Miller’s shirt and began to bind his arm. Albert bit his lip bloody against crying out.
John Ashley ducked down to replace the emptied magazine in the Browning. He said they were cut off from the west side of the camp where the dugouts were banked at the creek and they couldnt get away by water. The only way out was on foot through the Pits. “Like that goddamn Charlie—you see him? Took off in there like a spooked deer.”
He was talking fast and kept glancing up over the crotch of the tree. He said they could make their way north through the Pits till they hit higher ground and then head east to the pineywoods and on to Twin Oaks where they had their vehicles hidden in the woods. He told Albert to go first. He and Laura would hold off the posse for a time so he could get a good head start and then they would follow after him.
“Watch yourself good when you get near the house,” John Ashley said. “Cops bound to be watchin the place, so lay low. Get close enough to see what’s goin on but stay put till you know for sure how things stand.”
He peered up over the tree crotch and fired a long burst, then dropped down again and said, “All right, boy, go on. We be along directly.” Dazed and bloody Albert Miller staggered away into the Pits.
Now John Ashley stood once more and called out, “Daddy, come on get up here!”
As Old Joe bolted from the tent the BAR quit firing and he knew it had jammed. A fierce clatter of gunfire rolled out from the prairie brush and he could hear that their attackers too had at least one automatic rifle and before he’d taken five strides he was hit in the foot and he fell. He turned and scrabbled back for the tent on all fours, his foot a number ruin but the pain in his shoulder making him yell. And now he was hit in the side and he screamed but kept on crawling and was hit in the ass and as he tumbled into the tent he was hit somewhere under his arm.
He lay facedown and gasped his pain into the dirt. He put a hand to his searing side and felt of a gaping pulsing wound and the hand came away coated bright and hotly red. He heard John yell, “Got one! I got the bastard!” and heard Laura yell something too but did not make it out. He sat up and looked out and saw a man lying on his side next to a palmetto clump and hugging himself as though he were napping in the cold.
It now occurred to him that if he went out through the back of the tent he would have at least a little cover as he made for the trees. He unsheathed his skinning knife and crawled through his pain and raised up on his knees and the rear canvas wall parted neatly before the slash of his blade. And then a bullet passed through his neck and Joseph Ashley felt nothing as he fell forward through the slashed tent but clearly recalled sitting on the bank of the Caloosahatchee at age seven while his daddy showed him the proper way to rig his line if he wanted to catch fish of a size to impress his mother.
John Ashley had thrown aside the jammed BAR and taken up his Winchester carbine. He saw his father hit several times as he scrabbled back into the tent and then saw a man peek out from behind a palmetto clump not twenty yards from the edge of the camp. He fired twice and the man cried out and fell clear of his cover and drew up on his side in pain, hugging his belly. John Ashley shot him again and saw his hair jump with the impact of the round. He hollered in exultation and Laura yelled, “Good, baby,
Now Laura screamed. He whirled and saw her sitting with a hand to her head and blood rolling in thick rivulets from her hair. Her eyes were on him and now fluttered and closed and she fell back. He ran to her and shook her and shouted for her not to die goddammit. Blood ran into her ears and down her neck. Possemen were hollering one to the other and drawing closer and they sounded like a dozen or more. They continued to shoot as they came and bullets cracked through the branches and whacked against the tree boles and cut pale scars in the bark. He thought for a moment to run out to meet them and be done with it. And then heard Bobby Baker curse in a high wail, in a timbre of sorrow he’d never before heard in his voice, and he knew if he charged out there they would kill him before he got Bobby or even saw him. The only way to get Bob Baker was first to get clear of this killing ground. He loaded his pockets with ammunition and picked up his carbine. He put his fingers to his lips and then to Laura’s and then was up and running for the deeper swamp.
Albert Miller slogged through the treacherous muck and struggled through the bracken and thorny brush and several times that long. afternoon fell under the weight of his pain. His right boot was heavy with blood off his leg wound. His arm was a throbbing agony. He took his bearing from the sun, but even though Twin Oaks was a little less than three miles away as the crow flies, there was no route to it that did not cover at least twice that distance and all of it terrain so difficult he would do well to cover a mile in half a day. When he first heard the high excited yelping of the tracking dogs he guessed he’d been on the move about two hours. They were coming his way, but slowly, the swamp much rougher still on them than on a man. As the afternoon passed the hounds seemed to move off on a more easterly track into the deeper heart of the swamp and Albert guessed they were on someone else’s trail, maybe John’s and Laura’s, or one of the other’s if they’d split up. He almost walked into a quicksand bog but he threw himself back from it almost in the same motion of stepping forth and the action sent a streak of white pain through his wounds and he yelped despite himself. Some time later his heart lunged to his throat when a snorting redeyed boar all black and stinking and hung with ticks the size of grapes on his bristly hide crashed out of the button-brush and came for him with its yellow tusks forward and then veered away within a yard of him and vanished into the scrub. Why the brute didnt knock him down and gore out his guts would remain to Albert one of the mysteries of his life. He drank from a slough and was so tired and in such pain that he didn’t care if it poisoned him. By late that afternoon he did not know where he was. He stripped moss from a dwarf cypress that evening well before dark and made a bed beside a small creek under a low overhang of elephant ears. He slept but fitfully for his pain and the onslaught of mosquitoes that throve even in winter in this soggy mire. He could feel small parasitic forms already feeding on his wounds. The next day he staggered through country so mean it reduced his clothes to rags before midmorning and when he came at last to the outskirts of the pinelands and its more solid ground he sat down to rest in the shade. The next thing he knew he was awakened by a kick and opened his eyes to a ring of grinning possemen all aiming cocked firearms at his head and recognized among them the Padgett brothers and Grover Pass. He tried to speak but his mouth was too dry to shape words. He wanted to tell them he surrendered, that he never was cut out for this outlaw life, that prison would by God come a blessed relief.
She regained consciousness to find herself sitting against a tree. Her skull felt cloven. She put her hand to her head and felt a makeshift bandage in place there, felt a shirt sleeve dangling alongside her right ear. Her fingers came away bloody. Her thigh bandaged too if only cursorily. Cops everywhere, probing every part of the camp. And now she saw, not ten feet to her right, the bloody and unmistakably dead forms of Joe Ashley and Fred Baker laid side by side. Their mouths and eyes were closed but ants were already filing into their noses and ears in attendance to timeless instinctual duty. Her breath caught and she looked everywhere but saw no other bodies, no sign of John—then heard the bark and bay of dogs across the open ground and knew he had made away.
Possemen were staring at her now, glaring with such raw hate she wanted to hug herself against it. Now a man stepped around from behind her and she saw boots with star facings and looked up past the gunbelt and the badged black vest to the tightly clenched face of Bob Baker, his eyes on her and brightly welled. He seemed to want to say something that could be expressed only in some language whose grammar her did not quite understand. He looked at Fred Baker and gestured awkwardly as though he must make her comprehend, but even the kinetics of Grief seemed alien to him. He turned his face to the clouding sky for a moment and then squatted and looked at her and she saw nothing in his eyes but pain and rage beyond his powers of articulation. He cleared his throat and she thought he was going to spit on her but he didnt. He stared at her for a time and then took something from his vest pocket and held it up for her to see. She recognized the rifle cartridge. “He’s…” He paused and looked about as if he might espy someone to speak for him, to translate accurately the lurch and shudder in his soul. Then looked at her again. “I’m…” Then he swiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand and rose and walked away.
By late forenoon the news of the battle had relayed all up and down Dixie Highway from Fort Pierce to West Palm Beach. Local newspapers rushed to print fourth-hand reports of the attack and claimed a half-dozen outlaw dead. They lamented the death of good Fred Baker at the hand of John Ashley and alerted the populace that the desperado remained at large in the company of confederates. Aroused citizens from Fort Pierce to Jupiter converged at Gomez, the nearest hamlet to the Ashley place, every man of them outraged by the killing of Deputy Fred and each armed and avid for reprisal. Whiskey jugs now out of hiding and making the rounds and stoking the general fury. A clamor of calls to descend upon the Ashley property and search it every foot for members of the gang. Every such exhortation raising a chorus of ayes. In this party was a justice of the peace and mediocre bootmaker by trade who swore them all as deputies.
