A smudge of light came on in the back room of Mrs. Sloan's house. The light disappeared and Rachel hoped it might be her imagining, but then it was in the kitchen, moving around like foxfire before briefly reappearing in the back room. Rachel squinted her eyes and watched for the glow of a flashlight crossing Mrs. Sloan's yard, if not that for some denser shadow.
But she saw nothing. Galloway had vanished as completely as the light held in his hand. Could be walking straight toward town or the depot or straight toward us, Rachel thought, and moved Jacob and herself deeper into the boxcar. Minutes passed though she'd not have believed so except she heard the passenger train coming. Rachel gathered up the carpetbag and Jacob. Briars grabbed her legs, and each time there was an instant she thought Galloway had her.
Rachel finally felt cinders beneath her feet. She did not step onto the glimmering tracks but walked the edge. The train whistle blew and she took a few more steps. A big oak rose near the depot, and its limbs snared some of the moonlight. Rachel stood beneath where the dark pooled, a few yards outside the depot light's glow. She studied the travelers gathered on the platform, looked through one of the depot's wide windows but saw no one. The train pulled into the station and shuddered to a stop.
Two men got off but that was all, and soon the train began to load its new passengers. Rachel took the tickets from her pocket and moved closer, almost ready to step onto the depot's porch when something stopped her. It was not something seen but something sensed, like the time as a child when she'd started to lift the spring guard and stopped, a black widow spider big as a quarter where her fingers would have gone. The last passengers boarded, but still Rachel did not move. Then she saw him, in the shadows on the depot's far side. The last ticket holder boarded and the train pulled away, the flagman's brass lantern sweeping back and forth in farewell.
Rachel turned from the depot's glow and could not see her feet in the oak's thick shade. If I trip and fall and this young one starts squalling, we'll be goners for sure, Rachel thought. Imaginings began to get the best of her, thinking how one wrong step to the left or right and there could be a ditch or a rusty stob that would trip her. You've got to follow the same path you come here on, she told herself. She took a step into the darkness because there was no choice. Rachel took another step, the foot set tentatively before her. Like crossing a pond on thin ice, she thought, and it seemed a part of her listened for that first crackle. Seven steps and she was out of the tree's shade.
Rachel walked on toward the boxcar, quicker now, hunched low so that she was little taller than the briars and weeds. The only thing she could think to do was try to get to town and find the town's lawman, but Sheriff McDowell had warned her to trust no one but his cousin, even if that someone wore a badge. The moonlight was so stark and intense now she could see Mrs. Sloan's house clearly. She remembered then that it was October, remembered how her father called this a hunter's moon and claimed blood on the moon meant blood on the land. Rachel walked faster and got herself and Jacob into the boxcar as quickly as she could, unable to shake the feeling that Mrs. Pemberton and Galloway held sway over even the moon and stars and clouds. That they'd waited for this night and this night alone to find her and Jacob. Don't look up and see it, she told herself. Rachel pushed farther into the boxcar, clutched Jacob more tightly in her arms.
She heard a train, not the one that had departed but one coming out of the mountains into the valley, a freight train. The engine stopped beside the coal chute on the station's opposite end. Rachel lifted Jacob and the carpetbag and made her way down the track to where she'd stood before. She studied the depot, the shadowy far corner where Galloway had been fifteen minutes earlier. He wasn't there. The last of the coal clattered from the chute, and the train began moving. The engine passed in front of the depot, and when several cars had done the same Rachel gathered up the carpetbag and Jacob and walked rapidly toward the train, exposed now not just by the moon but the depot's yellow glow. She stepped onto the closer track, the train passing slowly in front of her. The fifth car gaped open, but Rachel didn't reach it in time. Six more cars creaked by before another was open. She set Jacob and the carpetbag inside, then jumped in herself. The train moved past the old boxcar and soon the darkened backs of buildings.
He was coming, beside the caboose but closing the distance between them one boxcar at a time, not even running but still gaining steadily. He stumbled, got up, and came on. He was smiling and his index finger waved in admonishment. She'd never known fear had a taste, but it did. It tasted like chalk and metal. Rachel pushed Jacob deeper into the car, so deep the child's back pressed against the rattling steel. Rachel's ribs tightened around her heart like a vise-grip.
The train sped up but not enough. Galloway's face appeared beside the car. He trotted now, his hand outstretched. A lanyard made from a dingy piece of twine was around Galloway's neck, dangling from it a dagger. Rachel thought of the bowie knife, but there wasn't time to get it from the carpetbag. She pulled the sock from her dress pocket as Galloway reached out his hand and gripped the door, the dagger glinting as it swayed back and forth across his chest. He continued to trot beside them, gathering himself to leap inside. The train whistle screamed like a final warning.
Galloway shoved himself halfway into the car, his head and belly on the metal floor, legs yet dangling. Rachel raised the sock to ear level. She paused, willing the pound of glass and steel to be enough, then brought it down as hard as she could on Galloway's leering face. His eyes went white. For a moment his body balanced half in and half out of the car. Then Rachel pressed her shoe heel against his forehead and shoved him earthward. Galloway tumbled into a gulley. Rachel leaned out and watched as the caboose passed where he'd fallen. She kept watching the tracks, but he did not rise. Jacob was squalling now and she gathered him into her arms.
"We're all right now," she told him. "We're all right."
There was hay on the boxcar's floor, and Rachel heaped some of it into a corner. She and Jacob lay on it, her arms around him. They were out of Kingsport now, headed south through the Smokies. They passed an occasional farmhouse, what wan light its windows shed skiffing the metal floor a moment, then gone. The rocking heartbeat of the train soon lulled the child asleep, herself as well. Rachel dreamed that she and Jacob stood in a cornfield where only a single green stalk grew. She and Jacob pulled shucks off the stalk's one ear and found not corn but a knife blade.
She woke in darkness, for a moment unsure where she was. Rachel spooned her body tighter around Jacob's and tried to fall back asleep but sleep did not come. She listened to the train passing over the rails, listened to Jacob's measured breaths. Rachel waited for the wheels to slow beneath her, and when they finally did she and Jacob got out and crossed rows of tracks, moving around stalled boxcars toward the depot. The sign above the front door said Knoxville. She went inside and checked the train schedule before asking to borrow the telephone mounted on the wall behind the counter. A collect call, she assured the depot master. She lifted the receiver to her ear and leaned toward the mouthpiece, Jacob clutching the black clothbound cord as Rachel spoke to the operator.
McDowell answered on the first ring.