“No more wild tales, Freddie,” Schneider said.
“Good heavens, he’s out of his mind,” the old woman said. “Delirium tremens is a terrible thing.”
“Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,” I said and turned towards the car. Peter Schneider followed close behind me.
I passed through the open iron gate outside of which the green coupe was parked with the engine running. The woman was still standing watching us. He couldn’t shoot me in front of a witness. Or could he? I took the chance.
I slammed the iron gate hard against him as he passed through and he staggered back with a cry.
“Goodness gracious,” the woman shrieked, “he’s getting away again.”
I ran towards the road and around the corner of the barn. The road was no good to me; he had a car. Across the road were willow-trees and beyond that an open pasture. I heard running feet behind me. I put the trees between me and Peter, and headed straight across the pasture.
He came across the pasture fifty feet behind me, but I didn’t look back. I had to get away from him before we were out of sight and earshot of the house, or he would be free to shoot me. There was a deep woods on the other side of the pasture, its half-turned leaves becoming gorgeous in the dawn. I tried to lengthen my stride, but tiredness hung around my thighs like iron hoops.
A shotgun roared from the woods and a rabbit came running out into the pasture towards me dragging a leg. It saw me and moved floppily aside like an old hat in a wind. Then it fell on its side and kicked once.
I ran towards it and picked it up and stood holding it by the ears with the blood dripping from it. Peter came up beside me with his chest heaving. “You can’t shoot me here, you bastard,” I said. “The man that shot the rabbit is coming.”
There were cracklings and rustlings among the trees and two men came out of the woods with shotguns under their arms. They saw me holding the rabbit and broke into a trot. They were young men in bright plaid shirts with smiling faces. One of them held out his hand for the rabbit and I gave it to him.
“Will one of you fellows lend me his shotgun for one shot?” I said. “Just to shoot at a tree. I haven’t shot a gun for–”
Peter Schneider broke in, “Don’t give him a gun. This man is an escaped murderer.”
The young men stood and watched us with blank, smiling faces. One of them took a card out of an inside pocket and handed it to me. It was an old dirty card bearing print which said:
“John Maldon,
Speech Institute, Arbana.
Please excuse me. I am a deaf-mute.”
I found a pencil in my pocket and wrote on the back of the card: “I’ll give you $40 for your shotgun and some shells. Now.”
I took two twenties out of my wallet and handed the card and the bills to the young man. He read what I had written and looked at me in smiling surprise. Then he turned to the other hunter and talked to him on his fingers. The other man’s fingers began to talk.
The first young man smiled more intensely than ever and nodded and handed me his gun. It was a single-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun and I broke it to make sure it was loaded. It was. The young man handed me a cardboard box of shells.
I felt very good. A shotgun can blow a man’s head off at close quarters. Peter had begun to move away. I held the gun at the hip so that it pointed at him and said:
“Stand still, Schneider.”
He edged behind the two deaf-mutes and, using them for cover, ran for the woods. I stepped around them, brought the gun to my shoulder, and fired quickly. Too quickly. He plunged into the woods and disappeared, and I heard his receding footsteps crackling in the underbrush.
The young men stared at me aghast and ran away across the pasture making little bleating noises.
I broke the gun and reloaded and emptied the shells into my pocket. Then I ran into the woods after Peter. It wasn’t a wise thing to do, but I was very eager to kill him. He had hunted me all night and now I was hunting him.
It was a maple-woods, probably sugar-maple, and well thinned out. I ran on a thin carpet of fallen leaves, sallow and brown and blond and blood-red, between trunks like black pillars. Afar ahead of me I could hear the running feet, and I caught a glimpse of him between the trees. I lost sight of him again and kept on running. The shotgun hampered me but I ran hard. I was so angry I forgot to be tired.
I leaped a stream and came to a rail fence with open fields rolling beyond it. The fields were empty. There was a sound along the fence a hundred feet away from me and I turned and fired and reloaded on my knees behind the fence. There was a shot and a bullet spatted into a tree behind my head. He broke from cover and ran across the field in front of me and disappeared behind a little hill.
I climbed the fence and walked up the hill with the gun at my shoulder. From the hilltop I saw him running across dry grass in a shallow valley, dragging a leg like the rabbit. On the next hillside there was a tumbledown barn beside the grass-grown foundations of a house that had probably been razed by fire. He was running uncertainly towards the barn.
There was a splash of bright new blood on a white boulder halfway down the hill. It went to my head and I felt like laughing out loud. I had winged him.
He fell once before he reached the old barn, and got up and dragged himself in through the gaping door. A thin, dribbling trail of blood led down the hill from the boulder where the blood-splash glistened, and I followed it across the field.
I walked towards the barn with the gun at my shoulder, expecting a pistol shot. There was none. There was a low moaning from inside the dark barn, and then silence.
I tiptoed to the door and looked inside under floating cobwebs. I could see nothing but old chaff on a floor of loose, rotting boards.
I forgot I wasn’t hunting rabbits and stepped across the rotting doorsill. A noose came over my head from the side and jerked me off my feet. My gun went off with a roar that shook the barn and killed nobody.
The noose drew tighter and burned my neck and I could feel congested blood swelling my face. I was flat on my face and he had one foot between my shoulder blades. It felt as if he was leaning back on the rope around my neck. I tried to get onto my hands and knees.
“Don’t struggle, Dr. Branch. It will do no good and will only force me to shoot you.”
I turned my head sideways and tried to see him but he drew the rope tighter. My eyeballs threatened to burst and the light seemed tinged with red. I heard a click like a box closing or opening and he kneeled on my back holding the rope tight. He pushed up the sleeve on my right arm and I felt a prick near the elbow. I tried to struggle and he drew the rope tighter. Swarming blackness dipped down at my consciousness and I relaxed. He loosened the rope a little and the black cloud receded.
“What a child you are, Dr. Branch. You Americans know nothing of war. I cut my arm and left a little trail of blood for you, and you followed it as a donkey follows a carrot. You must fancy yourself as a hunter, Dr. Branch.”
My right arm felt numb and my head began to go around in stately circles, humming like a distant motor.
“Relax, Dr. Branch.” His voice came from the other end of a dark tunnel. “You’ll go to sleep very shortly. Then I shall have the pleasure of hanging you.”
The rope was looser now and I tried for the last time to get my knees under me. I couldn’t raise my head. The black cloud had come back and rested on my head and it was as heavy as tons of coal.
Schneider’s voice droned on like a doctor’s soothing a patient going under ether, “Hanging is a fitting end for a murderer, is it not? Self-slaughter. Homicide and suicide. No one will guess that you did not hang yourself. In fact, you will hang yourself. I shall make that possible for you, Dr. Branch.