The Indian floated facedown in the sway of unsettled water, his long hair wavering about his head like swampweed, the back of his shirt bloated with trapped air. There was a stink of shit and John Ashley realized the man’s bowels had let loose when he died. He stood gasping in the chest-high water and thought he would never again draw a deep enough breath. He tasted blood and wiped at his mouth and his fingers came away red and it took him a moment to comprehend that the blood was running from his head and he put a hand to his crown and felt the loose flap of scalp under his hair. And now was conscious of pain in his forearm and he saw the gash but it bled slowly and not very much.
He slowly pulled himself up the steep creekbank where his carbine still lay. And as he rose above the bankrim he saw the breed sitting crosslegged on the ground ten feet away and looking at him. On his knee was braced a .30-40 Krag pointed at John Ashley’s face. The breed held it one-handed, finger on the trigger.
“Fucken Roebuck,” Heck Runyon said placidly. “I was for shootin you from the trees while you was suckin eggs, but not him. Fancied himself a knifer. Thought a knife felt
John Ashley could not recall if a round was chambered in the carbine lying before him and out of the breed’s line of vision. He licked blood off his lips and hoped Heck Runyon was watching him more intently than it seemed under those half-closed eyes. He cut his eyes over the breed’s shoulder and Heck Runyon instinctively flicked his own half-closed eyes in that direction and all in the same instant John Ashley snatched up the carbine and Runyon was startled and jerked rather than squeezed the trigger and the round batted John Ashley’s collar as John Ashley thumbed the hummer and fired and shot him in the belly and knocked him on his back.
He jacked another round ready but the breed made no move to rise or take up the rifle fallen beside him. He climbed up the bank and stepped forward cautiously and kicked the Krag from the breed’s reach. Heck Runyon was staring up at him without expression. “Damn quick,” he said. The shirt over his belly showed a spreading stain brightly red. “Musta hit the spine,” he said in a tone untimbred by plaint or bitterness. “Cant move.”
“Damn thats sad,” John Ashley said. And shot him through the Adam’s apple.
Two miles away Bob Baker heard the almost simultaneous reports of two rifles and tried vainly to fix their direction. Beside him Henry Stubbs grinned and said, “Hear that Krag? I say the breed and the redskin got him, Bob. They got the advantage in this damned country. I say they did for him and we’re shut of the sumbitch for once and all.
Then came another report—a Winchester. And then nothing more.
Bob Baker looked at Henry Stubbs who shrugged and spat.
Ray Lynn and Ben Tracey were poling along the sawgrass channel back to the Crossbone camp that early morning when they heard the sudden distant sounds of the gun battle. They sat in the dugouts and listened for a time and agreed that nothing good could be going on where so many guns were shooting. They turned around and headed back for Lake Okeechobee. The next day they hove up at an inlet of Pelican Bay, about four miles south of Pahokee. The bank was high and dry under tall willows and there they set up camp and stayed put for two days to let things settle. Then they cached their dugouts and rifles in the brush and pulled their shirts out of their pants to hide their pistols and walked up to Pahokee. They had a couple of beers at a fishcamp and two hours later cadged a ride on a catfisherman’s truck bound for West Palm Beach.
In West Palm they heard all about the raid on the Ashley whiskey camp—and learned that Joe Ashley was dead. And that Albert Miller and Laura Upthegrove were under arrest and heavily guarded. And that Bill Ashley had driven down from Salerno and surrendered himself in exchange for the sheriff posting of men at his house. Bill didnt want vigilantes showing up and terrifying his family and maybe torching his house too.
They learned that the Ashley home had been burned to the ground, and the Mobley house as well. That even Ma Ashley and her daughters and Hanford Mobley’s parents had been jailed for a couple of days before being released to tend to Old Joe’s funeral. Bill had been allowed to go with them. They’d buried Joe Ashley in the family graveyard next to the charred ruins of Twin Oaks. The only one present who wasnt a member of the family was the preacher, who later said everything about the Ashley place smelled of charcoal, Joe’s grave most of all. He said Ma Ashley and her daughters keened like Indian women. After the funeral Sheriff Baker dropped all charges against Bill Ashley, his mother and sister and the parents of Hanford Mobley. Bill had gone home to his wife. Ma Ashley and the girls were staying at the West Palm home of family friends with a larger house than Bill’s.
They heard that Bob Baker was charging Laura Upthegrove with murder for helping John Ashley kill Deputy Fred Baker. John Ashley was still at large in the Everglades but Sheriff Bob told the newspapers he was confident the outlaw would be captured or killed any day now.
The bad tidings weighed hard on Tracey and Lynn. They repaired to a cafe and sat in a dim booth and toyed with the Blue Plate Special of pork chops and sweet potatoes. They drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. They told each other there wasnt a damn thing they could do now except watch out for their own asses. They still had the money from the hooch sale to the Indians—and with Joe Ashley dead and John Ashley likely to join him real soon, the money belonged to whoever had it in hand. They agreed the smart thing to do was lay low. An hour later they were on the bus to Miami.
Over the next two days he rested during daylight hours and listened to the possemen hunting for him in the swamp but they had no dogs with them and they sounded scattered and lost more than like hunters on a hot trail. He’d tended well to his wounds. A think muckpack on his crown had finally stopped the bleeding and he’d bound his lacerated forearm with a sleeve ripped from his shirt. At night he moved fast and sure through the pineywoods and on the second night came at last to the highway and saw no traffic and he crossed and stayed to the deeper trees as he made his way to the Salerno town limits. The hour was late and the moon high and there was no one about the central streets but a stray drunk. Now came a lone police car moving without haste. John Ashley kept to the shadows of the eaves with his rifle cocked and watched the car pass and waited till it was gone from sight before he moved on. In the moonlit road his shadow stood so short under him it seemed itself to be trying to hide. Now he was on the dirt road east of town. As he went by a dark house set well back from the road a dog started barking at his passing and other dogs on the road ahead began to take up the alert. He stopped and faced the dark house and whistled as his daddy had long ago taught him and no human ear could hear the sound he made but the dog abruptly fell silent and then the other ahead did too.
A quarter-mile farther along he came to a side road and turned onto it and felt better for being now in the deep shadows of an oak hollow. Another two hundreds yards brought him to the narrow turn-in to his brother’s house. He’d been on the alert for police all the while and now advanced slowly and looked and listened more keenly yet. The trail to his brother’s house went through a dense wood of oak and pine and he could see the house just ahead and no cars in sight but Bill’s Oldsmobile tourer in the dappled light of the moon. He stopped in the darkest shadows of the trees and listened hard and heard nothing but the sudden rush of an owl leaving its perch somewhere overhead and the splatter of a school of mullet jumping in the canal behind the house. No sounds other.
He went around to the back of the house and to the bedroom window and saw that it was open. He stood there and listened hard and after a time could make out Bill’s steady heavy breathing and Bertha’s light sporadic snores. He tapped lightly on the open shutter and Bill’s breath already and then held bated. Bertha snored once more and then she too fell silent. And then Bill said, evenly and very clearly: “I got a gun here. I’ll blow your damn brains out without even thinking about it.”
“Easy now, big brother,” John Ashley whispered. “It aint but a wanderer lookin for shelter.”
They raised no lights until they’d let him into the indoor kitchen and closed all the shutters. Then Bertha fired a lamp and at the sight of him she gasped.
“Sweet Jesus!” Bill said.
John Ashley tried to grin. “Probably dont smell a whole lot bettern I look neither, huh?”
They made him strip naked and Bill gave him a towel to wrap around his waist and Bertha stuffed his foul ragged clothes in an old croker sack and went out and disposed of them. When she came back she was lugging two full pails of water. She made John Ashley hold his head over the tin sink and she poured a bucket on his hair to wash out the dried muck. As the muck softened and fell away his scalp began to bleed again. While Bill set up a tin washtub in the middle of the kitchen floor and put in handfuls of soap shavings and then went out several times more for water, Bertha got a needle and thread and made John Ashley sit at the table and she stitched his scalp closed and then washed and sewed his forearm as well and applied a clean bandage to it. As he submitted to being tended to, John Ashley felt a tiredness greater than any he’d known before. He barely felt Bertha’s needle. There was little talk among them until the tub was full of foamy water and Bill told him to get in it. Bertha excused herself
