drove, staying just under the speed limit in spite of the impatience riding me. I couldn’t leave the car up there where I had come out of the swamp before, on the deserted country road. It would be picked up eventually, and the state troopers might begin to wonder why somebody would steal a car in Bayou City, drive it to a place like that, and leave it, forty miles from anywhere. But if I wrecked it on the main highway, on the opposite side of the bottom, it would look all right.
It was dusk when I went through Colston, and nearly nine by the time I had passed the store and the boat place on the dam at the south end of the lake. The highway swung and turned north again, along the west side of the bottom. Fifteen miles up, and only three or four miles outside of town, it swung sharply left again, away from the bottom, and here was where I crashed it by the simple method of not making the turn. I had slowed to about twenty-five, and as I went down off the roadbed and through the ditch I took out a section of fence, and then finally came to rest without much damage up against a tree. I picked up the flashlight and started out through the pines. Joy-riding kids, they’d say.
It was a still, sultry night, with no moon but a faint light from the stars. As soon as I was in the timber, however, it was black, and I could see nothing at all. I snapped on the flashlight and started up over the ridge, leaving no tracks in the dense carpet of pine needles. When I came out on top I stopped and looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty.
If I went straight out across the bottom now, I’d hit the lake about five miles below Shevlin’s cabin. But I wanted to go in at least five miles above it, right into the swamp country itself. The best thing to do, then, was to go north here along the high ground for about ten miles and then swing down off the ridge.
It was fairly open up here in the pines and I made good time. At a little before one in the morning I figured I had come far enough, and turned right, going downhill. Before long the sand and pines gave way to big oaks and heavy underbrush. Inside an hour I was drenched with sweat and my clothes were badly torn. I ran into a wide marshy area where the mud and water were up to my knees, and to make matters worse, in the middle of it there was a place a quarter mile wide where a cyclone had gone through years ago. Big trees were piled like spilled matches in a nightmare confusion of tree trunks, limbs, and vines. I scrambled over, crawled under, and fought my way through the muck. Once, clambering along the trunk of a big windfall stacked crisscross above another, I slipped in my muddy shoes and fell into the tangle of big limbs below me, laying open a gash on my head and almost knocking myself out. I scrambled up, cursing and wiping blood out of my face, and then grinned sourly as it occurred to me it wouldn’t be necessary now to fake any signs of violence. I’d look as if Shevlin had worked me over with a ball bat.
It was nearly four when I hit the first sizeable channel of open water. I flashed the light out across it, saw that I was going to have to swim now, and stopped to light a cigarette. There wasn’t any necessity for swimming it before dawn, which would be in about an hour. I sat down against a tree and went over it in my mind. This was—What day was it, anyway? Time had been alternately stretched and compressed for so long I didn’t even know. Let’s see, I thought, I went into the lake Wednesday morning. That night at midnight I was in Bayou City. The next afternoon, then, when the story first broke, would have been Thursday. Then today was Friday. No, I corrected myself, it’s almost daylight Saturday morning. Then I’ve been lost in here for three night and two days, assuming that I tell them it wasn’t until very late Wednesday that I arrested Shevlin. It had taken me nearly all day to find his house, and