the water began to clarify and then it was coming forth clear as glass and delighted them with its sweet freshness.
Joe Ashley continued to make whiskey and run it to the Indians. Ben Tracey, who’d always wanted to know the moonshine trade, was his eager apprentice. Joe showed him how to make his way to the cypress hammocks a full day’s distance to the southwest where the Indian middlemen awaited the loads. Ray Lynn spent most his time with Albert Miller fishing for bass and bream, gigging frogs, netting turtles, snaring possums for the cookpot. They dared not shoot in case some trapper or posseman be sufficiently keen-eared to accurately fix the bearing of the gunshot even in the acoustical queerness of that vast and aqueous grssland where a report might carry for miles but seemed to whoever heard it to come from all points of the compass at once.
Laura Upthegrove and John Ashley would vanish for hours at a time. Ray Lynn asked of Albert Miller where they went and Albert smiled and winked. “Johnny and Laura are the king and queen of the Everglades,” he said. “Them two know places in the Devil’s Garden the rest of us aint even guessed is out here.”
Now the dry season was on them and the mosquitoes were scent. The night turned cool and clear and the stars did brighten. The dark sky seemed powdered with stellar swirls pale as talc. The moon in its fullness that month hung like a peeled blood orange. Frogs rang in the creeks and sloughs, owls hooted in the high pine, Sometimes came the deep rumbling growls and guttural barks of gators and now and then the high shriek of a panther near of far. John and Laura shared a tent but used it only to make love in private, after which they would come outside to sleep under the riotous stars on beds fashioned of Spanish moss.
Ray Lynn would like awake in the early nights and listen to the lovers in their passion and remember a time before he’d seen his first jail, a time when he was loved by a honey-haired girl with freckles like brown sugar on her breasts and a small chip in her front tooth. A girl he’d never seen again after going to jail for his first armed robbery and thereafter living the life of the itinerant holdup man from Pensacola to Key West. Thinking of her now he would ache with a loneliness he dared not admit for fear of weeping like a child.
TWENTY-THREE
January 1924
CHILL WINTER DAWN. THE EASTERN SKY SHOWING GRAY AT THE horizon. Pale mist rising in clouds off the wetland all about and dark trees ghostly in the fog. The air smelling of ripe muck. The world soundless.
Thomas High Hawk eased off his flatboard perch on the pine branch with his rifle slung around his chest and shinned down the trunk and lit softly on a carpet of pine needles. He was tired and his eyes burned. Last night’s fog had cut his vision’s range to a few feet but he had not heard anything unusual and the night had passed without hint of encroaching trouble. Nobody would have been out searching for their camp in such for anyhow.
He yawned and stretched, hoping that either the black man or cousin Charlie had a pot of coffee on the fire. Shirttail Charlie was his elder but he was lazy as a child and he often chose to sleep until Thomas shook him awake for his shift. He tightened his rifle slight and buttoned his jacket to the neck and headed into the fog, keeping his eyes to the ground in watch for mudholes and snakes.
A small stand of cabbage palms loomed darkly out of the mist and he held to the vague trail skirting around the trees. A dark figure emerged behind him and silently closed the short distance between them. An arm clamped around Thomas High Hawk’s mouth and cut off his cry before it began and Thomas felt an instant’s sickening pain at his backribs and then the blade was in his heart and he was dead even before Roebuck yanked away the knife and let him fall.
The sky showed now a long thin streak of pink at some distant point out over the Atlantic. The fog on the high ground was thinning fast but was yet dense as smoke under the trees and rose like steam clouds from the sloughs and flagponds and all along the length of Crossbone Creek as though the oaks were burning at their roots and all bodies of water in this swampland were on fire under their surface. A crow lit on a high branch of a scorched bony pine and his rasping squall was the day’s first sound. The camp was absent two of its residents this dawn— Ben Tracey and Ray Lynn having departed a week ago, each armed with a Winchester 95 and a .45 automatic, and each trailing a dugout loaded with bush lightning for delivery to Indian buyers at the south end of Lake Okeechobee. They were not due back for a day or so.
The campfire had been revived by Jefferson James who sat beside it and now set a pot of coffee to boil on the firerocks. Rolled in his blanket near the fire Shirttail Charlie still slept. Joe Ashley emerged from his tent, his trousers unbuttoned and held by galluses over his undershirt. He unleashed his stream against an oak trunk and then buttoned up and stalked over to Shirttail Charlie and nudged him with his boot. The Indian grumbled and tried to squirm away and Joe Ashley cursed lowly and kicked him lightly on the leg.
“Aw right,” Shirttail Charlie said, “I’m up, I’m up.” He sat up and peered around at the misty morn. “Where’s Thomas?”
“Aint come in yet,” Old Joe said, squatting to pour a cup of coffee. “If he went to asleep out there I’ll feed his ass to Jefferson’s damn dog.”
The dog was at that moment standing at the perimeter of the camp and peering intently into the thinning fog in the prairie beyond, its ears forward and its nape roaching. And then it bolted with a loud growl and fangs bared and the three men at the campfire all came fast to their feet as the dog sped toward a cluster of palmettos forty yards distant in the gray haze, its snarl rising as it closed on the brush. Then a shotgun blasted with an orange flare and knocked the dog in the air sideways in a burst of hide and blood.
A crackling salvo erupted from the prairie brush and Jefferson James grunted, staggered like a drunk and dropped. Joe Ashley ran at a crouch for his tent and his rifle that lay within as bullets kicked up dirt all around him. The coffeepot jumped away from the fire with a loud whang and round thucked through the sides of the tents. He lunged into his tent and snatched up his .44-40 and the canvas walls popped and shook with bullets and he was hit hard on the hipbone and dropped to his belly. He looked at his hip and saw blood and cursed. He levered a round and crawled forward to the doorflap. He fired several rounds into the expense of prairie even though he had yet to see any of the attackers. A bullet hummed over his head. From his left came the hollow staccato popping of an automatic rifle and he looked over and saw Laura firing the Browning from behind an oak and giving John Ashley coverfire as John with a pistol in his hand ran out to the fallen Jefferson and knelt beside him and rolled him onto his back. A bullet snatched at John’s sleeve and a chunk of limerock flew up beside him in a ricochet whine. At the forward edge of the camp Albert Miller lay behind a stump and levered and fired his Marlin. Now John Ashley turned and ran back for the trees as Laura stepped out in the open and fired the BAR from the hip as if she’d been born to it. Bullets chunked into the oak trunks around her. Then John was in the trees again and she side-hopped back behind cover. Shirttail Charlie was nowhere in sight.
Joe Ashley thought to follow John to the shelter of the trees but as he rose to one knee he was hit in the shoulder and he sat down hard. For a moment he was stunned and then tired his arm and found he could move it, but only awkwardly, and the pain was intense. He struggled to lever a round and felt bone grinding in his shoulder and even in the surrounding din of gunfire heard himself cry out. He crawled back to the tent flap and saw a man duck down in the myrtlebrush forty yards away. He fired into the brush and the man ran out from it and took cover behind a thick pine stump jutting from a clump of palmetto. Another man came running with a rifle in his hands and threw himself behind a low limestone outcrop not thirty yards away.
Laura was kneeling against a wide oak trunk and shooting now an Enfield rifle—working the bolt smoothly and firing steadily and now stripping a fresh clipload into the magazine and flinging away the empty clip and slapping the bolt home and firing again. One let of her overalls was stained bright red. John Ashley had the Browning braced in the crotch of a large oak and was pouring fire into the open country and yelling, “Come
Albert Miller jumped up and ran for the trees and he was almost to them when he was hit and went down. He was hit again as he got to his feet but he gimped ahead and now Laura had him and pulled him behind the cover of the tree. His shirtsleeve and pants leg were soaked with blood. A round had ripped through his hamstring muscle without hitting bone but his humerus was broken. Laura eased him to the ground and examined the wounds and said neither one would bleed him dead. She found a stick to serve for a splint and then tore the other sleeve off
