“What time is it?”
“Almost five. That’s a three-mile walk to the pond, and the big ones bite early.”
They hiked up Shinn Road in the dawn with their fishing gear and a camping outfit, the Judge insisting they make a day of it. Or as much of a day as the threatening skies would allow.
“When a man gets to be as old as I am,” observed the Judge, “half a day is better than none.”
Each carried a gun, taken from a locked commode drawer in the Judge’s bedroom, where the weapons lay wrapped in oily rags among boxes of ammunition. The old jurist frowned on hunting for sport; he had his property severely posted to protect the pheasant and deer. But he considered chuck, rabbit, and such pests fair game. “When the fishing runs out we’ll go after some. They’re thick up around there. Come down into the valley and play hob with the farms. Maybe we’ll get a bead on some fox. They’ve done a lot of damage this year.” He had issued to Johnny a 20-gauge double for the rabbits, reserving to himself what he called his “varmint rifle.” It was a .22 caliber handloader designed to play a little hob of its own, the Judge said ferociously, with the damn woodchucks. And he sighed, wishing old Pokey were trotting along to heel. Pocahontas had been the Judge’s last hunting dog, a red setter bitch whose tenderly framed photograph hung on his study wall. Johnny had seen her grave in the woods behind the garage.
“Pokey and I had some fine times in the woods,” Judge Shinn said happily.
“Hunting the butterflies, no doubt,” grinned Johnny.
The Judge flushed and mumbled something about all that foolishness being dead and buried.
So the day began peacefully, nothing marring their pleasure but the closing sky. They netted some peepers for live bait and went out in the old flatbottomed boat the Judge had had carted up to the pond the week before, and they fished for largemouthed bass and were successful beyond their dreams. Then they hauled the boat up on shore and did some steel-rod casting for pickerel, and they caught not only pickerel in plenty but a couple of husky trout, at which the Judge declared gleefully the coming of the millennium, for Peepers Pond had been considered fished out of trout, he said, for years.
“Did I croak some twaddle yesterday about premonitions?” he chortled. “False prophet!”
Then they made camp on the edge of the pond, broiled their trout and swallowed the delectable flesh along with their pond-cooled beer and Millie Pangman’s oatmeal bread, and Johnny brewed he-man’s coffee while the Judge cut open the ambrosial currant pie Aunt Fanny Adams had sent over by little Cynthia Hackett the evening before; and they stuffed themselves and were in heaven.
Whereupon the Judge said drowsily, “Don’t feel a bit like snuffing out life. Hang the chucks,” and he spread his poncho and dropped off like a small boy after a picnic.
So Johnny lay down and did likewise, hoping this time he wouldn’t dream the one about the ten thousand men in yellow blanket-uniforms all shooting at him with the Russian guns in their yellow hands.
And that was how the rain caught them, two innocents fast asleep and soaked to the skin before they could scramble to their feet.
“I’m running true to form,” gasped Johnny. “Did I ever tell you I’m a jinx?”
It was a few seconds past two o’clock by the Judge’s watch, and they huddled under a big beech peering at the sky and trying to determine its long range intentions. The woods about the pond crackled and trembled under lightning bolts; one struck not a hundred feet away.
“Rather be drowned on the road than electrocuted under a tree,” shouted the Judge. “Let’s get out of here!”
They turned the boat over, hastily gathered their gear, and ran for the road.
They pushed against a curtain of water, squishing along heads down at a steady pace. At two-thirty by the Judge’s watch they were half a mile from the crest of Holy Hill.
“We’re not doing bad!” roared the old man. “We’ve come about halfway. How d’ye feel, Johnny?”
“Reminiscent!” said Johnny. He never wanted to see another fish. “Isn’t there any traffic on this road?”
“Let us pray!”
“Keep your weather eye peeled for anything on wheels. A scooter would look good just now!”
Five minutes later a figure swam into view on the opposite side of the road, heading in the direction from which they had come and leaning into the rain.
“Hi, there!” yelled Johnny. “Enjoying the swim?”
The man leaped like a deer. For a moment he glared in their direction, the width of the road between them. They saw a medium-sized man of spare build with a face dark gray as the skies, a stubble of light beard, and two timid, burning eyes. The rain had fluted the brim of his odd green hat and was coursing down his face in rivers; patched black pants plastered his shanks and the light tweed jacket with its leather elbow patches hung on his body like a wet paper sack. He carried a small black suitcase, the size of an overnight bag, made of some cheap material which was dissolving at the seams — a rope held it together... For a moment only; then, in a lightning flash, water squirting out of his shapeless shoes, the man ran.
Soaked as they were, Johnny and the Judge stared up the road after the running man.
“Wonder who he is,” said the Judge. “Stranger around here.”
“Never look a stranger in the mouth,” said Johnny.
But the Judge kept staring.
“Foreigner, I’d say,” shrugged Johnny. “Or of recent foreign origin. He never got that green velour hat in the U.S.A.”
“Probably some itinerant heading for Cudbury and a mill job. Why do you suppose he ran like that, Johnny?”
“Sudden memories of the old country and the People’s Police, no doubt. Two armed men.”
“Good Lord!” The Judge shifted his rifle self-consciously. “I hope the poor devil gets a lift.”
“Hope for yourself, Judge. And while you’re at it, put in a good word for me!”
A minute or so later a gray shabby sedan bore down on them from behind, shedding water like a motorboat. They turned and shouted, but it was going over forty miles an hour and before they could half open their mouths it was past them and out of sight over the hill. They stood in the slap of its wake, dejected.
“That was Burney Hackett’s car,” growled the Judge. “Darn his chinless hide! He never even saw us.”
“Courage, your honor. Only a mile or so more to go.”
“We could stop in at Hosey Lemmon’s shack,” said the Judge doubtfully. “It’s at the top of the hill there, in the woods off the road.”
“No, thanks, I filled my quota of filthy shacks long ago. I’ll settle for your house and a clean towel.”
As they reached the top of Holy Hill, the Judge exclaimed, “There’s old Lemmon now, footing it for home.”
“Another pioneer,” grumbled Johnny. “Doesn’t he have a car, or a buggy, or a tricycle, either?”
“Hosey? Heavens, no.” Judge Shinn frowned. “What’s he doing back up here? He’s hired out to the Scotts.”
“Prefers high ground, of course!”
The Judge bellowed at the white-bearded hermit, but if Lemmon heard the hail he paid no attention to it. He disappeared in his hut, a ramshackle cabin with a torn tar-paper roof and a rusty stovepipe for a chimney.
Nothing human or mechanical passed them again. They fell into the Judge’s house at three o’clock like shipwrecked sailors on a providential beach, stripped and showered and got into clean dry clothes as if the devil were after them; and at three-fifteen, just as they were sitting down in the Judge’s living room with a glass of brown comfort and rags to clean the guns, the phone rang twice and the Judge sighed and said, “Now I don’t consider that neighborly,” and he answered the phone and Burney Hackett’s nasal voice, more nasal and less lucid than the Judge had ever heard it, announced with total unbelief that he had just walked over to the Adams house and found Aunt Fanny Adams stretched out on the floor of her paintin’ room deader than a shucked corn.