Red Grass River (40 page)

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. Whis
key 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
some
thing. 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.