But the boat wasn’t there.
So Tanner hadn’t hung around after he killed Harris. He had gone directly into the jungle and set up the deadfall, knowing that Ramsay would come along the path sooner or later. Then he had hauled off the boat and hidden it. Where? God, it could be in any little setback in the thicket. It would take him hours to find it!
And Tanner was probably somewhere in the thickets too. Where? How near? He looked at the.22’s cylinder. No, he thought, and he quickly broke open the pistol.
One.22 long rifle cartridge. One. Because that was all Harris had needed, knowing that if he missed with the first one a second slug of that caliber wouldn’t do him any good.
“Ramsay!”
The gut-grabbing bellow reacted on him like a bomb. He jumped and shrank into the lofty tules, trying to see everywhere at once.
“Goan kill yuh, taxi boy! Goan feed you to the gators!”
Then Tanner laughed — a high, maniacal laugh that got a short-winged cooter bird all asquawk.
Ramsay crawled into the reeds, the echo of the savage laugh ringing in his ears. He realized that for the first time in years he was at the edge of a complete and violent loss of temper. Tanner had killed a good man, one of the few really good men Ramsay had known. And now Tanner was playing games with Ramsay’s life.
In an odd way he was almost glad that the boat was gone. Now he couldn’t run for help. For the first time in his life, out of all the false beginnings and phony endings, he was going to have to stick to one thing and see it through.
He snaked through the tules, under the pindowns and around the gargoyle cypress knees — then stopped in consternation when he suddenly found himself face to face with a big bull gator drowsing on a fallen tupelo. The huge saurian started to unhinge its ponderous jaws with a wet hiss, and Ramsay beat a hasty detour.
The marsh dust was balling in the air, covering him with a fine powder, turning to mud where his clothes were wet. The sun was straight up and hell hot, but the jungle was looming now, and he plunged through the last of the reed and gained the mucky bank.
Here at its outer edge, the jungle was thickly grown with cocoplum, bay and willow shoots interlaced with bamboo. The thorny vines tore his shirt, entangled his feet, snatched at his pants.
Sweating a pint a minute, he smashed through to a place where the ground was still marshy but the island more open. Dense laurel bushes crowded him, and the gums and bay trees and swamp pines rose higher, their branches spreading overhead.
Stopping to listen, he thought he heard Tanner following the run of the creek. But it might have been anything from a gator to an otter.
He crept along the path that led to the downstream bog at the foot of the trapline, looking right and left. He actually didn’t have any plan in mind. He was simply keeping on the move.
He came to an abrupt stop, staring at a length of grapevine across the path. It was partially concealed with dead leaves, as if a breeze had banked them there. Crouching down he pawed aside the laurels on one side of the run.
A six-foot sapling was cocked back to the ground and held in place by a forked branch. The end of the grapevine was tied to one tine of the fork. A hunting knife, blade up, was lashed to the tip of the taut sapling. A spring trap.
He triggered the vine with an outstretched foot. The fork flew out and the sapling sprang at the path with a swish, the steel blade describing a flashing arc. Ramsay yanked the knife free, looked around, and let out a sharp, painful cry — “Aagh!”
Dodging into the sheltering laurels, he dropped to his knees. His damp hand gripped on the butt of the.22 as he waited. He felt like a guitar after a quadrille solo, beat and trembly.
Some unseen limpkins moaned about his cry for a little while. Then they shut up and the silence picked up again, and there was nothing but the usual sing of the attacking mosquitoes.
Five minutes... ten minutes...
A redheaded pilcated woodpecker banked among the trees in its peculiar up-and-down flight pattern. Ramsay watched it go. Had it been flushed out? His thumb stretched for the.22’s hammer.
“Haw!” Tanner’s laugh exploded in the jungle.
“Smart bastard, ain’t you? Figgered to bushwhack old Coz, did you? Figgered I’d thunk I got you and would come booming along to see the body. But you ort a left my knife on that titi!” Tanner let out a crazy laugh, and a chill zagged up Ramsay’s spine.
“Now I’m goan show you real bushwhacking, boy! I’m coming at you, hear? But you won’t see me!”
He was now certain that Tanner had a gun — else he wouldn’t have risked wasting his knife on the spring trap. And Ramsay didn’t dare try to match the.22 against a real firearm. Conscious of his danger, he scrambled hastily to his feet and took off into the jungle.
He didn’t flee in absolute terror this time. He ran with an idea forming in his mind. Two could play at traps...
The jungle opened and he ran panting into the sawgrass. Four wild turkeys, flushed out of hiding, raced like streaks through the grass and palmetto and took flight, thrashing the air with powerful wings. Ramsay dodged in among a tall, lacy stand of Caribbean pines and cut back toward the creek and the pindown thicket again.
He was laying a track that a blind man couldn’t miss.
Nearing the pindowns, he turned south and started forcing a path through the devilclub and catclaws until he reached a little soggy leaf-covered patch of earth. The number two downstream trap was under those leaves.
With Tanner’s knife he cut down the telltale bait dangling from a gum tree, and pitched it into a witch hobble. Then he stepped over the concealed trap and pushed deeper into the devilclub.
Not three minutes later a piercing shriek all but split his eardrums, and all manner of little creatures went scurrying in the sky with a great beating of crimson wings. Ramsay stopped short with a tight grin. A moment later he slipped quietly back along the path.
He spotted Tanner from some distance away. The killer was thrashing around in the damp leaves like a wounded cougar, wearing the steel trap on his right foot. Suddenly he wheeled over, belly to the ground, and his eyes glared insanely at Ramsay.
He snatched for something by his side, and Ramsay piled sideways into the thicket as Tanner whacked out a shot.
That was that. He had a 30 carbine, and Ramsay didn’t stand a chance of getting close enough to put the.22 to use. He pulled back in the bush, wondering what to do next.
Tanner, evidently, knew just what to do. He knew he didn’t have a prayer of forcing down those powerful springs on the trap by hand, so he disentangled the drag hook and picked it up along with the connecting chain, and started hobbling painfully after Ramsay.
Ramsay understood Tanner’s desperate play. The killer was going to go back to the camp and find Harris’ jackscrew which would loosen the steel jaws on the trap. Which meant that Ramsay would have to get to the camp first and pocket the jackscrew.
The trouble was, he didn’t know where Harris kept it. It would probably cost him precious minutes trying to find the damn thing among all the patrolman’s gear. And all Tanner needed with that carbine was one clear shot.
Then he remembered there was one other kind of trap that he had completely overlooked...
He started laying a fresh trail back to camp, making it comparatively easy for Tanner to follow him. Reaching the marshy thicket at a point where the godawful pin-downs pushed far over the spongy bank of the island, he hacked a sizeable path through the tules and hoop bushes with the knife. The oozy marl was only ankle deep.
He paused, listening to Tanner’s labored breathing and gasps of pain, still coming on strong. And he knew then that Tanner was one of those hardheaded, iron-ribbed men who would never throw in the towel. Even if he never got the jackscrew, he would keep right on limping after Ramsay with that damned thing on his foot, until he ran him down and killed him.