Red Grass River

TWENTY-THREE

January 1924

CHILL WINTER DAWN. THE EASTERN SKY SHOWING GRAY AT THE horizon. Pale mist rising in clouds off the wetland all about and dark trees ghostly in the fog. The air smelling of ripe muck. The world soundless.

Thomas High Hawk eased off his flatboard perch on the pine branch with his rifle slung around his chest and shinned down the trunk and lit softly on a carpet of pine needles. He was tired and his eyes burned. Last night’s fog had cut his vision’s range to a few feet but he had not heard anything unusual and the night had passed without hint of encroaching trouble. Nobody would have been out searching for their camp in such for anyhow.

He yawned and stretched, hoping that either the black man or cousin Charlie had a pot of coffee on the fire. Shirttail Charlie was his elder but he was lazy as a child and he often chose to sleep until Thomas shook him awake for his shift. He tightened his rifle slight and buttoned his jacket to the neck and headed into the fog, keeping his eyes to the ground in watch for mudholes and snakes.

A small stand of cabbage palms loomed darkly out of the mist and he held to the vague trail skirting around the trees. A dark figure emerged behind him and silently closed the short distance between them. An arm clamped around Thomas High Hawk’s mouth and cut off his cry before it began and Thomas felt an instant’s sickening pain at his backribs and then the blade was in his heart and he was dead even before Roebuck yanked away the knife and let him fall.

The sky showed now a long thin streak of pink at some distant point out over the Atlantic. The fog on the high ground was thinning fast but was yet dense as smoke under the trees and rose like steam clouds from the sloughs and flagponds and all along the length of Crossbone Creek as though the oaks were burning at their roots and all bodies of water in this swampland were on fire under their surface. A crow lit on a high branch of a scorched bony pine and his rasping squall was the day’s first sound. The camp was absent two of its residents this dawn—Ben Tracey and Ray Lynn having departed a week ago, each armed with a Winchester 95 and a .45 automatic, and each trailing a dugout loaded with bush lightning for delivery to Indian buyers at the south end of Lake Okeechobee. They were not due back for a day or so.

The campfire had been revived by Jefferson James who sat beside it and now set a pot of coffee to boil on the firerocks. Rolled in his blanket near the fire Shirttail Charlie still slept. Joe Ashley emerged from his tent, his trousers unbuttoned and held by galluses over his undershirt. He unleashed his stream against an oak trunk and then buttoned up and stalked over to Shirttail Charlie and nudged him with his boot. The Indian grumbled and tried to squirm away and Joe Ashley cursed lowly and kicked him lightly on the leg.

“Aw right,” Shirttail Charlie said, “I’m up, I’m up.” He sat up and peered around at the misty morn. “Where’s Thomas?”

“Aint come in yet,” Old Joe said, squatting to pour a cup of coffee. “If he went to asleep out there I’ll feed his ass to Jefferson’s damn dog.”

The dog was at that moment standing at the perimeter of the camp and peering intently into the thinning fog in the prairie beyond, its ears forward and its nape roaching. And then it bolted with a loud growl and fangs bared and the three men at the campfire all came fast to their feet as the dog sped toward a cluster of palmettos forty yards distant in the gray haze, its snarl rising as it closed on the brush. Then a shotgun blasted with an orange flare and knocked the dog in the air sideways in a burst of hide and blood.

A crackling salvo erupted from the prairie brush and Jefferson James grunted, staggered like a drunk and dropped. Joe Ashley ran at a crouch for his tent and his rifle that lay within as bullets kicked up dirt all around him. The coffeepot jumped away from the fire with a loud whang and round thucked through the sides of the tents. He lunged into his tent and snatched up his .44-40 and the canvas walls popped and shook with bullets and he was hit hard on the hipbone and dropped to his belly. He looked at his hip and saw blood and cursed. He levered a round and crawled forward to the doorflap. He fired several rounds into the expense of prairie even though he had yet to see any of the attackers. A bullet hummed over his head. From his left came the hollow staccato popping of an automatic rifle and he looked over and saw Laura firing the Browning from behind an oak and giving John Ashley coverfire as John with a pistol in his hand ran out to the fallen Jefferson and knelt beside him and rolled him onto his back. A bullet snatched at John’s sleeve and a chunk of limerock flew up beside him in a ricochet whine. At the forward edge of the camp Albert Miller lay behind a stump and levered and fired his Marlin. Now John Ashley turned and ran back for the trees as Laura stepped out in the open and fired the BAR from the hip as if she’d been born to it. Bullets chunked into the oak trunks around her. Then John was in the trees again and she side-hopped back behind cover. Shirttail Charlie was nowhere in sight.

Joe Ashley thought to follow John to the shelter of the trees but as he rose to one knee he was hit in the shoulder and he sat down hard. For a moment he was stunned and then tired his arm and found he could move it, but only awkwardly, and the pain was intense. He struggled to lever a round and felt bone grinding in his shoulder and even in the surrounding din of gunfire heard himself cry out. He crawled back to the tent flap and saw a man duck down in the myrtlebrush forty yards away. He fired into the brush and the man ran out from it and took cover behind a thick pine stump jutting from a clump of palmetto. Another man came running with a rifle in his hands and threw himself behind a low limestone outcrop not thirty yards away.

Laura was kneeling against a wide oak trunk and shooting now an Enfield rifle—working the bolt smoothly and firing steadily and now stripping a fresh clipload into the magazine and flinging away the empty clip and slapping the bolt home and firing again. One let of her overalls was stained bright red. John Ashley had the Browning braced in the crotch of a large oak and was pouring fire into the open country and yelling, “Come on, Daddy! Come on, Al!”

Albert Miller jumped up and ran for the trees and he was almost to them when he was hit and went down. He was hit again as he got to his feet but he gimped ahead and now Laura had him and pulled him behind the cover of the tree. His shirtsleeve and pants leg were soaked with blood. A round had ripped through his hamstring muscle without hitting bone but his humerus was broken. Laura eased him to the ground and examined the wounds and said neither one would bleed him dead. She found a stick to serve for a splint and then tore the other sleeve off 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, good!” Then a man with a rifle peered over an outcrop and fired once and John Ashley saw his father spill out of the back of the tent with blood jetting from his neck and knew he was killed. The shooter ducked out of sight as John Ashley howled and fired three fast rounds at the outcrop and each glanced off the rock with a high whine.

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.

The sheriff’s men heard them coming from a mile away. Whooping and rebel-yelling on rattling trucks slewing through the mud and jouncing over the corduroyed trail, calling for the blood of John Ashley. The deputy in charge of the surveillance team was a brave sergeant named Hazencamp who stood fast where the trail debouched into the cleared ground of Ashley property and within sight of Twin Oaks and he gave the mob no choice but to stop or run him over. He would permit no vigilante action without Sheriff Bob’s sanction and ordered them to turn back. The vigilantes jeered him down and shoved the justice of the peace forward to apprise Hazencamp of their deputized status. Only now did Hazencamp and his men learn of the gunfight at the Ashley whiskey camp and of Fred Baker’s death. In the face of this terrible revelation and on hearing of Sheriff Bob’s open weeping over the body of his dead cousin the cops joined in the general cursing of John Ashley. Hazencamp was now unsure what to do—and in that moment of his indecision his men fell in with the mob and it surged toward the house.

The Ashley women stood back from the windows and watched them come. And here came Uncle Arthur James on the run from around the side of the house and his eyes wide and white in his frightened black face but his duty foremost. As he bore for the porch a rifle cracked and the round slammed the front wall and Arthur covered his head with his arms. He started up the steps as more gunshots sounded and his legs quit him and he tumbled to the ground. He rose to elbows and knees and began scaling the steps and was shot several times more—and still he kept crawling upwards. Then a bullet found the back of his head and blew away a portion of his forehead and he slumped dead.

The mob was shooting in force now and the windows burst and framed photographs along the mantel in the front room flew apart in shards and bullets whined through the room and the walls shed dust under the impact of the fusillade. The shooters laughing and yeehawing and having great sport. But now the women’s screams from the house rose above the clatter of firearms and the clamor of the mob and Sergeant Hazencamp again and again hollered “Hold your fire—hold your goddamn fire!” The shooting slowly subsided and finally ceased altogether and Sergeant Hazencamp yelled out to know if John Ashley or any other man was in the house with the women.

Ma Ashley shouted back: “It’s just us and you know it, you fool sonsofbitches!”

Hazencamp ordered them to come out with their hands up high and they did. When they looked upon Uncle Arthur James sprawled dead in his blood on the porch steps the girls began to cry. Hazencamp had the women taken aside and then led a party of men into the house to search it. In moments he smelled smoke and rushed out to the dogtrot to see the other side of the house in crackling flames. The men who’d done it stood together in front of the house and laughed and passed a jug. The fire fed on the resined pine so fast there was no hope of stopping it from spreading. The sidehouse was already burning as well. The blaze threw up great flaring sparks with cracks and pops like pistolshots and the mob cheered even as the heat drove them back. The fire filled the house and billowed red-yellow and lunged wildly from the windows and doors and leaped high off the rooftop shingles as if it would break free and run amok on the earth. They could hear glass breaking within, the loud crack and crash of the rooftimber coming asunder. Twenty feet back of the main house the kitchen roof suddenly sent up a roiling black cloud of smoke and then that building too was in flames. Ma Ashley looked on without expression nor sound as tears coursed down her face. Clutching fast to either side of their mother the Ashley girls wailed like witnesses to the end of the world.

Now the mob found the Ashley motor vehicles in the pines behind the house and quickly put the torch to them—to Ben Tracey’s blue Chevrolet and Laura’s Ford coupé and two of the gang’s trucks. In minutes the vehicles were enveloped in rolling sheets of orange fire. The fuel tanks detonated each in turn with a deeply resonant BOOOMMM! and parts of the vehicles flew through the air and scattered the crowd even as each explosion raised great celebratory cries. A man standing too near the Chevy when its tank blew up was himself set afire and ran screaming and others pulled him down and stripped the smoking clothes from his blistered skin.

And now somebody shouted something about another house seen down the trail, and somebody else cried, “It’s another damn Ashley place!” and the mob closed up again and made for the house in a great exultation of outrage and some among them carried flaming brands.

The Mobleys saw them coming and went out with their hands up and begged them not to burn their home. But someone shouted that the old man was Hanford Mobley’s daddy and someone else informed loudly that the mother was an Ashley sister, and the mob’s rage and at things Ashley would allow for no mercy. Torches smashed though the windows and in minutes the little residence was swallowed in fire.

The smoke of the Twin Oaks fires rose in towering black columns that could be seen all over the county. From where he squatted to drink from a swamp creek west of Twin Oaks, John Ashley saw the smoke pluming high above the pines and fixed its location and knew exactly what it meant.

Eight days and nights he stayed on the run in the swamps and pineywoods of the Devil’s Garden with Bob Baker in relentless pursuit. The cry of the tracking dogs on the air and now and then gunshots—and God only knew who those peckerwoods were shooting in their fervor to shoot something. He slaked his thirst at creeks, ate birds’ eggs raw, the bloody meat of turtles he caught at the creeks and broke apart on rocks, the fresh sweet heart of cabbage palms. Neither he nor the posse slept much. The dogs continued to come on after dark and he was obliged to stay on the move through the night. He sometimes slept for more than an hour and then woke to a louder baying of hounds and had to move faster all that day to open the distance between them again. Other times when he tried to sleep he would dream of his father lying in blood, of Laura’s eyes fluttering closed, and he would wake up weeping furiously.

By his third day in flight he’d determined to take refuge with the only brother left to him in the world. He’d thought of making his way to Clarence Middleton at his girlfriend’s house in St. Lucie but he did not know if Clarence was still in the clear or had been arrested or had fled for safer haven. Besides, he did not know Terrianne very well and so did not trust her, no matter that Clarence did. It had to be Bill. His big brother would likely not be happy to see him, not with every cop in five counties looking for him. But Bill was blood, and blood had to take your side.

He had first to lose his chasers. He slogged through muck and waded along the sloughs and wormed through the thorniest brush. He was a mass of bloody cuts caked with mud. He doubled back on his trail and set zigzag courses and was every moving in a large circle so as to give no hint of his intention to head for Salerno. And still the dogs held his trail. It rained hard but briefly one morning and he heard the dogs’ frustration when they lost his scent—but an hour later they were on him again. He could not but admire such animals and their handlers and thought Bobby must have some damned good trackers with him beside. He was weary to his bones and now had bad dreams the minute he fell asleep. His clothes were stinking bloody rags held together by sweat and muck.

On the sixth morning the dogs’ yelping for the first time began to go faint and by that afternoon he heard them no more. He figured they had finally run themselves out or the posse had quit the chase. He had no way of knowing it was the third pack of dogs Bob Baker had used on this manhunt and all three packs had been run to exhaustion.

That midday he felt sure he’d lost them and at last turned toward the drier pineywoods perhaps a day’s distance to the east and, a day beyond them, Salerno and Bill’s place. He found a high-banked creek whose water came to his chest and he held the carbine up high and followed the creek through heavy black willows and buttonbrush until he arrived at a higher-ground stand of cabbage palm and wateroaks. He laid his rifle on the weedy slope of the bank and searched carefully along the creek and found a turtle nest and robbed it of its eggs. Then climbed to the bankrim and there sat to eat.

He was sucking the last egg dry when he suddenly sensed something behind him. He raised his arms defensively as he whirled around and a knifeblade cut though the back of his forearm like a lick of fire. He grabbed the attacker’s legs as the blade slashed into the crown of his head and he pulled the man off balance and rolled sideways and they tumbled together down the bank and into the water. They came up gasping and spitting and John Ashley saw an Indian of blackfire eyes and brown teeth bared like a dog’s. The Indian slashed at his neck and missed and John Ashley grabbed him in a bear hug that pinioned the Indian’s knifehand between them and he drew a deep breath and plunged underwater with the man fast in his embrace. The water was murky and the color of tea and the Indian struggled and kicked in a wild desperation that raised thick clouds of mud off the creekbottom and still John Ashley clutched him with all his might, hugging himself to the Indian like a lover becrazed. And just as he thought his lungs would burst for lack of breath he felt the Indian abruptly go slack. He released him and thrust his head up out of the water, gagging and coughing and for a moment he could not gain his feet and everything remained blurred and he flailed against the water and thought he might yet go under and drown but then his feet found purchase and he stood upright and his lungs swelled and sucked huge draughts of air.

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 sweet. Dumbfuck Indian.”

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 to give John privacy while he bathed. Bill had brought in a quart bottle of beer he’d pulled up from the well and now poured two glasses and handed one to his brother, then lit two cigarettes and passed one of these to him also. They looked at each other a long moment. In a tight voice Bill Ashley said: “I thought they’d killed you too for sure.”

He told John that Ma and their sisters were living with the Pattersons in West Palm Beach for now but it would be too risky for him to try to sneak over there to see them. Their mother had cursed Bob Baker publicly as the murderer of her husband and destroyer of her home and told the newspapers she hoped Bob Baker got paralyzed and had to be fed from a spoon for the rest of his life. She had sworn to build a new house on the ashes of Twin Oaks. “She can afford to do it, too,” Bill said. “Daddy buried money all over the place and she knows where a good bit of it is.”

What about their daddy’s grave, John Ashley wanted to know. Could he go to it? He wanted to say goodbye to him.

Bill told him to forget it. Bob Baker still had the posse on duty and had deputized what seemed like half the men in the county. Cops were everywhere. Thinking John might try to visit his daddy’s grave, Bobby was keeping it under close watch by deputies armed to the teeth.

He told John of the rumor that Ray Lynn and Ben Tracy were in Miami, but nobody knew it to be true for sure. Clarence Middleton hadnt shown a hair of himself since the news of the raid and was likely still in St. Lucie. Bertha had written a note to Hanford Mobley telling him what happened and to stay put right where he was. She’d mailed it by way of a friend in Pensacola who relayed the letter to Galveston—just in case the cops were checking the mail going out through the local post offices. As for Laura, Bill said, Bobby’d given up trying to stick even an attempted murder charge on her and wouldnt be able to convict her for anything more than a misdemeanor or two and she wasnt likely to serve more than a few months at the most.

John Ashley stared at him and the stub of his cigarette fell from his mouth into the tub water now thickly purpled with dirt and old blood. He put his head in his hands and sobbed so loudly Bertha came running with face afright.

He slept all the next day and despite his exhaustion he came awake on the instant that afternoon when he heard a car pull up in front of the house. He peeked from behind the curtain and saw two cops in the car, the driver talking to Bill Ashley who was wearing a straw hat and had gardening tools in his hand. Bertha knelt at her nearby flower bed and trimmed weeds. Bill was talking amiably and one of the cops smiled and shook a finger at him. Then both cops grinned and waved so long and the car wheeled around and left. John Ashley once more checked the .45 under the pillow to ensure a round in the chamber. He lay back and thought to himself, She’s alive, oh yes she is, and smiled so wide it hurt mouth and he happily drifted back to sleep.

That evening Bertha served a supper of fried chicken and cornbread, rice and greens, and John Ashley had second helpings of everything and then two huge wedges of pineapple pie for dessert. Over coffee and cigarettes Bill told him the best thing to do was go away to Texas. He would make all the arrangements for him.

“The law’s on you for killing a policeman now,” he said. “They figured they got a score to settle and they wont never let it lay and you know it. You stay round here and sooner or later they’ll catch up to you and if they dont shoot you dead on the spot they’ll sure’s hell see you hang.”

“Well goddamn, Billy, I figure we got a few scores to settle our ownselfs, dont you?” John Ashley said. “What about Daddy? Dont you figure thats a score needs settling? Hell, men, it’s lots of damn scores I still got to settle with that fucken Bobby, scores nobody even knows about but me and him. Scuse my language, Berty.”

Bill Ashley heaved an enormous sigh. “All this”—he gestured vaguely—“this shit about settlin scores. It’s too damn many people with too damn many scores to settle in this world, Johnny. If we dont start lettin go of some of these damn scores, thats all we’ll be doin the rest of our days, tryin to settle em. That aint no goddamn way to live. It’s just a way to not live long.”

John Ashley set down his cut and stared hard at him. “What the hell you talkin about? The son of a bitch killed my daddy.”

“Our daddy.”

“Well you damn sure dont act like he’s any daddy of yours. I seen you out there talking to them cops today, jokin with them like they was just a coupla old boys.”

“They are a coupla old boys. Christ, Johnny, they didnt shoot Daddy. They didnt have a thing in the world to do with it.”

“It was cops killed him and they’re cops, aint they? Anybody who can smile at cops thataway aint no son of—”

“Goddammit, dont talk to me like that! He was as much my daddy as—”

“Billy, you stop now!” Bertha said. “The both you—stop!”

Bill Ashley glared at John and looked at Bertha and then made a half-growl in this throat and looked off to the window.

Bertha turned to John Ashley who lit a cigarette and angrily exhaled. She said softly, “Can I say somethin? I promise I’ll only say it once and then I’ll keep my trap shut and go back to mindin my own business.”

He looked at her. “You can always say anything you want, Berty, you know that.”

“Just last night you thought Laura was dead, didnt you? You’d thought it for days. You felt like there wasnt a reason in the world to go on living except to get even with Bobby Baker for her and your daddy. Then you found out she was alive and it made you so happy you cried—yes, you did, John Ashley, I saw it and you know I did, and there’s nothin in the world wrong with that. Knowin she was alive made the world a whole lot better in a hurry, didnt it? But now just listen to you. Here you are all over again talkin about gettin even with Bob Baker for your daddy and you know it wasn’t even him that killed him, you said so yourself—no, wait, let me finish…You figure Bobby’s responsible no matter who did the shootin, but what difference does it make anymore, Johnny? I swear, you and that damned Bobby Baker sound exactly the same. He’s sayin in the newspaper he wants to even things with you for killing his cousin Freddie. How two men who already suffered and caused as much pain as you two can talk about nothing but causin more pain is something I’ll never understand. How I pity that man’s poor wife and children. But you! Even if you cant think of yourself or of your own brother here, cant you at least think of what you’d be doin to Laura? That girl loves you so much. Why in the world do you want to take a chance on getting killed or goin back to prison and makin the rest of her life so miserable? Why do that when you and her can just go away somewhere and be happy together? Why cant you just quit all this awful business? I’m sorry to sound like Little Miss Know-it-all, because I surely aint any such a thing, but if I was you I’d just want to get away from all this meanness and sadness and trouble and so someplace where I could live a peaceable life and wake up happy ever day because I’m with somebody I love and who loves me back and I’d try and remember how damn lucky that makes me.”

She was crying as she rushed from the table into the bedroom and shut the door behind her.

“The brother sat in silence for a moment without meeting each other’s eyes. Then Bill looked at him and showed a small crooked smile and said: “Now look what you done. She’ll be at least a week blamin me for any pain any man’s ever caused a woman.”

John Ashley chuckled softly. “Sometimes just havin a dick means we’re guilty, dont it?”

They fell quiet again. After a time John Ashley said, “You say she’ll do about three months in the lockup?”

“Three, four, wont be much. He aint got much on her.”

“They mistreatin her?”

“Hell no. I know that for a fact. I talked to her before I got let go. She’s lookin fine, I swear. Luckiern hell that bullet only scraped her skull. And the leg would wasnt much. She was already gimpin around in the cell a coupla days after. Bobby told them to treat her right, she heard him say it herself.”

John Ashley looked at him. “Why would he do that? I thought he wanted to hang her?”

Bill Ashley shrugged. “He wanted somebody hung for Freddie. Anyway just cause he wanted to hang her dont mean he cant be a gentleman to her. Hell, I dont know. I quit tryin to figure why people do any the things they do. It only tired my mind to try.”

He stayed with Bill and Bertha two days more and then was sufficiently rested to slip out in the late darkness of the following night. He made his way through town and into the pineland swamps and on to a creekside waycamp where they’d long before cached a skiff and ammunition and a few supplies. By sunrise the next day he was headed for the Devil’s Garden.

Three days later he was forty miles away at Laura’s house deep in the sawgrass country and the Thousand Hammocks where nothing did abide but the ever untamed.