chested man.
'Here's what we do. I will lead them away. It's your scent them dogs has homed on. I will peel off to the right. You keep going straight to the track. Them boys will be on me. I will try to shuck them a few miles from here, and I will get to the train.'
'Earl, you don't even know there's a train, you have no idea when on earth the train?'
'It's due in Hattiesville by six-thirty, which means it ought to be through this part of Greene around four, which gives you fifteen minutes. You think I'd do this goddamn stunt without a train schedule in my pocket? The whole goddamn thing is set up around that freight.
Usually six cars, it slows down as it hits grade, and you ought to git aboard easy enough. I once rode from Little Rock all the way to Dago on the bum. Now, goddammit, you have rested enough. Get going.'
'Earl, I?'
'Just go, Mr. Sam. I will see you in Arkansas.'
'Yes, I?'
'And one last thing. If I don't make it, you will want to start your program. The governor, the congressman, the police chief, the newspaper joe, all that stuff. Well, I am giving you an order: don't you do it. If they nab me, one thing'll keep me alive, and that's them wondering who the hell I am. If big shots start asking questions, they will shoot me in the head and bury me out here in the piney woods. Do you hear? Do you understand?'
'Earl, give me a time frame? How long do I wait?'
But a train whistle sounded far-off, and Earl, rubbing Sam's sweaty clothes on bushes and against trees, began his maneuver to the right.
Sam picked himself up, pulling Earl's coat tight about himself, and was off. it was better now. Earl, alone, spread the Sam scent broadly as he worked his way back. He preferred to be alone. Alone, he could concentrate fully on what he had to do; he didn't have to pay attention to Sam. Regretfully he tossed his pack and pistol into a hollow log; he couldn't afford the weight.
The dogs were loud now. He knew they'd take the bait. That was the way their minds worked. But he had a moment where he wondered if he hadn't been wiser to have just set up and shot the dogs as they came upon them.
But who knew when they'd be here and maybe he'd not have time after shooting them to get to the train himself. No, of the choices, all of them bad, this was the best.
He worked his way along but just below the crest of what appeared to be a low hill. On the other side of the crest, the land would drop away to the tracks, possibly half a mile ahead. That would be fine. Sam should have plenty of time. He checked his watch and knew that he had enough time now to get himself to the train. He would just dump Sam's clothes and dip over the crest.
He wadded them into a union of pine trunk and bough and laughed at the ruckus the dogs would set up when they reached this spot. Then he ducked over the ridge, ready for his own descent. It occurred to him suddenly:
They were going to make it. It wa sat the crest, he made a terrifying discovery.
The trees had been timbered all the way down the slope. There was no cover at all. And he could see Sam, alone, amid a forest of stumps, picking his painful way down to the tracks, now plainly visible.
He knew what that meant.
A rifleman on the crest would have a clear shot at Sam all the way down.
If he was any good at all, he'd have Sam dead three hundred yards before he got to the track.
Earl squatted to gather his breath for a second. It wasn't even a dilemma. Even though he was close enough to the limit of the timbering, and had at this moment technically escaped, and had only a last downhill plunge before intercepting the train, it never occurred to him to go.
Instead, he dropped back on the other side of the crest, and headed toward his pursuers.
Now he was hunting them. sam felt naked. He knew this wasn't good, but the nearest timber was a half mile in either direction, and if he raced for it he'd miss the train. He hoped and prayed the boys behind wouldn't get a good shot at him, and he stumbled ahead, feeling so helpless. He had no shirt, but only Earl's hunting coat, a waxy canvas thing, and his shoes were sodden, and his ankle still throbbed from the twist, and the breath came in hard, dry spurts, as if he hadn't enough room in his throat to get the proper right amount of air into his lungs.
He could see the track before him, glinting in the sun like a piece of ribbon on the floor, but at the same time bobbing in his perspective because of the spastic quality of his breathing and his downward lurching. The sun was hot. He seemed to be floating through thickets of moths or butterflies. Now and then a pine stump jabbed or poked at his already torn and battered legs, but the slope helped him immensely, as did his momentum, as did the prospect of gravity.
Suddenly he heard a shot. the first dog bounded into view. It was a hound, sleek and young, a beautiful animal, gobbling up Sam's scent as it plunged ahead.
It saw Earl, and it didn't pause a second, and went from tracking dog to attacking dog, flying at Earl with a fury no man could muster, its fangs bared, a guttural growl of pure insanity screaming from its throat. The eyes were red and narrowed as it leaped, and Earl took it from the hip, one shot, the bullet piercing its throat, blowing its brains out at an upward angle as it passed through the not-so-thick skull, and the dog, so beautiful, was also so dead. It collapsed in a heap.
A bullet kicked up a gout of dirt near him, a geyser of highpowered energy. One of the deputies had fired.
Earl threw his lever, jacked a shell out, and took up a kneeling position halfway behind a tree. The stupid boy ran ahead to see if he had bagged something and Earl put the sight blade in the center of his chest, and almost squeezed the trigger, but instead let it drop and fired a round at the running boy's feet, throwing up his own geyser. The boy dropped, both himself and his rifle, and if the other were aiming, he took a dive when he saw the closeness of the round.
But Earl saw none of this.
Instead another dog leaped and before he could get a new round levered into his rifle it was upon him so even in the motion of cocking, he wheeled and clubbed it with the butt of the rifle, feeling it shudder with the blow and sigh. But the dog after that was on him, and he felt its tearing snout burrowing through his shirt as it tried to rip his throat with its canines. There's something terrifying about the totality of the way an animal fights; it has no doubts or qualms and its fear releases a pure blast of chemicals into its blood, so that its muscles triple in their strength and its savagery quadruples. But the animal could not get purchase on the soft flesh of Earl's throat because he protected it with his chin, then ripped out his K-bar and got the blade into her.
She squealed in the sharp pain, and knew herself to be mortally hurt, but in a second she was back at him.
By this time he had gotten the rifle up and fired. He belly shot her, and down she went, and he could not stand the idea of so brave an animal suffering, and so he levered the rifle again and shot her in the side of the head.
The beaten dog came at him and got its jaws locked on his left wrist so he could not shoot. The pain flared through his arm. He transferred the rifle to his right hand, flipped it, then used it to brain the dog.
The dog relaxed. He swung it overhead and brought the full weight of the accelerating rifle down upon its skull, and something broke. The dog lay still.
He sat back, leaking blood from a dozen ugly wounds. He could feel it in his eyes, running down the side of his face, darkening his shirt, running down his arms to his hands, making them so slippery they could hardly hold the rifle. He tried not to look at the ruined bodies of the animals. It seemed to cast a bad spell on this business. Killing something so beautiful that was only doing what it had been trained to do, well, it was nothing to be proud of.
As he sat back momentarily, he made another terrifying discovery. The force of thumping the last dog was so intense that the lever had popped, opening the action, and the remaining two.30–06 cartridges had spilled out to somewhere on the floor of the forest. He was unarmed.
'Opic! Goddamn, there he be.'
'Wal, git him. Then we git tother. And the sheriff be here with more dogs. Git that one down there. It's that goddamned law fellow, I know for sure.'
Indeed they could recognize Sam as he worked his way toward the tracks, not going as fast as he should, a civilized man in rough territory without a clue. He was nakedly open to them in the distance, a tiny figure against the rawness of the timbered plot.
