Red Grass River

THREE

March 1912

FOLLOWING HIS RELEASE FROM THE PALM BEACH COUNTY JAIL he’d made directly for the deeper reaches of the Everglades, avoiding all the various waycamps he and DeSoto Tiger had ever used, bypassing widely all Indian villages and the possibility of informers who would point out his direction to some who might come inquiring. For five days he poled his dugout through the maze of waterways winding through sawgrass and around hardwood hammocks and palm islands and pine stands and along sloughs wide and narrow until he arrived in a region unfamiliar even to him, who had lived in the Everglades all his life and hunted and trapped and ranged over a considerable portion of it. For five nights he slept in the dugout or on the raised ground of hammocks, face and hands coated heavy with muck against the mosquitoes. Quick rain showers came and went, drumming on the hard crown of his bowler. And when he was at last so deep in the wilderness he could not except in the vaguest sense have said where he was, he beached the dugout in the high dark shade of a cypress-and-palm hammock and there made a camp of sorts and settled in to let time pass and to ponder the possibilities of his future.

He’d heard that John Ashley had been warned about the murder warrant and had left the state to avoid prosecution, but the put little stock in the rumor. No telling where the man might be. He could be hid out somewhere in the Glades just as he himself was and who’d know it but them who’d never tell. Besides, there were other Ashleys who might come looking for him and any of them capable of settling accounts for brother John. Lay low was the thing to do. Way out here where none but the wildest ever ventured.

He subsisted on fish and turtles, on eggs pilfered from bird nests. He built small cookfires of lighterwood only in the brightest hours of the day the better to hide against the sunlight and clouds whatever smoke might ascend through the thick cover of the cypress branches. He napped often but never deeply and always with an ear cocked for anomalous sound. At various times every day he climbed high in a tree and scanned the horizon for signs of encroaching others but saw none.

A week went by and then another and with the passing of each day he grew more confident that his hideout was a good one. He constructed a solid lean-to of saplings and palm fans against the occasional rain shower and the nightly dew. He built a bed of palm fronds. On the far side of the hammock he discovered a wide shallow creek just beyond the reach of the tree overhang, its current clear and smooth and thronged with turtles and bream and bass as long as his forearm. His immediate thought was of a trotline, a line with baited hooks affixed to it at intervals and let to hang into the water from one bank to the other overnight and retrieved the next day with its catches. In the dugout he had a sufficient length of line and plenty of hooks, and about ten yards onto the grassy bank on the other side of the creek stood a small cypress to which he could attach the other end of the line. But the range from the edge of the hammock and across the creek to the dwarf cypress was perhaps forty feet and all of it out in the open and his wariness would not easily abate. He was loathe to expose himself for even so short a distance and for as brief a time as it would take to tie the line.

Another week passed and each day found him squatting in the shadows of the hammock bank and considering the creek. The trotline he’d fashioned days before and then lain aside was unnecessary to feed himself—he every day on his handline caught more fish than he could eat. But he was angry at himself for being too fearful to string the trotline. He had been fearful his entire life and knew it. And knew too that others knew it. Neither white man nor Indian had ever shown him a measure of respect and he could not fault them for that. Why should anyone respect him, who could not respect himself for his cowardice?

He determined to do it. He would wait for dark and then cross the creek and attach the line. The resolution was heady. Yes, he would do it and be done with being afraid. And now asked himself why he should wait until dark. Who but he and the beasts inhabited this portion of wildland for miles around? Now—now in the clarity of full daylight—was the time to prove to himself he could do it. He retrieved the ready trotline and baited the hooks with chunks off the several largemouth he’d caught earlier that morning and he fastened one end of the line to a ground root and fed out the line behind him as he walked backward out of the cover of the trees. He eased into the creekwater and it rose to his chest as he sidestepped his way across, playing out the trotline as he went. As he clambered up the other bank he almost laughed out loud in his exultation at being unafraid. And now he reached the little cypress and checked the lay of the line behind him and then tied this end to the cypress and the job was complete.

He went to the creek bank and admired the hang of the line in the water and already a fat turtle took the bait on one of the hooks and was caught. He looked all around and smiled at the infinite depth of dizzying blue sky carrying a few thin clouds above a scattering of hammocks in a vista of sawgrass to the horizons. And never heard the carbine crack from the cluster of cabbage palms some one hundred and fifty yards distant that sent up a fluttering flock of roseate spoonbills from its feed in the grass shallows and sped before it a .30 caliber bullet to enter his skull in front of his right ear and spin him about completely before he pitched into the creek with a huge splash. He bobbed to the surface facedown and floated there as the water again stilled and the blood issuing from his head drifted away on the slow current in wispy red rivulets as vague and elusive as dreams of courage.