I hadn’t touched the five hundred. “How do I know I would get the forty-five hundred?” That didn’t sound right. I added quickly, “That is, if I have to kill him.”
“All I can give you is my word. And many men have taken my word when larger amounts are involved. They haven’t regretted it. It’s a matter of pride with me.”
Anger came from an unknown place. I stood up quickly. “What kind of fool game is this? If you want him killed, say so!”
Carson Medwell shrugged and picked up his glass. “You have an active imagination, Lawson. I want him returned to King’s Prison.”
I stood by the chair. I watched my own hand go out, touch the bills, pick them up. I could hand them to Medwell. Or crumple them and drop them. Yet, to refuse, would mean that a word from Medwell in the right place would put an end to the years of work. What harm could there be in trying to capture an escaped convict? He deserved capturing. Taking money would not imply a willingness to kill the man.
I folded the bills the long way and put them in my shirt pocket.
“He has had time to get here, barely,” Medwell said. “I want you in the woods as soon as possible.”
“Tomorrow morning,” I said. I looked him in the eye. It required an effort to bring my gaze up to his face.
“Take him back, Harry,” Medwell said. “I am armed, Lawson, and so is Harry. I shall stay inside the lodge here until this thing is over.”
My attempt at humor was shallow. “Suppose he gets me?”
“That will be unfortunate, Lawson.”
I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark. I had been there a long time.
Belle touched my back. I hadn’t heard her awaken. “What is it, Ben? What’s the matter?”
“Can’t sleep,” I said.
“I could heat some milk,” she said uncertainly.
“Don’t bother. Go to sleep.”
I reached out in the darkness, found the shirt pocket, took the bills out. They felt cold. I dressed quickly.
Turning on the light over the old desk, I sat down and put the money in front of me. The pen scratched as I wrote:
“Dear Mr. Medwell,
I have thought it over and I can’t do what you ask. I think you must go ahead if you want to and tell them about me. I think you want that man killed and you know if you told me to do it I would not be able to because...”
The point caught in a rough spot on the paper and sprayed a thin line of tiny blots. I heard Belle getting out of bed. I crumpled the note and tucked the money back in the shirt pocket.
She stood, barefooted, in the bedroom doorway, her toes pulled up off the cold boards. “Don’t you want to tell me?” she said.
I made myself smile. I dipped my fingers into the pocket and got one bill loose from the others. I held it out to her. “Here. This was a secret. I’ve been saving it to get you something. You better spend it.”
She looked solemnly at the bill, doubt in her eyes, and reached out her hand and took it. “Goodness!” she said. I saw the doubt slowly go away. She came over and kissed me. “It’s a lot of money, Ben.”
“It was a tip from — from Ludwigs.”
“Last year? After he got the bear?”
“After he got the bear.” I stood up and stretched. “Now I can sleep. I’ve got to go out early. Medwell hired me.”
“For how long?”
“Until he gets tired of walking across his own land.”
I didn’t sleep. I lay and felt the warmth that came from her. At three I caught the clock before the alarm sounded. She was breathing deeply. I took the three-ought-three with the four-power scope. In the shoulder bag I put dried beef, army rations, compass, matches and my Belgian .38 automatic with three extra clips. I took three extra clips for the rifle, too. Moccasins, belt knife, heavy brown jacket, trousers and dark cap.
I shivered in the pre-dawn chill. By six o’clock the thin edge of a watery sun began to show. By then I was on Medwell’s property with nothing between me and the Canadian border but line after line of mountains, woods that had been too rugged to be timbered off. If Medwell was right, Fournier was either north of me, working his way south, or he had already crossed onto Medwell’s property. I began to range from west to east across the northern portion of the tract, keeping to the terrain that would show up sign the quickest. Mist clung to the low places, with the sun beginning to eat at it. I picked up mud and killed the gleam of the barrel of the three-ought-three.
I felt twice as tall as a man and four times as strong. I had been a fool to worry. This was just another job. I moved with the greatest care, finding animal track, keeping to cover when I could, moving fast in open spots.
It must have been about nine when I pulled back and held my breath as a sow bear, her sides slatted by the long winter, ambled across a clearing with her two cubs. One whiff of me and she’d wheel and charge. They went off into the brush and I waited twenty minutes before continuing.
At noon I crawled into a thicket and ate, burying the traces as I had after the cold breakfast. At three o’clock in the afternoon I found man track. It was in damp leaf mold. He took big strides, toes turned in a bit, wore store shoes. I ranged back a few yards over the trail he’d made, examined the leaf bruises on the pale green stuff that was beginning to poke up from the forest floor. It could have been a day old, I guessed. I followed the trail until I found a place where he had to work his way through close brush. On a broken twig I found two gray cotton threads. I went over the brush carefully, but it wasn’t until I imitated how a man would have to go through there that I found what I wanted. The normal thing would be to lift a rifle high in your right hand and edge through sideways. I found a dark stain on the edge of a green bud over my head. When I pulled it down and touched my tongue to it I tasted gun oil. Fournier had a rifle.
This was tracking in a new, more exciting way.
I decided to follow his trail with as much speed as I could manage without getting winded. What to do when I came up on him wasn’t clear. I was probably two miles from the north end of the small lake.
Fournier laid his trail across the easiest, fastest part of the terrain, the way a trained woodsman will. I was glad that he was making no effort to cover track. I had a hunch that he would have made it almost impossible to unravel. With the start he had, it was likely that he had been holed up in sight of the lodge waiting for a shot at Medwell.
Absorption in the problem at hand made me careless. Also, it was good to stop thinking of why I was doing this, to think only of trotting along the clear track he had left.
The stream came in from the right, bubbling white over the stones, cold and black in the eddies. It was the inlet to the small lake. I saw where his toe had dug into the far bank. The western side of the lake was a sheer rock wall, rising from the north and south ends to a peak a good eighty feet high a bit south of the midpoint, fading off to the west in a steep wooded slope. I stood in the open listening to the sound of the stream. Fournier would know that the highest crest of the wall would give him a vantage point.
A man can be empty-headed. I stood there like a fool, picking out stepping stones, thinking of circling and coming up close enough to rush him...
I stepped from stone to stone. There was a pulse of air by my cheek, a slapping sound against one of the stones, a screech of ricochet off into the air. As I dived headlong for the brush the sound of the distant shot punctuated the scream of the ricochet. A second slug chunked into the ground close by and I scrambled around a corner of rock, thudding my rifle against it in my haste. From the interval between the thud of the slug and the sound of the shot I guessed that he was shooting at better than three hundred yards. Fournier was a shot. No mistake about that. There had been sympathy in my mind for him. Medwell had put both of us in an awkward situation. I wasn’t sorry for him any longer. I felt it all, from the incredulous feeling at the nearness of death to the hard anger that followed.