could hear the bullets whamming into the trees a few feet off to our left. Miss Harrington grabbed my arm and dragged me. We came shooting up onto dry ground and then stumbled and rolled across some dead leaves.
The guns cut loose again on the other side. Bullets whacked into the ground behind us and some of them glanced off trees and went screaming out ahead of us like they do in Western movies. We had our faces plastered against the ground. I was still choking and sputtering, trying to get my breath.
Then the guns stopped and I heard a couple of men yelling at each other on the other side. “I think they got across into them trees,” one of ‘em shouted. “Come on.”
I spit out some leaves and dirt that was in my mouth, and says to Miss Harrington, “Uncle Sagamore was right. Those rabbit hunters are sure careless where they shoot. They might of hit us.”
She clapped a hand over my mouth and pulled me up against her. She was listening for something. I couldn’t hear anything except the noise we was making trying to get our breath. Then in a minute, I did. It sounded like men running through the brush on the other side of the lake.
“How far is it to the end of the lake?” She whispered in my ear.
She’d forgot she still had her hand over my mouth, I reckon. I squirmed a little, and she saw what the trouble was, and took it away. “About a hundred yards,” I says. “Just around the bend there.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she says, and jumps up. She grabbed me by the arm and we started running. She couldn’t run very fast with no shoes on because things hurt her feet, but I was all right. I hadn’t had shoes on since I’d been here. She put her feet down like she was running across egg shells, and in about a hundred yards or so we fell down again and rolled into a little gully that had ferns growing all along it.
We was both still wet and leaves and twigs was sticking to our bare skin. We was out of breath. I could hear my heart beating. She held on to me real tight, with my face against her bosom, and I could feel it going up and down when she breathed. There was ferns all around and over us.
“Don’t make a sound,” she says, whispering.
“Why are we running?” I asked.
“Shhhh! Those men are looking for us. If they find me they’ll kill me.”
“Kill you? You mean they ain’t rabbit hunters, like the others?”
“The others wasn’t rabbit hunters, either. Hush,” she says.
It was all crazy and mixed up, I thought. Why would anybody want to hurt a nice woman like Miss Harrington? I was glad the other two had had that accident. It served ‘em right. Then I began to be scared. They must be coming around the lake. Suppose they found us. I began to shake.
“Just be still,” she whispered. “They won’t find us in these ferns.”
I laid still and listened. And in a minute I could hear them moving, running through the brush somewhere towards the head of the lake. And all of a sudden there was a shot. And then three or four in a row. And then another one by itself. There was no bullets come this way, though.
We laid real quiet in the ferns. Miss Harrington turned her face a little and looked at me. Her eyes was big and blue and worried.
“What do you reckon they’re shooting at now?” I whispered.
“I’m not sure,” she says.
The sun was gone now, and it was getting shadowy out in the timber, what little of it I could see through the ferns. I wished Pop and Uncle Sagamore was there. Then we heard a sound. It was a man walking through dead leaves somewhere between us and the lake. We couldn’t see him, though. We tried to hold our breath and listen, waiting to see if he was coming closer. At first it sounded that way and I was scared stiff, but before long we could tell the sound was dying out. He was going away.
“Maybe it was Pop,” I says. “Looking for us. Or maybe Dr Severance.”
“Shhhh,” she whispered. “I don’t think so. They would have tried to call us.”
“What would they want to shoot you for?” I asked.
“Never mind,” she says. She put her hand over my mouth again.
In