Part 25 (1/2)
Sometimes at night he dreamed of a double cabin in a cool mountain-girded valley.
”You want to watch him,” warned Simmons again and again.
Once Molly came to see him. Simmons himself, at the guard tent, questioned her roughly, then shrugged his shoulders and let her pa.s.s.
Throughout the interview, though, he sat over there by the guard tent, his eyes always on the two of them; and at his side, but never looking up at him, lay Sheriff, the bloodhound, panting.
She told him how hard she had tried to get him off; how hard his friends had tried. They had been to see the solicitor, the sheriff, and finally the governor himself. ”They were all nice to me, Tom,” she declared; ”but they say they can't do nothin'. The governor talked to me a long time in his office. He asked all about us--where we lived, how many children we had, how it all happened. But he says he was elected to see the laws carried out, an' can't interfere.
”We done everything we could,” she went on, ”even the folks that live 'round here an' have seen you workin', po' man, with the gang--even they tried to help. Squire Kirby an' Mr. Earle, him that lives in that big white house they call Freedom Hill, up the road whar you been workin', they headed the pet.i.tion. They are the richest folks 'round here. They heered the trial, Tom. They know you was set upon in that low-down place. Mr. Earle, he went to the capitol with me to see the governor.
Him and the governor are ol' friends. Mr. Earle, he bought my railroad ticket and paid my board in Greenville. He talked to the governor for over an hour.... But”--she shook her head--”it never done no good.
”Here's what folks say, though,” she whispered quickly. ”If you got away back into Tennessee the law wouldn't follow you. Mr. Earle, he told me that, just yistiddy, Tom. Squire Kirby he says the same thing. Tom, the sheriff hisself as good as told me. The governor wouldn't requisition you, they all's good as said. He wouldn't, either, Tom. I know he wouldn't.”
Then her eyes widened with horror. ”Oh, I wasn't goin' to tell you that!” she gasped. ”Don't try to get away. That man over yonder, he'll kill you, Tom. Folks said he would--said he had killed two. I know he will, since I've seen him. He's awful, awful!”
She went on protesting, in terror that he would try to do the very thing she had suggested. She told him about the bloodhound. The newspaper men said he never lost a trail--that n.o.body who stayed on the ground had ever got away from him.
”They know ever'thing, these newspaper men,” she went on. ”They advised me right. Tom, two years ain't long. We waited longer than that to get married. Remember, Tom? We ain't old yet....
”Poor old gal,” said Tom.
It was the sight of a dilapidated and deserted blacksmith shop near the road they were widening, and of some rusted fragments of tools scattered about here and there, which caused old Tom, as the road-sc.r.a.per pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed the spot, to look very closely down into the upturned dirt.
And it was the glimpse of something in that dirt which caused him suddenly to rein up the four mules and glance quickly in the direction of the two guards.
It was an afternoon of terrific heat, following a prolonged drought. In the road ahead the gang of Negro convicts toiled silently, sluggishly, in the blinding glare. Simmons had driven off in the direction of Greenville an hour before. The two remaining guards, with shotguns under their arms, stood in the scant shade of two dust-covered trees.
”Jake,” said the old mountaineer calmly to the Negro on the machine behind him, the Negro who handled the levers, ”Jake, there's a bolt loose some-whar' on this sc.r.a.pe. Reckon I better 'tend to it myself.”
Without any apparent hurry, he clambered down from the seat. Quickly, secretly, he picked out of the upturned earth an object which he thrust into his s.h.i.+rt. Deliberately, as if encountering obstacles which caused him trouble, he hammered away at the supposed loose bolt. When at last he clambered back into the iron seat, heated like the top of a stove, there was just a slight flush on his lean cheeks and a brightness as of triumph in his deep-set eyes.
On the way back to camp they pa.s.sed Tom Belcher's store. Here he asked permission of one of the guards (they were not all like Simmons) to go in and buy himself some tobacco. The guard who went in with him saw nothing suspicious in the fact that, along with the tobacco, the old man purchased also a package of chewing gum.
That night he did not sleep. By raising up on his elbows in his cot he could see, in a chair tilted back against an oak tree, the night guard with a gun across his knees and, farther on, in front of the guard tent, the outline of the bloodhound asleep. Once, when he thought the guard nodded, he reached in his s.h.i.+rt. He got out the object he had picked up in the road and rubbed it against his shackles. The rasp of file on steel sounded loud in his tent like an alarm. He thought he saw the guard stir and the bloodhound lift his head. He lay silently down again.
Later he punched a hole in the mattress and stuck the file deep into the straw.
Next day he thought of Molly and home. As he sat on the road-sc.r.a.per the mountains, purple and lofty against the sky, seemed now to be beckoning him. Once within them, once across the state line, the law would not follow him. He was satisfied of that from what Molly had told him.
He bided his time until one stormy night when wind and rain drove the bloodhound within the shelter of the guard tent and, thras.h.i.+ng through the branches of the oaks and flapping the canvas of the big tent, drowned out to all ears but his own the rasp of a file on steel. Next day the continued rain made road work impossible, and as he hobbled back and forth to feed the mules, chewing gum hid two triangular cuts in his shackles. Again that night, storm and rain drowned out the sound that came from the tent where he sat hunched forward on his cot, sawing patiently and methodically away.
Hours before dawn he slipped out of the rear of his tent and walked quickly toward the mule sheds, where he stood listening. Then, hat pulled down low, he hurried through the grove, across a field, and made for the black rim of the surrounding forest.
He could not have picked a better night had choice been given him. The rain, falling steadily, was was.h.i.+ng his trail. It was the season of full moon and in spite of storm clouds the night was dimly luminous. He struck straight for the bottoms and the creek, whose swollen turbulence sounded above the rain. He plunged into the water, which at the deepest places came no higher than his waist, and partly by feeling, partly by sight, now and then stumbling over boulders, now and then having to push aside thick underbrush, he made his way for something like two miles up-stream.
Carefully he chose the spot where he left the creek. His eyes, grown accustomed to the night, picked out a tree that grew out of the ground at a distance from the bank, then bent over it. He caught hold of the branches, swung himself up, felt his way like an opossum along the trunk, swung to another tree, and did not touch ground until he was some hundred feet from the sh.o.r.e.
An indistinct, dripping dawn that showed low-driving clouds found him, wet to the skin, like an old fox who has run all night, but confident, like one who has covered up all trace of a trail, making his steady way with long mountaineer's stride across tangled bottoms, into stretches of woodland, over hills that grew ever steeper and higher, through undergrowth that grew ever denser.
His face was very serious, but not anxious. His nerve was too cool, his courage too steady for him to feel any impulse to run. His lifelong experience as a hunter who travels far had taught him to save his energy. As the light of the gray day grew stronger he distinguished, at no great distance ahead, it seemed, the outlines of misty mountains. He recognized the gap where the highway crossed this first ridge into the recesses of the mountains, beyond the Tennessee line. On the night after to-morrow, he calculated, he could tramp up on his porch and Molly would open the door.
Now and then, as twilight advanced, he stopped and listened. One of the guards, more kindly disposed than Simmons and the other guard, had, during the hour of lunch one day, told him something about the bloodhound, Sheriff. The dog, he said, was not a full-bred bloodhound, his grandfather was a foxhound. Consequently, he ran a man freely, as a hound runs a fox, barking on the trail.