“Now, Lieutenant,” said Rawlins. “You shouldn’t speak of the boys like that, even in sport. A lot of these boys have never been out like this before.”
“None of them have.”
I said: “I’ve got one of them following me around like he was a pet poodle. The Ardella boy. I can’t turn around without bumping into him.”
Ward said: “A good kid.”
Captain Rawlins said: “If you feel up to it, Mr. Bryant, I’d like to have you drop your regular work and look into this for us. This has me worried. I fear the boys aren’t safe with things as they are.”
“It might be better if I worked at it slow and easy,” I said. “Apparently we’re watched here. If I go about things as though nothing out of the way has happened, I think I may have better luck.”
He thought that over and admitted I might be right and told me to work it out any way I wanted. Ward and I left together — our cabins were side by side, with Lieutenant Comiskey’s cabin just on the other side of his — and when we got to his door he stopped and said: “Got a gun, Bryant?”
I said I hadn’t.
He told me to wait a second and went in the cabin, then came back with a Colt .45 automatic, that looked as big as a house. He handed me this and a box of shells and said: “I’d carry it for a while. That bird that smacked you might come back. You know enough not to start anything if he’s got the drop on you, don’t you?”
“You forget I was brought up in this country,” I said. “They still settle things with guns around here — that is, the old-timers do. I won’t take any chances.”
“I wouldn’t,” he said, scratching one of his heavy jowls. “I’ve had a funny hunch about this place ever since we brought the boys in here. There’s something wrong here.”
I asked: “Where’s Comiskey tonight?”
“He went into town after the mail and some supplies with one of the trucks and half a dozen of the boys. He’ll be back any time, now.”
It was just then that we heard the boys shouting from down the road and both Ward and I turned and ran for the sound. From their voices they sounded as though they needed help.
Ward’s flash picked them out when we were still a hundred yards away. There were three of them. Two of them were running and the other was just picking himself up after a fall. Just as we saw this a shot banged out in the wood, right above them, and the boy who’d just got to his feet spun and went down again.
I said to Ward: “Get that light off them, Lieutenant! Fast! That kid took a slug.”
We got to the two boys who were still on their feet and I said: “Keep going, guys. Don’t stop until you get to camp.”
The one in front stopped and panted: “The truck! The truck! It’s off the road a couple of miles down. They’re hurt — all of them.”
“What about Lieutenant Comiskey?” snapped Ward.
“He... he’s dead,” the boy managed to say.
I said: “When you get to camp find Captain Rawlins. Tell him about this. Tell him to get a truck and get it down there and get them back to camp. Ward, take care of the kid down here, will you?”
I started up through the brush and heard him say: “Hey wait, Bryant! Not in the dark!”
I didn’t like the idea myself because I didn’t know just what I might run into, but I figured I’d have as good a chance that way as the other fellow would.
It was easy enough to see just what was happening — the truck had been run off the road — and somebody on a horse had followed the three kids up the road, keeping above them, and had cut loose with his gun at the boy our light had spotted for him. Ward and the two boys and I had been making a lot of noise talking and the gunman might have ridden away. I didn’t know, but I thought I could go through that underbrush as quietly as a horse could — and I might get lucky.
I did just that. I wasn’t over a hundred feet away from the road when I heard a snorting sound just ahead and to the right. I latched the safety off the automatic and went that way, trying to keep from making a sound — and then the horse snorted again. After that I heard somebody mutter angrily: “Hold still!”
It didn’t sound as though it came from more than twenty feet ahead, but I was wrong on that. All of a sudden the brush started to crack and I heard a horse going away from there in a hurry.
I ran just as fast as I could in the direction of the sound. The trees thinned out a little and I got a hazy glimpse of a man on a horse and I emptied my gun that way. It was too dark to see anything but the line of the barrel and I didn’t think there was any chance of hitting anything but it seemed to be worth a try.
I heard Ward shout, from the road, and I called back: “I’ll be right there. He ran away.”
Ward had the boy’s belt off and was using it for a tourniquet. The boy had taken the slug through the fleshy part of his leg and it hadn’t touched the bone but had cut the big artery there. The kid was perfectly conscious and was leaning up on his elbows and watching Ward work.
I said: “He got away. I just got a look at a man on a horse.”
“You hit him?” asked the boy.
I said I didn’t think so but that I certainly hoped I had. And then the boy told us just how much he hoped so too — and he used more language than I ever heard in all my life, even after three years on a professional football team.
He said, when he got that out of his system: “They worked it dirty on us. Jonesy was driving and the looie and a guy named Morri were on the front seat with him. Me and Harper and Cort were in the back. We was looking over Jonesy’s shoulder — you know — just standing up and hanging onto the seat back and looking at the road. We was hungry, see, and wanted to get back before the chef closed up the cookhouse. The looie said he’d see we all fed. So we see where a piece of the road has come down, on the upper side, and Jonesy pulls as far over to the lower side as he can and starts to go by in low. There was room. Then the bank just caves and down we go. I’ll bet that truck tipped over sideways twenty times or more before we hit bottom.”
I looked at Ward and he looked at me. The boy knew what we were thinking, because he added: “Yeah! That’s where it was. Right at that place where the road runs up and is shelved into the side of the hill. Where it’s steep going down to the creek.”
That made it deliberate murder and nothing else. And mass murder. The road was a hundred feet or more above the creek at the place the boy was speaking of, and it was almost straight down. If the road had been undermined there the truck was sure to go down — and with it the men who were riding it. And with a heavy truck, going over and over like that, it was more than likely that everybody in the truck would be killed.
The boy got the idea all right, because he said: “Me and Harper and Cort got jarred loose on the first roll and sort of thrown to the back. Then we got pitched out. We went down and looked and Lieutenant Comiskey was dead. We got Jonesy out and put him by the truck but the steering wheel had shoved his chest in bad. He couldn’t talk.”
Ward asked: “What about the other boy? Morri?”
The boy looked sick and it wasn’t alone from the bullet through his leg. He said: “He — the truck’s on him yet. We tried to pry it off, but it just sort of kept settling more. So we went to get help.”
Then we heard another truck come pounding down the road and it pulled up with the lights on us. Captain Rawlins came piling out and ran to us and said: “How bad is he hit?”
“Through the leg,” Ward said.
Rawlins was right in action. He snapped: “All right! Two of you men get that stretcher out of the back of the truck. Carry him to the cook shack — the cook knows some first aid.”