careful stiff-legged step at a time, pulling close to the dome. Sunky walked behind him in near-lockstep. Raff kept moving until he was in low undergrowth of the dome perimeter and about twenty feet off the trail. In his mind, he plotted each step of his coming sprint around the dome.
Sunky pushed him in the back roughly. "That's far enough," he said.
Raff stood still for a moment, with his back to Sunky, and then moved his arms as though unzipping his pants. After a few seconds, he turned his upper body partly around to glance at Sunky, who was only arm's length away, and saw that the young man had not yet pulled his gun. On the trail, Rainey was talking softly to LeBow and he also still had his gun under his shirt.
Raff started to turn all the way around and began to speak.
"Stop, Sunky, there's a snake--"
At that instant, having turned enough to gain purchase, he pushed Sunky as hard as he could. The young gunman fell backward, landing hard on the ground, yelling, his arms flung out, his hat sailing off to the side. As Sunky hit the ground, Raff was already at the edge of the dome and sprinting around it. Rainey's response was immediate. Within five seconds he had his gun out and up and started firing. Raff had just passed out of sight before the first shot. Rainey tried to calculate Raff's progress through the vegetation and fired several more shots through the densely shaded foliage. It works only rarely, hunting for deer running through forest cover, and this time also the tactic failed.
Raff continued on his way across the little clearing and into the brush ahead. He disappeared just as his pursuers rounded the dome. Rainey and Sunky, who was now recovered and in pursuit, held their fire for a clear shot, didn't get it, and, with LeBow following, plunged in after him.
At this point Raff had less than a fifty-yard lead. Only the thick leafy vegetation saved him from being gunned down in the first minute or two. He knew he could lengthen the distance, however, because he was familiar with the wild terrain of Nokobee and they were not. He knew the location of openings in the undergrowth in this part of the tract and paths around the tangled ruins of fallen trees. By the time he broke out of the hardwood undergrowth and into the more open spaces of the pine savanna, he was nearly a hundred yards ahead, widening the gap and still on a nearly straight course. When his pursuers broke out into the open themselves, they could catch only glimpses of him.
Soon afterward Raff noticed that the men were beginning to fan out while shouting back and forth to one another. At first he thought they had lost him and were trying to locate him. Then he realized the awful truth. The trio knew where he was, at least approximately. They, not he, had the upper hand. LeBow and his men were almost certainly experienced hunters. They were not yelling just to communicate. They were quartering the terrain, while driving their prey forward in a confined space of their choosing. They were forcing him toward the riverbank as if they were hunting down a wild pig. If he continued on a straight course to the bank, they would then converge toward each other, closing the net.
Raff, running hard, desperately sought a way to break out of the trap. He thought about reaching the river first and diving in, but he was a poor swimmer and if he didn't drown, his head would be an easy target for pistol fire from the bank.
Then a plan came to him. From the voices of his pursuers, Raff knew that LeBow was on his left. He was fairly sure LeBow was unarmed, and the minister was older than the others and hadn't looked in very good shape to Raff. If Raff cut diagonally to the left and sprinted even just a little bit faster, he might beat LeBow to the Chicobee and then cut to the left along the riverbank ahead of the whole lot of them. If he didn't make it in time, he might still fight his way past LeBow and continue down the river before the others arrived on the scene.
He angled left and within three minutes, zigzagging through the last of the savanna and into the second-growth cypress of the floodplain, arrived, sooner than he had guessed,