Then I went down the road, putting my footprints in the dust as nonchalant as a prize heifer, and then cut back into the alley behind the livery stable and ran as quick as I could to the back of the jail. There waiting for me was an unusual sight indeed. Pete had knocked the bars out all right, but he was having considerable trouble trying to get Jimmy to fit through the little window. He had him out to his waist and in fact you couldn’t see any window at all and Jimmy looked as if he was bolted onto that wall without legs; his arms were going like they were demonstrating swimming. And Pete was jumping there, every so often grabbing an arm and giving it a tug but unable to do much good.
Then Pete saw me and whipped off his cap and whirled it round and round to put me into haste, and I came on the fly. He ran to meet me and grabbed me by the shoulders.
“We’ve got to get him through!” he said, all heated up.
I stuffed the bugle down into my pants and ran after him. We stopped under Jimmy and looked up at him and he looked back at us, hung up there like a fixture, bald head covered with sweat-beads, mouth open in the little beard but unable to speak anything (though that round wordless orifice spoke louder than any words), and his body jerking and quivering which led me to suspect that his legs were doing considerable thrashing behind him.
“Now take hold,” Pete said to me reaching up and taking an arm, “and take hold good. We’re going to heave him out.”
“Easy now, boys,” Jimmy said.
“You leave out your breath and let it be that way,” Pete told him.
Then we were pulling. At first it didn’t seem as if he’d ever come out of there and then it seemed as if we were pulling him in two and I had a vision of the town hanging just his legs while the rest of him was being wheeled away by us, but then his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth too and his face grimaced and he was on the way. There was an awful scraping and scratching and ripping, but he was coming, inch by inch. The sides of the window gave off a little spurt of dust and then he popped right out, fast and unexpected — and Pete and I were both pulling suddenly a flying force and falling back and down as Jimmy fairly flew out of there and plummeted chest-down between us.
We lay there for a second, the three of us, tuckered out with exhaustion and surprise. But we’d done it. Jimmy groaned and tried to get up.
“What’s the matter?” Pete asked as we got up and whipped the dust from us.
“It’s my leg,” Jimmy said. “I can’t put weight on it.”
He’d given it a good solid whack when he’d come down and now he couldn’t walk. So Pete and I lifted him up erect and he put his arms around us and skipped along on one foot as we hurried him into the woods. We took him a little ways into a very secluded spot in the elm grove and sat him down in the bushes next to the brook.
“Here you are,” Pete said. “At least you’ll have some water if you want, till we can scare you up a horse.”
“My leg feels like ’twas mule-kicked,” Jimmy said, lying back, shutting his eyes. He looked a sight, what with the dust all over his vest and trousers and his trousers considerably ripped from his slide through the window.
“Anyway it’s a far sight better than being hanged,” Pete said, with that unimpeachable wisdom of his.
Jimmy opened his eyes and looked up at us, the sun and the leaves making speckles of shadow on his face, and his eyes filled with tears.
“I reckon I’m mighty obliged to you lads,” he said.
“That’s fine,” Pete said. “Now you just lay quiet till we can rustle up some transportation for you. These bushes hide you pretty good, so you don’t have to worry.”
We left him there and hurried on back.
“Where do you reckon we can get a horse?” I asked Pete as we skipped through the woods.
“I don’t know just yet,” Pete said. “From a careless man probably. Let’s just keep our eyes open.”
When we got back, we found the place in a general furor. Men were running about and a group on horseback was gathering in front of the Dooley House. The dust was flying thick as smoke.
“See here,” Pete asked a young lad in overalls, “what’s going on?”
“Old Jimmy’s got away,” the lad said breathlessly.
We heard somebody shout out, “We should’ve hanged him when we had him.”
I hadn’t ever seen such activity in Capstone. It seemed that everybody was there, all the storekeepers in their aprons and the men from the tavern that never came out in daylight and all the farmers and their sons. Most everybody who had a horse was mounted and so there wasn’t an idle horse about at all. The sheriff and his deputies went by us and the sheriff looked at me and I shuddered but he kept right on going toward a wagon full of men with rifles, never suspecting anything at all I guess, and jumped up into the wagon as fierce as a bear. Just then Eddie Larsen’s father ran up onto Dooley’s porch and shouted out:
“Listen here, you men!” And he held up two fingers and said, “Two hundred dollars reward to the man that brings him in, dead or alive!”
I looked at Pete and his face lighted up as if he’d received a benediction. His face was a map to his every thought and scheme.
“You can’t do it, Pete,” I said.
But he had his hand inside my arm and was steering me off into the alley. “I didn’t say I would,” he said. “But isn’t that a pile of money? Think of the suit of clothes and the derby hat and the buckboard a fellow could buy with that. And it looks like they’ll catch old Jimmy anyway since he don’t have a horse and we can’t get him one. It’d be a pity to have one of those far-spittin’ farmers carry off that money, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t think,” I said. He was moving along real quick into the woods now and I had to skip over fallen trees to stay with him. “You can’t do it,” I said.
“You listen here,” he said. “We don’t know for sure if he’s innocent or not anyway. He says he is of course, but I don’t suppose he’d have much trouble influencing himself of that. We’re going against the whole town, ain’t we? What’s the chances of us being right and everybody else wrong? I ask you that.”
“I’m against it,” I said.
“Then the whole two hundred belongs to me.”
“It’s blood money.”
“But he’s most likely a murderer. The more I think on it the more I feel convinced.”
The idea was hot in his head and there was no stopping him. I told him I’d have no part of it and so he went on ahead, slipping through to the elm grove as quiet as smoke. I sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree and clasped my hands in my lap and tried not to believe anything that had ever happened. A little bit of trumped-up disbelief can go a long way in mitigating a nervous conscience, or so I thought.
Then I heard Pete whistling through the woods and I jumped up and went hurrying, sure he’d changed his mind. But he hadn’t. When I came to the brook he was standing there and Jimmy was stretched out as peaceful as last night.
“I tapped him with the chisel,” Pete said. “He never saw me either, so he can’t tell.”
“You might’ve killed him,” I said. “There’s a difference in knocking a man out and killing him. Now you give me a hand with him if you want to have a hundred dollars and be a hero too.”
So we gathered him up by the wrists and the ankles and started toting him through the woods.
“I don’t like a bit of it,” I said.
“You ain’t so pure yourself,” he said. “Standing there and playing that fool bugle makes you liable for jail yourself.”
We carried him back to the yard behind the jail and laid him down.
“We’d best bring him around the front,” Pete said.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “They’re going to hang him as soon as they let eyes on him. It won’t be so pretty either, if you’ve never seen a man hanged, and you’re going to have to stand there and watch and know that you done it.”