At the second road, we stopped and listened for ten minutes before turning right. All we heard was the chirping of night insects and the hoot of a hunting owl. Our pace was slow and cautious up to the fourth lane on our left. We turned into it and followed the rutted trail through brush and saplings for what we judged to be approaching a quarter mile. The saplings beside us grew close together and many were over fifteen-feet tall.
Ahead in a clearing, a two-story frame house stood silhouetted under moonlight. Outbuildings lay scattered around it, and a large ramshackle barn overlooked all of it. Looking closely, we saw the barn's roof was swaybacked and partially collapsed on the near end. We dismounted and tethered the horses to the post of an old, rusty barbed wire fence. Cautiously, we approached the house with rifles in the ready position. Up close it was apparent the farm site was uninhabitable. I pointed in the direction of the fifth lane and set off with Richard covering our rear. We stepped over the decrepit wire fence strands and moved stealthily through the dense stand of weeds and saplings.
In twenty minutes, we passed through a fifty foot stand of mature trees to another clearing; it matched the description Everett gave us. We moved back ten feet and took positions behind a dense, fully leaved deciduous bush. The luminous dial on my old windup wristwatch showed the time was twelve minutes past two a.m. I whispered to Richard to try to nap and I'd wake him at four. I counted six cabins beside the barn. All six had roofs at a steep enough angle to accommodate lofts inside. Usually that would be where children would sleep. From where I sat, it appeared they'd been built haphazardly with no logical pattern to their placement.
At six, Richard gently placed a firm hand on my shoulder and pulled me from a shallow, uneasy doze. He pointed through an early morning mist at a single male figure as it stumbled through dawn's half-light to an outhouse.
Close to my ear, he whispered as he pointed, "I saw dim light in that building on the far end a little after you went to sleep. Then seven women went to the outhouse. Two of them had guns, guarding the other five. I'm sure I recognized our women, so this is the right place. After they finished, lights were lit in that building in the middle. I imagine they're up early to cook breakfast because of the smell of wood smoke."
I threw him a thumbs up in the shadowy, subdued light, blinked, and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. My butt squirmed on the rough ground, and I settled in to wait and watch.
Shortly after five another male made the trip to the outhouse. Ten minutes later three more women and a gang of kids from toddlers to teens made the walk to the stinky two-holer shack.
Near six a woman left the kitchen and stopped at a brass bell the size of a large watermelon mounted on a vertical post in the yard. She clanged it four times. Over the next ten minutes, two men, a woman and the gang of children of all ages hurried to the kitchen for breakfast. The sun poked above the horizon to our right. We reassessed our position and agreed to stay where we were.
The thought of breakfast caused hunger to set in. I pulled two strips of jerky from a pocket; Richard did the same. As we chewed, several big mongrel dogs appeared at the kitchen to eat the first of the morning food scraps tossed by a young woman I didn't recognize. They barked, snarled and fought over the offered food. To my dismay, a big tan colored mongrel sniffed the air and wandered in our direction. It stood at the edge of the clearing and snarled and then barked lightly. I tossed the half piece of jerky I'd been eating toward the dog. It jumped to the side before lowering its head to sniff the object. In one gulp the meat disappeared. The dog was silent but continued to stare in our direction.
The pack of dogs had dispersed. Molly stepped from the kitchen to dump more scraps onto a large round metal pan, and they quickly raced back to the feeding area and began their fight routine again. Our dog lost interest in us and trotted off to join the fray amid the promise of more food.
I motioned to Richard that it was time to leave. No one had gone to the barn, so it didn't appear anyone would be leaving anytime soon.
We tromped back to our horses and gave them water from canteens we'd left on the saddle horns before we quenched our thirst. Instead of going to the main road, we cut through a field overgrown with weeds and trees thirty-feet high to the next private lane. That home site was desolate, also. The house that had stood there was a charred ruin, and the barn and outbuildings leaned sharply; they were in the process of falling down. I guessed no one had lived there for the past forty years. We figured our wandering had put us three-fourths of a mile from the enemy. The lane to the farm was relatively clear due to a still visible amount of small rock on it.
At our camp, we told
