“I heard that,” said the voice from the darkness. “If I wasn’t hogtied—”
“We know what you’d do,” said Chub. “How much proof do you think we need?”
“Chub, you don’t have to do any more to him!” It was Kelly, flinging his cards down and getting up. “Tom, you want water?”
“Yes.”
“Siddown, siddown,” said Chub.
“Let him lay there and bleed,” Al Knowles said.
“Nuts!” Kelly went and filled a cup and brought it to Tom. The big Georgian was tied thoroughly, wrists together, taut rope between elbow and elbow behind his back, so that his hands were immovable over his solar plexus. His knees and ankles were bound as well, although Knowles’ little idea of a short rope between ankles and throat hadn’t been used.
“Thanks, Kelly.” Tom drank greedily, Kelly holding his head. “Goes good.” He drank more. “What hit me?”
“One of the boys. ’Bout the time you said the cat was haunted.”
“Oh, yeah.” Tom rolled his head and blinked with pain.
“Any sense asking you if you blame us?”
“Kelly, does somebody else have to get killed before you guys wake up?”
“None of us figure there will be any more killin’ — now.”
The rest of the men drifted up. “He willing to talk sense?” Chub wanted to know.
Al Knowles laughed, “Hyuk! hyuk! Don’t he look dangerous now!”
Harris said suddenly, “Al, I’m gonna hafta tape your mouth with the skin off your neck.”
“Am I the kind of guy that makes up ghost stories?”
“Never have that I know of, Tom.” Harris kneeled down beside him. “Never killed anyone before, either.”
“Oh, get away from me. Get away,” said Tom tiredly.
“Get up and make us,” jeered Al.
Harris got up and backhanded him across the mouth. Al squeaked, took three steps backward and tripped over a drum of grease. “I told you,” said Harris almost plaintively. “I told you, Al.”
Tom stopped the bumble of comment. “Shut up!” he hissed. “SHUT UP!” he roared.
They shut.
“Chub,” said Tom, rapidly, evenly. “What did you say I did with that Seven?”
“Buried it in the swamp.”
“Yeh. Listen.”
“Listen at what?”
“Be quiet and listen!”
So they listened. It was another still, windless night, with a thin crescent of moon showing nothing true in the black and muffled silver landscape. The smallest whisper of surf drifted up from the beach, and from far off to the right, where the swamp was, a scandalized frog croaked protest at the manhandling of his mud-hole. But the sound that crept down, freezing their bones, came from the bluff behind their camp.
It was the unmistakable staccato of a starting engine.
“The Seven!”
“ ’At’s right, Chub,” said Tom.
“Wh-who’s crankin’ her up?”
“Are we all here?”
“All but Peebles and Dennis and Rivera,” said Tom.
“It’s Dennis’ ghost,” moaned Al.
Chub snapped, “Shut up, lamebrain.”
“She’s shifted to Diesel,” said Kelly, listening.
“She’ll be here in a minute,” said Tom. “Y’know, fellas, we can’t all be crazy, but you’re about to have a time convincin’ yourself of it.”
“You like this, doncha?”
“Some ways. Rivera used to call that machine Daisy Etta, ’cause she’s de siete in Spig. Daisy Etta, she wants her a man.”
“Tom,” said Harris, “I wish you’d stop that chatterin’. You make me nervous.”
“I got to do somethin’. I can’t run,” Tom drawled.
“We’re going to have a look,” said Chub. “If there’s nobody on that cat, we’ll turn you loose.”
“Mighty white of you. Reckon you’ll get back before she does?”
“We’ll get back. Harris, come with me. We’ll get one of the pan tractors. They can outrun a Seven. Kelly, take Al and get the other one.”
“Dennis’ machine has a flat tyre on the pan,” said Al’s quivering voice.
“Pull the pin and cut the cables, then! Git!” Kelly and Al Knowles ran off.
“Good huntin’, Chub.”
Chub went to him, bent over. “I think I’m goin’ to have to apologize to you, Tom.”
“No you ain’t. I’d a done the same. Get along now, if you think you got to. But hurry back.”
“I got to. An’ I’ll hurry back.”
Harris said, “Don’t go ’way, boy.” Tom returned the grin, and they were gone. But they didn’t hurry back. They didn’t come back at all.
It was Kelly who came pounding back, with Al Knowles on his heels, a half hour later. “Al — gimme your knife.”
He went to work on the ropes. His face was drawn.
“I could see some of it,” whispered Tom. “Chub and Harris?”
Kelly nodded. “There wasn’t nobody on the Seven like you said.” He said it as if there was nothing else in his mind, as if the most rigid self-control was keeping him from saying it over and over.
“I could see the lights,” said Tom. “A tractor angling up the hill. Pretty soon another, crossing it, lighting up the whole slope.”
“We heard it idling up there somewhere,” Kelly said. “Olive-drab paint — couldn’t see it.”
“I saw the pan tractor turn over — oh, four, five times down the hill. It stopped, lights still burning. Then something hit it and rolled it again. That sure blacked it out. What turned it over first?”
“The Seven. Hanging up there just at the brow of the bluff. Waited until Chub and Harris were about to pass, sixty, seventy feet below. Tipped over the edge and rolled down on them with her clutches out. Must’ve been going thirty miles an hour when she hit. Broadside. They never had a chance. Followed the pan as it rolled down the hill and when it stopped booted it again.”
“Want me to rub yo’ ankles?” asked Al.
“You! Get outa my sight!”
“Aw, Tom—” whimpered Al.
“Skip it, Tom,” said Kelly. “There ain’t enough of us left to carry on that way. Al, you mind your manners from here on out, hear?”
“Ah jes’ wanted to tell y’all. I knew you weren’t lyin’ ’bout Dennis, Tom, if only I’d stopped to think. I recollect when Dennis said he’d take that tractuh out… ’membah, Kelly?… He went an’ got the crank and walked around to th’ side of th’ machine and stuck it in th’ hole. It was barely in theah befo’ the startin’ engine kicked off. ‘Whadda ya know!’ he says t’me. ‘She started by herse’f! I nevah pulled that handle!’ And I said, ‘She sho’ rarin’t’ go!’ ”
“You pick a fine time to ‘recollec’ ’ something,” gritted Tom. “C’mon — let’s get out of here.”
“Where to?”
“What do you know that a Seven can’t move or get up on?”
“That’s a large order. A big rock, maybe.”
“Ain’t nothing that big around here,” said Tom.
Kelly thought a minute, then snapped his fingers. “Up on the top of my last cut with the shovel,” he said. “It’s fourteen feet if it’s an inch. I was pullin’ out small rock an’ topsoil, and Chub told me to drop back and dip out marl from a pocket there. I sumped in back of the original cut and took out a whole mess o’ marl. That left a big neck of earth sticking thirty feet or so out of the cliff. The narrowest part is only about four feet wide. If Daisy Etta tries to get us from the top, she’ll straddle the neck and hang herself. If she tries to get us from below, she can’t get traction to climb; it’s too loose and too steep.”
“And what happens if she builds herself a ramp?”
“We’ll be gone from there.”
“Let’s go.”
Al agitated for the choice of a Dumptor because of its speed, but was howled down. Tom wanted something that could not get a flat tyre and that would need something really powerful to turn it over. They took the two-cycle pan tractor with the bulldozer blade that had been Dennis’ machine and crept out into the darkness.