towered overhead and the brush was thinning out. The ground here was dry and firm underfoot and walking was easier. I caught a glint of sunlit water off to the right, shining through the trees, and tried to run toward it, but I was too weak and fell again. When I got to my feet I staggered on toward it, the view opening up, and then I knew I had reached the lake. A hundred yards of open water stretched out past me, disappearing around a bend up to my right, and full of big weed beds along the other shore. I looked down at my feet and saw the remains of a campfire, but knew it was an old one even before I knelt frenziedly and ran my hands into the ashes. But somebody had been here! I could find them!
But where were they? Where was the sound of guns? I stared wildly around in the little open glade, so peaceful in the sunlight of late afternoon, and then, suddenly, I began to have the awful feeling that it was somehow familiar. I knew now. The campfire was my own. This was where I had camped on that first trip up here, when I had met her, and there was where the bedroll had lain and I had caught her hand and she had pulled away from me, crying, to run out toward the lake. I was back to where I had started, but now she was in jail and he was dead and I was the one who had killed him. I was conscious of the horrible sensation that I wasn’t just walking in circles in space and time, but that I was actually swinging around the steep black sides of some enormous whirlpool and sliding always toward the center.
But there is a way out, I thought agonizingly. There’s always a way out. All I had to do was locate the searching parties and she would be freed when word was flashed that I had been found. But where were they? I had thought the lake would be busy with motorboats and the sound of guns being fired at intervals throughout the day and night, and here was only the same dead, lost silence I had been fighting through all day. Had they given up? Would I ever get out of here in time, before she collapsed and told them?
And then I heard it—not gunfire, but a motor starting. It was up there to the right, around the bend, sudden, staccato, and very near, so similar to the way I had heard his motor start that morning a long time ago that I was conscious again of that feeling of going around and around in some tightening and deadly spiral. Immediately after it I heard another start, and they were coming nearer. I looked up and saw them appearing around the bend, and there were not two boats, but three. The first had two white-hatted men in it, the second was being towed and was empty, and the one in the rear held two.
I’ve found them, I thought wildly. Shouting and waving my arms, I ran across the small open glade and down to the water’s edge. They had seen me now, and I watched the boats change course a little to swing in toward the bank. I had made it, and in a little while word would be going out that I had been found alive, and she would be freed. The boats were drawing nearer. I didn’t know either of the men in the front boat, but I saw suddenly that Buford was one of the two in the other one.
Instead of waving he was swinging around in the seat with something extended in his hands. I saw the glint, then, of sunlight on steel and recognized it as a rifle, the barrel suddenly foreshortening into nothing as he brought it into line. He was directly behind the boat being towed, and even as I was throwing myself down and back in the awful realization that he was going to shoot, I saw that the second boat was carrying Shevlin.
He shot after I was on the ground and rolling. Mud exploded in my face and then I heard the crack of the rifle almost at the same time because he was so near. Before the sound had even died I was on my feet, knowing somehow that I had to get up and over the bank