while he was working the bolt or I would never move from there alive. And then I was in the trees, hurtling zigzag through them while the gun cracked again. They had cut the motors and in another few seconds they would be on the bank themselves and chasing me.
I didn’t know where I ran, or how far. There was just the pain in my chest and the crying sound from my open mouth as it gulped for air, and the only thing my mind could hold was the picture of that long, canvas-wrapped bundle like an old rolled-up rug lying in the bottom of the second boat. After a while I fell, unable to move, and lay there in the brush trying to still the tortured sound of my breathing enough to listen. There was no sound behind me now.
Twenty-five
I don't know how long I lay there on the ground with nothing but the numbness and the terror in my mind. We were whipped now, and this was the end. They already had her, and I was trapped. They had found him; they knew I had killed him and I was a fugitive with no plan of escape and nothing ahead but futile and senseless flight. Flight? I thought. To where? I looked down at my clothes, at the utter ruin that I had deliberately sought, and thought of the way I would look if I did get out of the swamp, Bearded, bloody, mud-caked, I wouldn’t have a chance. And if Buford got to me first, he’d kill me. I knew that now. He didn’t want me arrested.
Once, though I was not sure, I thought I heard an outboard motor start, far away across the bottom. One of them would go down the lake to take the body in and get to the telephone. The other three would stay here and keep up the search until they began to pile in here with the dogs sometime late tonight. They’d call in the state police cars and swear in a bunch of special deputies to patrol the roads on both sides of the swamp, and everything moving out there would be searched. And I couldn’t stay in here because in another few hours without food or rest I’d be too weak to move.
And what of her? I thought. What will it be like with her when they bring the news that he’s been found? Or was that how they had found him? Had she broken already and told them? But what difference did it make now how they’d done it? It was done, and we were trapped.
We would have been in San Francisco now…I caught myself up, almost savagely, knowing I had to keep away from that or I’d lose my mind. The sun was setting now, and I wondered if, where she was, she could see even a little reflection of it along a wall. This was what I had done to her. I was going to give her everything, and now this was what it was. I had to get up, to move, to do something to shut it out of my mind. Jumping to my feet, I started walking, aimlessly at first, and then, as some strange compulsion began to take hold of me, swinging south and then west in a large circle back toward the lake.
It was growing darker here in the timber and I began to walk faster. The direction I was going at least made a little sense. Since I was on this side of the lake and they would expect me to run east and try to get out to the railroad and catch a freight, it would be better to move west and get across the lake. Suddenly, then, I knew where I was headed. I had about one chance in a thousand of getting there, but I was going toward Dinah’s. There was no use in trying to get home for some more clothes and a car; they’d be watching the house just on the chance I might try it. But maybe to Dinah’s apartment...I wanted to break into a run.
Just at dusk I came out on the bank of the lake a mile or two below where the boats had been. It was breathtakingly beautiful, like dark glass, with the wall of the trees a black silhouette against the sunset afterglow along the other shore, and as I came up I saw a big, spreading ring where a bass