Then he went on, pausing after each few miles to scrape the ever-accumulating mud from his boots, using each hilltop to search the country behind for signs of pursuit.
The rain came down again, matting his thin, clay-plastered hair—his hat had gone with his mount. The ill-fitting slicker restricted his body and flapped about his ankles, impeding his progress, but his wounded shoulder needed its protection from the rain.
Twice he left the road to let vehicles pass—once a steaming Ford, once a half-load of hay creeping along behind four straining horses.
His way was still through fenced land that offered scant concealment. Houses dotted the country, with few miles between them; and the loss of his horse was ample evidence that the telephone wires had not been idle. He had not eaten since noon of the previous day but— notwithstanding the absence of visible pursuit—he could not forage here.
Night was falling as he left the road for the slope of Tiger Butte. When it was quite dark he stopped. The rain kept up all night. He sat through it—his back against a boulder, the slicker over his head.
The shack, unpainted and ramshackle, grovelled in a fork of the coulee. Smoke hung soddenly, lifelessly above its roof, not trying to rise, until beaten into nothingness by the rain. The structures around the chimneyed shack were even less lovely. The group seemed asprawl in utter terror of the great cat upon whose flank it found itself.
But to the red eyes of the man who had killed Dan Odams—he lay on his belly on the crest of the hill around which the coulee split—the lack of telephone wires gave this shabby homestead a wealth of beauty beyond reach of architect or painter.
Twice within the morning hour that he lay there a woman came into view. Once she left the shack, went to one of the other sheds, and then returned. The other time she came to the door, to stand a while looking down the coulee. She was a small woman, of age and complexion indeterminable through the rain, in a limp, grayish dress.
Later, a boy of ten or twelve came from the rear of the house, his arms piled high with kindling, and passed out of sight.
Presently the watcher withdrew from his hill, swung off in a circle, and came within sight of the shack again from the rear.
Half an hour passed. He saw the boy carrying water from a spring below, but he did not see the woman again.
The fugitive approached the building stealthily, his legs carrying him stiffly, their elasticity gone. Now and then his feet faltered under him. But under its layers of clay and three-day beard his jaw jutted with nothing of weakness.
Keeping beyond them, he explored the outbuildings—wretched, flimsy structures, offering insincere pretences of protection to an abject sorrel mare and a miscellaneous assortment of farm implements, all of which had come off second-best in their struggle with the earth. Only the generous, though not especially skilful, application of the material which has given to establishments of this sort the local sobriquet 'hay-wire outfit' held the tools from frank admission of defeat.
Nowhere did the ground hold the impression of feet larger than a small woman's or a ten— or twelve—year-old boy's.
The fugitive crossed the yard to the dwelling, moving with wide-spread legs to offset the unsteadiness of his gait. With the unhurried, unresting spacing of clock-ticks, fat drops of blood fell from the fingers of his limp left hand to be hammered by the rain into the soggy earth.
Through the dirty pane of a window he saw the woman and boy, sitting together on a cot, facing the door.
The boy's face was white when the man threw the door open and came into the unpartitioned interior, and his mouth trembled; but the woman's thin, sallow face showed nothing—except, by its lack of surprise, that she had seen him approaching. She sat stiffly on the cot, her hands empty and motionless in her lap, neither fear nor interest in her faded eyes.
The man stood for a time where he had halted—just within the door to one side—a grotesque statue modelled of mud. Short, sturdy-bodied, with massive sagging shoulders. Nothing of clothing or hair showed through his husk of clay, and little of face and hands. The marshal's revolver in his hand, clean and dry, took on by virtue of that discordant immaculateness an exaggerated deadliness.
His eyes swept the room: two cots against the undressed board side walls, a plain deal table in the centre, rickety kitchen chairs here and there, a battered and scratched bureau, a trunk, a row of hooks holding an indiscriminate assembly of masculine and feminine clothing, a pile of shoes in a corner, an open door giving access to a lean-to kitchen.
He crossed to the kitchen door, the woman's face turning to follow.
The lean-to was empty. He confronted the woman.
"Where's your man?"
"Gone."
"When'll he be back?"
"Ain't coming back."
The flat, expressionless voice of the woman seemed to puzzle the fugitive, as had her lack of emotion at his entrance. He scowled, and turned his eyes—now redder than ever with flecks of blood—from her face to the boy's and back to hers.
"Meaning what?" he demanded.
"Meaning he got tired of homesteading."
He pursed his lips thoughtfully. Then he went to the corner where the shoes were piled. Two pairs of men's worn shoes were there—dry and without fresh mud.
He straightened, slipped the revolver back into its holster, and awkwardly took off the slicker. "Get me some grub."
The woman left the cot without a word and went into the kitchen. The fugitive pushed the boy after her, and stood in the doorway while she cooked coffee, flapjacks, and bacon. Then they returned to the living-room. She put the food on the table and with the boy beside her resumed her seat on the cot.
The man wolfed the meal without looking at it—his eyes busy upon door, window, woman, and boy, his revolver beside his plate. Blood still dripped from his left hand, staining table and floor. Bits of earth were dislodged from his hair and face and hands and fell into his plate, but he did not notice them.
His hunger appeased, he rolled and lit a cigarette, his left hand fumbling stiffly through its part.
For the first time the woman seemed to notice the blood. She came around to his side. "You're bleeding. Let me fix it."
His eyes—heavy now with the weights of fatigue and satisfied hunger—studied her face suspiciously. Then he leaned back in his chair and loosened his clothes, exposing the week-old bullet-hole.
She brought water and cloths, and bathed and bandaged the wound. Neither of them spoke again until she had returned to the cot.
Then: "Had any visitors lately?"
"Ain't seen nobody for six or seven weeks."
"How far's the nearest phone?"
"Nobel's—eight miles up the coulee."
"Got any horses besides the one in the shed?"
"No."
He got up wearily and went to the bureau, pulling the drawers out and plunging his hands into them. In the top one he found a revolver, and pocketed it. In the trunk he found nothing. Behind the clothes on the wall he found a rifle. The cots concealed no weapons.
He took two blankets from one of the cots, the rifle, and his slicker. He staggered as he walked to the door.
"I'm going to sleep a while," he said thickly, "out in the shed where the horse is at. I'll be turning out every now and then for a look around, and I don't want to find nobody missing. Understand?"
She nodded, and made a suggestion.
"If any strangers show up, I guess you want to be woke up before they see you?"
His sleep-dull eyes became alive again, and he came unsteadily back to thrust his face close to hers, trying to peer behind the faded surfaces of her eyes.