in a bottle. And even if he could pull down to a stop before he hit the bridge, he would be caught between the car at this end and the one following him.

He was going too fast. He was right on top of the first car and still doing fifty. They were shooting now; he heard the guns and saw a hole appear in the windshield. Then he slammed into the car. There was a crash and a scream of metal as the right side of the Lincoln tore off the front end of the patrol car. Then he was skidding onto the bridge. The Lincoln was completely out of control. It raked one guard rail, shot across the pavement into the other, then spun end for end and stopped, facing back the way it had come.

Before it was stopped he was out on the bridge in the rain with the gun in his hand. The bridge was about five hundred feet long and he was near the center of it, over the main channel of the river. The patrol cars had both ends of it blocked now, the one chasing him having come up and stopped. They knew it was down here, he thought, and slowed down enough to get under control.

There was no panic in him now that he had finally been trapped, only a cold and terrible concentration as he looked swiftly around at the river bottom and at the two ends of the bridge to see how many men there were. He could see two at one end and three at the other, and now they were pulling rifles from the cars.

No protection behind the car, he thought, because they’re on both sides of me. And this .38 ain’t no good against them rifles. Couldn’t even hit a barn with it at this distance.

He put the gun back in his pocket and ran for the rail. There was the sudden impact of something crashing into his arm and he spun around and fell, hearing the rifle shot crack in his ears. He got up and made it this time and climbed over, holding to a slanting steel girder. They were running toward him, but not all of them at once, for the rifles cracked twice more and lead slammed into the girder to go flattened and screaming off into the rain. He looked down. The muddy and drift-laden surface of the flood was about twelve feet below him. He let go and dropped.

He took a deep breath before he hit the water and let himself go deep into it, and then began kicking downstream, going along with the current and pushing upward with his hands to keep from coming to the surface. When his lungs could stand no more he swam upward and felt his head go above water. He took another breath and went under again as a small geyser exploded just beyond his face. This time he changed course slightly and went quartering down the current in order not to come up too near to where they would be expecting him.

They’ll be coming down the river, he thought. The current’s carrying me along and two or three more dives and I’ll be out of range of the bridge, but they ain’t going to stay up there like it was a shooting gallery. The river’s overflowed the main channel but they can still get along the banks all right. It won’t be over knee-deep. One of ‘em will stay on the bridge and there’ll be a couple of ‘em coming down each bank, and there ain’t no way in Christ’s world I can get out of here. And I sure as hell can’t swim from here to the Gulf of Mexico underwater.

He came up again. This time with the swift intake of breath he took a quick and sweeping look around across the drift-laden, roily surface of the flood, seeing the two men in black slickers splashing along the bank. One of them spotted his head out in the current and stopped to raise the rifle, yelling, and he went under, but not before he had seen the drifting sweet-gum tree some thirty feet to his left and slightly upstream. Just as his head went under he heard and felt the sharp concussion as a rifle bullet hit the surface and glanced off. A half second later, he thought, and my head would have been busted open like a green gourd.

He turned underwater and fought his way across the current toward the place the tree had been. It was a small sweet gum, not much more than a sapling, but he knew there would be submerged branches he could locate if he could come near it underwater.

They’ll be looking for me downstream, he thought. The thing is to find it and come up inside the limbs. If I can hold straight enough I may be able to do it. Must have come twenty feet now, and it should be right ahead, not more’n another ten feet. Can’t figure out about that arm. It was hit, but I don’t feel nothing. Hardly nothing at all. Must not have hit the bone, because I can swim with it. If it had, the bone would have been busted all to hell. They weren’t shooting 22’s. Well, I ain’t in any hurry to feel it. When the shock wears off I’ll get it all right.

I must have passed that tree. Come fifty feet anyway, and I must have got off the course and missed it. And it ain’t going to do no good to make a second run at it, because when I come up over here instead of downstream they’ll know what I’m up to and they’ll start blowing the tree out of the water. I missed it, that’s all. Then leaves and small twigs brushed the top of his head and he felt a surge of hope.

Right under it, he thought. He raked upward with his right arm and felt a limb, still underwater, and began following it up, forcing himself to go slowly in spite of the pain in his lungs. Then there was the trunk of the tree directly over his head. He held onto the limb under the surface and came up slowly until his face was just out of the water. He took a deep, gasping breath and opened his eyes. It was perfect.

The tree was eight or ten inches in diameter here, with a couple of inches of it out of the water. Several limbs took off at this point and his head was in a cluster of leaves and small twigs. Through breaks in the foliage he could see the two men on the near bank, standing now in knee-deep water and intently searching the surface of the flood downstream, waiting for him to come up. It fooled ‘em, he thought, and started to swing his head slowly around to look out at the opposite bank for the other two when he heard an ominous and terrible buzzing just back of his ear like an egg beater whirring in a pile of dead leaves and felt all his nerve ends turn to ice in one of the few moments of absolute terror he had ever known.

Cold fury looked at him six inches in front of his face, and the deadly triangular head drew back to strike. The big rattler had been stretched along a limb as high as it could get out of the water it hated, and his movement or the pull of the current had disturbed the balance of the tree and rolled the limb downward toward the water. There was no time to pull his head back or submerge. One more slightest move and it would strike him full in the face. He brought a hand up and took the deadly, loathsome impact of it on his wrist and felt the puncture of the fangs. His hand closed over the body just back of the head and he pulled it below the surface, squeezing terribly with all his strength, feeling the sinuous, thick-bodied power of its threshing, and then the fangs pierced his hand once more before it stilled. He let it go and vomited into the water in front of his face.

Sixteen

Joy lay on her bed in the hot, close-pressing darkness and listened to the soft breathing of the younger girl across the room. It had been almost a half hour since she had heard the sibilant scuffing of Mitch’s bare feet on the sand in the back yard and had seen the light glow through the battenless crack in the back wall of the room. She knew he had come up on the back porch and lit the lantern for something, then there was the retreating snup, snup, snup of his feet going away toward the barn, and the light had faded away.

What was he doing out there at this time of night? she wondered. There wasn’t even any way of knowing what time it was, for she had been lying awake for hours, long after Jessie had gone to sleep. She wondered if the hatred would ever let her sleep again. Closing her eyes, she could see him now, going somewhere with the lantern, down the trail toward the bottom perhaps, lank, straight-backed, bitter-faced, and hateful, and the vision made her sick with rage. Her mind swung, hate-lured, to one of the facets of her dream. She was driving a Cadillac along a tree-shaded boulevard, young and radiant in a gold lame evening gown, while a handsome young millionaire made love to her at her side, and saw Mitch lying in a ditch beside the road with an arm outstretched in beseeching agony and the thin, harsh angularity of his face bearing the ravages of some loathsome disease like leprosy. She stopped, the car and went back to bend over him, and when he looked up in supplication she spat full in his face and laughed, and went on laughing with contempt and scorn, pointing at him so the young man in the car could laugh too. Oh, God, she thought, isn’t there anything I can do to him? If there was something, if there was some way to hurt him I could sleep again.

Suddenly she heard the faint sound of an automobile across the oppressive stillness and wondered whose it was. It came on down the sand-hill road leading in from the highway, and then turned, going along the hill toward the Jimerson place. It was probably Cal or Prentiss, she thought, coming home from a dance. It went on, the sound fading away, and then it stopped. She was sure she had heard the motor sound die abruptly. But why would anybody stop up there? She must have been mistaken. It had probably just gone around a bend in the road.

Minutes dragged by and she forgot about it. I’m going to the if I don’t go to sleep, she thought. If there was

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