Read Silver Stallion for Free Online Page B

Chandol’s mother, looking back at the two boys, who stood in a daze amidst the pandemonium. With her open palm she began to scrape the rice into the bag she was holding.
    â€œThis is really something,” said Chandol, scooping up the rice with his gourd dipper. “Look at these people. Just like maggots thriving in a rotting corpse.”
    Mansik knelt down on the grains, that slipped under him like sand, clamped the opening of his bag between his teeth and pulled in the rice with both hands.
    â€œSeems they’re taking everything in sight,” said Mansik, tilting his head to point at a thin woman in her fifties, who had just hurried out of the stationmaster’s office, hugging a tall grandfather clock in her arms. The townsfolk were looting not only the granary but the neighboring railroad station building as well. Chandol saw two middle-aged women dragging a plank desk out of a station warehouse, followed by an old man carrying a sawdust stove on his shoulders. The boys even spotted a young woman stealing cabbages from a patch behind the granary.
    â€œThe whole town is crazy,” Chandol whispered to Mansik, knotting the top of his bag. “I heard some women over there a minute ago say the Reds left a lot of confiscated goods behind. At the buildings they’ve abandoned there are more valuable things than a lousy sack of rice. And then the women left …”
    All of a sudden, everybody started to run away, the women clustering on top of the rice pile sliding down backwards in panic, the whole mountain of grain crumbling with them like a sand castle washed away by a big breaking wave. The women fled desperately, screaming, some of them abandoning their bags or baskets. Mansik and Chandol and their mothers, puzzled, stood there, not knowing why everybody else was running away so frantically. Then somebody shouted “Air raid!” and they finally understood. Although the two boys and their mothers had not noticed it, the townspeople had experienced enough bombing to instantly recognize, even amid all the other noise, the faint purr of the bombers coming over the mountains. “Air raid!” women shouted, fleeing breathlessly. Some tripped and tumbled down, their baskets bouncing and rolling and spinning on the sidewalk, and a little lost child wept by a telegraph pole, her nose bleeding. Hemp bags and wooden receptacles were abandoned on the street, spilt grain lay on the pavement like the bleached remains of cow dung. A woman, carrying her baby on her back, threw herself into a roadside turnip patch, several women blindly ran into the open field, and several others rushed back into the granary to hide behind the rubble of the demolished wall. The old man threw the heavy sawdust stove away and ran for his life.
    The two boys and their mothers dug into the rice piles because they did not know what else to do. Now Mansik heard the airplanes at last. Snoring slowly and monotonously, a formation of twelve breezed in over Saddle Mountain from the direction of Hongchon. These planes were very big and each had four propellers. A dozen women lying exposed on the road, too frightened to run any more, wept and shrieked louder and louder as the planes came nearer and nearer. Her mother finally found the little lost girl with the nosebleed and both of them, hand in hand, jumped into the cabbage patch to seek shelter. Everybody hiding or fleeing or screaming in the fields or on the road or behind the collapsed granary wall waited for the bombing to begin.
    The airplanes reached the sky over the town but did not drop any bombs; they kept on flying and slowly vanished over the northern mountains in the direction of Hwachon.
    Mansik craned his neck out of the rice to peek around like a cautious turtle. He was breathing heavily, bathed in sweat. The women who had been hiding behind the demolished wall looked at one another and asked in surprise and disbelief:
    â€œWhy didn’t they bomb