“We’ll lose him altogether in this pea soup! We’ll have to chase him on foot—”
“Wait, Ferriss.” The Judge was peering ahead, fingering his gun nervously. “Watch it! Stop the car!”
The brakes shrieked. The coupé skidded to a halt. Adams jumped out, looking ahead wildly.
The car had stopped on the brink of a soft black stretch of the marsh. Adams picked up a heavy rock and lobbed it into the stuff. The rock sank out of sight immediately. The surface of the muck quivered as if it were alive.
“Quagmire.” Adams cursed again. “We’ve lost him.”
The rain bounced off them. Each man stood in a nimbus of spray, peering.
“He can’t have got far,” said Johnny.
“There he is!” cried Adams. “Stop! Stop, or we shoot!”
The fugitive was wading frantically through the knee-deep morass forty yards away.
“Mr. Shinn — Judge — shoot, or give me a gun—”
Johnny pushed the excited man aside. The Judge was looking at him curiously.
“Stop,” called Johnny. “Stop, and you won’t be hurt.”
The man pressed on in a violent splash of arms and legs.
“Why don’t you shoot?” Adams shook his fist at Johnny.
Johnny raised the 20-gauge and fired. At the roar of the gun the fugitive leaped convulsively and fell.
“You hit him, you hit him!” shrieked the Cudbury lawyer.
“I fired over his head,” said Johnny. “Stay right there!” he called.
“Scared witless,” said the Judge. “There he goes!”
The man bounded to his feet, glared about him. He had lost his suitcase, his hat. He crouched and scuttled behind a big swamp oak. By the time they reached the tree he had vanished.
They kept together, calling, occasionally firing a shot into the air. But the tramp was gone as if the bog had caught him.
Eventually they struggled back to the wagon road.
“You should have put a bullet in his leg,” Ferriss Adams was saying heatedly. “I’d have done it if I had a gun!”
“Then I’m glad you don’t, Ferriss,” said the Judge. “He won’t get away.”
“He’s got away, hasn’t he?”
“Not for long, I warrant you. If he sticks to the swamp, he’s bottled up. If he takes to the main road, he’ll be caught in a matter of minutes. Burney Hackett and the others should be along any time now. What is it, Johnny?”
Johnny touched the Judge’s elbow. “Look.”
They were back at the dead end of the wagon road. Adams’s coupé no longer stood on the brink of the bog. It was settling into the quagmire. As they watched, it stopped.
All but a foot of its top had been sucked under.
“My car,” said Ferriss Adams dazedly.
Johnny pointed to a series of deep narrow oval holes in the mud midway between the tracks of the car, ending at the edge of the bog.
“His tracks. He released the brake, put his shoulder to the rear end, and pushed the car in. He’d probably doubled back, seen the coupé, and decided he had a better chance of escape if we were forced to foot it, too. Tough luck, Mr. Adams.”
The Judge said, “I’m sorry, Ferriss. We’d better get back to the main road and wait for the other cars.”
“Give me your gun!” said the lawyer.
“No, Ferriss. We want this man alive, and pushing a car into a bog doesn’t call for the death penalty.”
“He’s a killer, Judge!”
“We don’t know that. All we know is that he was seen going around to the kitchen door of your aunt’s house some twenty minutes or so before she was murdered.”
“That proves it, doesn’t it?” snarled Adams.
“You’re a lawyer, Ferriss. You know it proves no such thing.”
“I know I’m going to get that murdering hobo dead or alive!”
“You’re wasting time,” said Johnny. “He’ll risk the main road again, now that we have no car. We’d better get moving.”
They hurried back along the wagon road in the mire, Ferriss Adams laboring ahead in white-faced silence. Johnny and the Judge did not look at each other.
Suddenly they heard a burble of voices, scuffling sounds, a man’s laugh. Adams broke into a run.
“They got him!”
They burst out into the blacktop road. Hubert Hemus’s sedan and Orville Pangman’s farm truck were blocking the road. The fugitive was down on his back at the bottom of a pile of flailing arms and legs — the big Hemus twins, Eddie Pangman, Joel Hackett, and Drakeley Scott. Forming a tight gun circle around the boys were Hubert Hemus, Constable Hackett, Orville Pangman, old Merton Isbel, and fat Peter Berry. As the three men pushed through, the pile-up dissolved and the Hemus boys hauled their quarry to his feet. They slammed him against the side of Orville Pangman’s truck.
Eddie Pangman said hoarsely, “Get your lousy hands over your head.” He rammed the muzzle of his rifle into the man’s belly. The quivering arms went up.
Tommy Hemus grinned and kicked him in the groin. He fell down with a scream, clawing at his middle. Dave Hemus picked him up and pinned him against the truck again. His legs jerked in spasms of effort to raise them.
Johnny Shinn felt something stir deep, deep inside. It was the small cold hard core of an anger he thought he had lost forever. It slowly spread to take in the old woman’s head, as if her shattered head and the fugitive’s twitching legs were part of the same violated body.
He felt the Judge’s hand on his arm and looked down with surprise. His finger was on the trigger of the shotgun and the gun was coming up to Tommy Hemus’s belt buckle.
Johnny hastily lowered the gun.
The dripping, muddy, blood-caked, gasping man was hardly recognizable as the itinerant Johnny and the Judge had passed on the road in the downpour earlier in the day. Dirty blond hair hung over his eyes; his jacket and pants were torn in a dozen places; thorns had ripped his hands and face; blood oozed from his mouth were a tooth had been kicked out. His eyes kept rolling like the eyes of a frightened dog.
“You flushed the bastard right out to us,” said Burney Hackett.
“Saw your tracks where ye turned into the ma’sh,” said burly Orville Pangman, “then heard your guns.”
“We spread out along the road and ambushed him,” panted Peter Berry. “Real excitin’.”
Old Merton Isbel said: “Scum. Dirty whore scum.”
Eddie Pangman, great red boy-hands opening and closing on his rifle: “Put the cuffs on him, Mr. Hackett!”
“Aw, Pop don’t have no cuffs,” said stocky Joel Hackett disgustedly. “Didn’t I always say you ought to get cuffs, Pop? Cop’s got to have at least one pair, anybody knows that.”
“You mind your tongue,” said Constable Hackett.
“Cops without cuffs...”
Tommy Hemus drawled: “He ain’t goin’ no place.”
Dave Hemus, sucking on a torn knuckle: “Not any more he ain’t.”
Hubert Hemus, to his sons: “Shut up.”
Drakeley Scott said nothing. The thin-shouldered boy was staring at the jerking fugitive with heat, almost with hunger.
‘Was he armed?” asked Judge Shinn.
“No,” said Constable Hackett. “I kind of wish he was.”
Ferriss Adams walked up to the man and looked him over. “Has he talked?” he asked harshly.
“Jabbered some,” said Peter Berry. “Try him, Mr. Adams.”
“You killed her, didn’t you?” said Ferriss Adams.
The man said nothing.
“Didn’t you?” shouted the lawyer. “Can’t you talk, damn you? All it needs is a yes or no!”
The eyes merely kept rolling.