He wondered where she got her wisdom. From hard-won experience of her own? Or had it been born in her blood, as cats can see in the dark and avoid pitfalls?
"Couldn't it mean that they've forgotten?"
She gave him another capsule of her bitter 'wisdom, sugared with a hard, wearied smile.
"The police? They never forget, lovey. It's we who will have to. If we want to live at all."
He brought in three papers the next time. Three successive ones, each a day apart, but that had come in all together. They divided them up, went to work separately, hastily ruffling them over page by page, in search of what they were after.
He turned his head sharply, looked at her half frightened. "It's stopped! There's not a word about it any more."
"Nor in these either." She nodded with sage foreboding. "Now the real danger is beginning. Now it's under way."
He flung the sheets explosively aside, rose in instant readiness, so much under her guidance had he fallen in these things. "Shall we go?"
She considered, made their decision. "We'll wait for one more newspaper. We can give ourselves that much leeway. They may already know who, but I doubt that they still know where."
Another wait. Three days more this time. Then the next one came. Again nothing. Dead silence. Brooding silence, it almost seemed to him, as they pored over it together.
This time they just looked at one another. It was she who rose at last, put hands to the shoulders of her cream satin dressing robe to take it off. Coolly, unhurriedly, but purposefully.
"Now's the time to go," she said quietly. "They're on to us."
He was still baffled, even this late, at the almost sixth sense she seemed to have developed. It frightened him. He knew, at least, it was something he would never attain.
"I'll begin to pack," she said. "Don't go out any more. Stay up here where you are until we're ready."
He shuddered involuntarily. He sat on there, watching her, following her movements with his eyes as she moved about. It was like--observing an animated divining rod, that walked and talked like a woman.
"You went about it wrong," she remarked presently. "It's too late to mend now, but you may have even hastened it, for all we know. Singling out just the Mobile papers each time. Word of things like that can travel more swiftly than you know."
"But how else--?" he faltered.
"Each time you bought one, you should have bought one from some other place at the same time, even if you discarded it immediately afterward. In that way you divide suspicion."
She went on into the next room.
Even that there was a wrong and a right way to go about, he reflected helplessly. Ah, the wisdom of the lawless.
She came back to the door for a moment, pausing in midpacking.
"Where shall it be now? Where shall we go from here?"
He looked at her, haunted. He couldn't answer that.
56
They came to a halt in Pensacola, at last, for a little while, to catch their breaths. They had now followed the great, slow, curve the Gulf Coast makes as far as they could go along it, heading eastward, always eastward. By fits and starts, by frightened spurts and equally frightened stops, some long, some short, they'd followed their destiny blindly. New Orleans, then Biloxi, then Mobile, then Pensacola. With many a little hidden-away place in between.
Now Pensacola. They couldn't go any farther than that, along their self-appointed trajectory, without leaving the littoral behind, and for some reason or other, probably fear of the unknown, they clung to the familiar coastline. From there the curve dropped sharply away, past the huddle of tin-roofed shacks that was Tampa, on down to the strange, other-language foreignness of Havana. And that would have meant cutting themselves off completely, exile irrevocable beyond power to return. (Returning ships were inspected, and they had no documents.) Nor did they want to cut inland and make for Atlanta, the next obvious step. She was afraid, for reasons of her own, of the North, and though that was not the North, it was a step toward it.
So, Pensacola. They took a house again in Pensacola. Not for grandeur now, not for style, not to feel "really" married, but for the sake of simple, elementary safety.
"They spot you much easier in a hotel," she whispered, in their rain-beaten, one-night hotel. "They nose into your business quicker. People come and go more, all around you, carrying tales away with them and spreading them all around."
He nodded, bending to peer from under the lowered window shade, then starting back as a flash of lightning limned it intolerably bright.
They took the most remote, hidden, inconspicuous house they could find, on a drowsing, tree-lined street well out from the center of town. Other houses not too near, neighbors not too many; they put heavy lace curtains in the windows, to be safer still from prying eyes. They engaged a woman out of sheer compulsion, but pared her presence to a minimum; only three days a week, and she must be gone by six, not sleep under their roof. They spoke guardedly in front of her, or not at all.
They were going to be very discreet, they were going to be very prudent this time.
The first week or two, every time Bonny came or went from the house in daylight, she held her parasol tipped low as she stepped to or from the carriage, so that it shielded her face. And he, without that advantage of concealment, kept his head down all he could. So that, almost, he always seemed to be looking for something along the ground each time he entered or left.
And when a neighbor came to offer a courtesy call, as the custom was, laden with homemade jellies and the like, Bonny held her fast at the door, and made voluble explanations that they were not settled yet and the house was not in order, as an excuse for not asking her in.
The woman went away, with affronted mien and taking her gifts back with her unpresented, and when next they sighted her on the walk she made no salutation and looked the other way.
"You should not have done that," he cautioned, stepping out from where he had listened, as the frustrated visitor departed. "That looks even more suspicious, to be so skittish."
"There was no other way," she said. "If I had once admitted her, then others would have come, and I would have been expected to return their calls, and there would have been no end to it."
After that once, no others came.
"They probably think we live together," she told him, once, jeeringly. "I always leave my left glove off, now, every time I go out, and hold my hand up high, to the parasol-stick, so that they cannot fail to see the wedding hand." And punctuated it: "The filthy sows!"
Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had come to Pensacola. Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had taken a house in Pensacola. Mr. and Mrs. Rogers-- from nowhere. On the way to--no one knows.
57
This time he did not tell her; she guessed it by his face. She saw him standing there by the window, staring out at nothing, gnawing at his lip. And when she spoke to him, said something to him, his answer, instead of being in kind, was to turn away, thrust hands in pockets, and begin to pace the room on a long, straight course, up and down.
She understood him so well by now, she knew it could be nothing but the thing it was.
She nodded finally, after watching him closely for some moments. "Again ?" she said cryptically.
"Again," he answered, and came to a halt, and flung himself into a chair.
She flung from her irritably a stocking she had been donning upward over her arm in search of rents. "Why is it always that way with us?" she complained. "We no sooner can turn around and draw our breaths, than it's gone again, and the whole thing starts over!"
"It goes, with anyone," he said sombrely. "It's the one thing you can't hold and yet use at the same time."