of this dresser. The gun would have been along a line like this, with the slide over on this side… Christ, I thought, the door! Shoving the gun and the cloth back in my pocket, I hurried outside. It was lying near a clump of grass, glinting in the sun. I took a deep breath. When I came back to the boat she said nothing, but I could see the question and the pleading entreaty in her eyes. “Yes,” I said. “We can go now. It’s all finished.”
She gave a little cry and caught my arm. I helped her in and shoved off. When we were well out in the lake I tied the gun up securely in the cloth, which would still show bloodstains in a laboratory, and dropped them over the side.
This was the part now that scared me. There were fifteen miles of lake between here and the slough where I would leave her, and at any turn of the channel we might come across a party of fishermen in a boat. There wasn’t much chance of it, for it was a weekday, and there had been none when I came up, but I still didn’t like the risk. It would be dangerous to have anybody see me taking her out. But there wasn’t any other way to do it. I had to take the boat back, and if I kept it up here to run her down the lake after dark I wouldn’t get back with it until midnight or later, which would cause dangerous talk later when the story broke. So there was nothing for us to do except go ahead and pray we wouldn’t meet anybody.
Our luck held. I ran the whole fifteen miles with the motor wide open and my heart in my mouth as we came around every turn in the channel, and we didn’t meet a single boat. As I swung into the entrance to the slough where I used to launch my own boat, I breathed freely for the first time and lighted a cigarette, conscious of the way my hand had stiffened around the tiller. It was only then that I realized that neither of us had said a word since we left the landing. At the end of the slough I cut the motor and drifted up to the bank. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes of two. That was good time, I thought.
I helped her out. “It’ll take me a little over an hour to take the boat back to the foot of the lake and get my car and get back here,” I said. “You can sit down here, or if you want to you can start walking out toward the highway on that logging road and meet me. You won’t meet anybody on it because it’s never used any more. Can you walk in those shoes?”
She nodded eagerly. “Yes. I’d rather walk. I’d go crazy sitting here. I can’t get lost, can I?”
“No,” I said. “There’s only one road and it doesn’t branch off anywhere. But if you get to the highway before I get back, don’t go out on it. Wait for me in the timber.”
I refilled the fuel tank of the motor again from the can in the bow, and dumped most of the shiners in the lake to make it look as if I’d done a lot of fishing. They were dead because I’d forgotten to change the water on them. Of course, I didn’t have any fish to show for my day, but fishing-camp proprietors never expected you to catch anything anyway.
I shoved off and started the motor, and as I went down the slough I swung around once and looked back. She had turned and was walking along the ruts of the old logging road, very straight and lovely and alone, and suddenly I knew, more than I ever had before, how much I loved her, and that if anything ever happened to her, everything would end for me.
I’d driven the Olds down this morning instead of the old Ford, and after I returned the boat I blasted it back up the highway to where the logging road turned off. It was slow work there, however, because of high centers, and I’d gone barely a quarter mile before I met her. After she’d climbed in and I turned around I passed her the cigarettes and asked her to light me one. As she handed it over, she