Three weeks later, limping along a road a hundred and fifty miles south of the city, John Collins stopped, listened intently with frowning brows, and then, climbing up a bank, crawled into the chaparral and instantly fell asleep.
In three weeks he had gone a hundred and fifty miles in a straight line, but he had travelled probably a thousand—running, trotting, doubling, dodging, ambushing, killing. His goal had been to the east; time and time again he had made a desperate dash for the Sierra, snow-capped in the distance, the Sierra, with its profundity of forest, its intimacy of valleys, its secrecy of meadows, with its running water, its game, its sheep-herders, half-mad with solitude; and each time he had been headed off and slid on farther down the coast. But this morning he had seen before him a hill-range coming high-peaked to the sea; this was now his goal. From the place where he slept, the land fell off to the south in a broad valley golden-hazed at the bottom with unleafed willows, then rose again in long elastic jumps to a first crest, tumbled abruptly into a black cañon, and leaped up perpendicularly to a final summit dark with pines and promising of impenetrable recesses.
And behind him, to the north, men were hunting. For three weeks he had been pursued as a wild animal, with growing savagery of purpose, with increase of cunning, by greater numbers. The whole State, aroused, was buzzing about him like a beehive. Hundreds of men, armed as he was, clamoured on his trail. Some had seen him; it was a sudden vision, instantaneous and flitting as the revelation of a photographer’s flashlight—a grinning mask, a savage eye glinting along a rifle-barrel—and then men died, men with fingers upon triggers, before they could pull a trigger. The farmers in the fields worked with rifles in their hands, with pistols, with pitchforks; children armed with shot-guns watched in the kitchens while their mothers cooked; the officers of five counties at the head of posses tracked him indefatigably; and leading them all was the best man-hunter of the State—the grizzled, keen-eyed sheriff who, years before, had taken John Collins to prison. Twice, close-pressed Collins had seen him, with his broad sombrero, his black moustache, streaked with gray; but neither time had he had the chance to kill him.
The elements, also, had conspired against the fleeing convict.
For the first week, the drought had persevered. He had travelled through a parched and arid land. The sun poured like molten lead upon his bare head; dust lay about him like a suffocation; it piled on the roads, sifted through the holes in his shoes, burning his feet; it caked his dry lips; it inflamed his eyes; he had suffered thirst.
Then the long-delayed rains had come. The leaden vault of the sky had burst, letting down upon him the upper reservoirs. For a week he had been wet, persistently, all of the time; he had travelled in ooze; his clothes had clung cold about his limbs, paralysing them; he had slept in puddles; and always, like a persecution with him, went the necessity of caring for his gun—of seeing that it be not wet, that it rust not, that it stay smoothly working, well-oiled, swiftly ready to kill.
He had borne these things with alacrity. A feeling of phenomenal endurance had exalted him. All the time, in want, in hunger, in thirst, in heat or cold, in pursuit or short respite, killing or hiding, he had felt that he could go on thus forever; that his nerves were steel, his muscles iron, that nobody, nothing, God Himself, now could ever bring him down. When he shot, it was by reflex, with utmost surety, his game looming large as a mountain against the bead of his rifle.
But the last few days, something insidious had attacked him—something that he felt but vaguely, that he could not name, but which he distrusted profoundly.
A few days before, the rains had ceased, and the sun had shone again.
It shone through an air that was as old-gold dust, upon a wet land along the surface of which trailed silver hazes; upon a warm, moist land which panted to its touch, exhaling sighs humid and soft and fragrant as the breath of kine. Overnight a giant painter seemed to work with broad sure brush. The landscape, yellow and smooth as if gold-lacquered at sunset, at sunrise was tinted in lavenders; the next morning it was light green; the next morning it was dark green; and in the fields, on the roads by the side of the ruts, at first a mere verdant mustiness, the grass was springing, numerous, strong and serried, as to the commanding stamp of some fantastic foot. Here and there, on some rounded hill, a ploughman showed, a poster ploughman behind four poster horses; he rolled up in his share, as though it were ribbon, long strips of emerald sward, turning up to the sun the deeper land, tinged with red, with the red of its proffered generous blood. A heaviness was in the air; at the slightest movement, sweat poured out upon Collins’s body; a listlessness was in his limbs, a listlessness that was not unpleasant, but which worried him; his veins, swollen as were the streams, as were the budding twigs, ran with a torpor, a peace almost, which he fought; at times a softness came to him, a vague mournfulness, which was not bitter, which was almost sweet, which relaxed his sinews, his nerves, his vigilance—his hate almost. It was something subtle and inexplicable, something at which he growled, but that he could not resist, something which he distrusted, but could not conquer.
And now it was with him as he slept, there in the chaparral, by the roadway. This it was which caused him to lie loosely asprawl on his back, his rifle almost beyond reach, his right arm across his eyes; it made him breathe deep; it lay about him like a warm soothing bath.
On the last day of the rain, by a cunning redoubled doubling, he had gained half a day on the leading posse, led by the sheriff. Since that, torpid with the new influence, he had been content to plod straight ahead, holding the gained advantage. This morning he had decided to give up two hours of it to sleep. He had lain down with the intention of sleeping two hours, fitfully, on the watch, like a dog, as was his way.
But now he was sleeping profoundly, on his back, his arm across his eyes, his rifle carelessly rolled ten feet away. An hour passed; he still slept. Another, and he still slept. A mile behind, a group of horsemen came along the road slowly.
Their eyes were bloodshot, the mud lay caked in the stubble of their unshaven faces, and they shifted uneasily in their deep saddles. Ahead, like a vidette, scanning the way, rode a keen-eyed man, with dark moustache grayly streaked, a sombrero upon his grizzled head. He bent low, along the flank of his horse, stopped the animal, bent lower, looking into the drying mud of the road, then spoke a few muttered words to the men who now were about him. Immediately they tensed; weariness fled them. And John Collins, in the brush a mile ahead, became fitful in his sleep.
The horses raised their heads to the reins and began to trot. The riders, rising in their saddles, looked ahead, their rifles in their right hands ready for use. An animal stumbled in the rear; the rider cursed, and the sheriff silenced him with a potent look. They were within half a mile of the sleeper now; he awoke suddenly.
He awoke, listened, then crept through the brush to the summit of a little knoll and looked.
He saw them—the sheriff and his posse—coming down the road. He looked toward the east, up the valley; from this direction another group of horsemen was approaching. The two posses were drawing an angle of which he was the apex. And three miles away to the south lay the mountains, black with pines, impenetrable to search; he had slept at their very feet while the hunters came upon him. He cursed—but even as he cursed a subtle indifference, a carelessness, was within him.
A short distance ahead of the point where he now stood, between it and the posse coming slowly down the valley, a fainter road crossed toward the hills he sought. At a bend, in a little hollow shaded by a live-oak, a mossy watering-trough dripped, and toward the trough a boy was riding at a walk, on a young horse, bareback. Bending low, Collins glided through the brush, down the hillside, and gained a patch of woods that, paralleling the main road along which the two posses were converging, extended to the trough. He stepped out of the fringe of willows just as the boy brought his horse to a stop beneath the live-oak. Men’s voices came to him from the junction of the roads, one hundred yards away; the posse from up the valley was passing it.
The boy, startled, threw his eyes toward the crackling twigs and looked into the muzzle of the rifle. “Get off that horse,” Collins said, and took a step toward the trough.
The boy slid to the ground along the horse’s gleaming flank; the man, watching him narrowly, his rifle at the hip, lowered his head and drank.
A shout came from the road. The two posses had met. Voices mingled in surprise; then in loud discussion. Collins took a step backward into the willows.
“Where’s water in them hills?” he asked the boy, jerking his thumb toward the mountains across the valley, to the south.
The boy pointed to a rounded summit, crowned with black pines, across the valley, to the south.
Collins raised his rifle, clubbed. He knew that he must kill the boy; all through his flight this had been his rigid line of conduct: to kill those from whom he obtained information according to which he must act.
But now, at this moment of peril, with the voices of the posses floating clear to him on the quiet air, the feeling that had been with him since the cessation of the rain enwrapped him subtly—an indifference it was, a weariness, a laziness—he didn’t know what it was; but it made him say:
“If I don’t kill you, will you keep still?”
The boy nodded mutely.
A grimace suddenly distended the fugitive’s cracked face, a strange grimace, like the decrepit contortion of what might once have been a smile; and his eyes lit up, lit up with something that might have been the shadow of a softness. “Cross your heart and die?” he asked.
The boy crossed his heart, his staring face very serious.
Collins leaped upon the horse and was off.
He did not ride toward the mountain to which the boy had pointed. He turned his back to it, made for the main road down which had passed the second posse, swung into it, and went up the valley, at right angles to the course that would take him to his goal. As he turned into the main road, a yell had sounded. Another rose now; a rifle cracked. He had been seen by some member of the posses. He rounded a sharp double-turn beneath the branches of a sycamore which scraped him as he passed, and a long ribbon of road stretched level before him. The horse was young and fresh; Collins bent forward, his face almost between its ears, and to his mutter it leaped in great bounds. Behind, the yells ceased; they were superseded by a drumming of hoofs, steady, constant like a buzzing; at times bullets cried wild overhead. The planking of a bridge reverberated hollow beneath him; he rounded another turn. This time, when he had gone three hundred yards beyond it, he brought his horse up in three short cow-pony jumps, wheeled it around at a stand, raised his rifle, and waited for the first man to make the turn.
It was as he had expected. The first horseman was the sheriff; riding strongly but calmly, the rim of his sombrero blowing back, his face very grim. Collins held the bead of his rifle against him longer than was necessary (all through his flight he had fired from all angles, in all positions, with absolute accuracy); he chuckled as he pulled the trigger; then, without waiting to look, whirled his horse under him and sprang forward again.
After a while, looking beneath his arm-pit, he saw vaguely a man riding after him, a man with a sombrero. He turned and looked fair. It was the sheriff, riding strongly but calmly, his sombrero rim flapping, his face very grim; he had missed the sheriff.
It was the first time since he had the rifle that he had missed. Heretofore the gun had leaped to his hip, to his shoulder, by reflex and had blazed death always. It had been impossible to miss; in his eyes the game had loomed up like a mountain. And now he had missed. A fear came upon him; a fear as of the supernatural; clubbing his horse with the butt of the faithless weapon he urged it forward at greater speed; it was beginning to pant now.
The road was rising with the floor of the valley. Ahead on either side lay half-ploughed fields; he saw men bent over their ploughs behind four-horse teams. One of the teams stopped abruptly; the ploughman ran to his horses, fumbled at the traces. Another man, to the left, was doing the same thing. And then, from each arrested plough with its drooping-headed animals, a horse detached itself, traces dragging loose behind, the ploughman on its back, and loped with lumbering steps toward the road. And Collins caught a glint of shot-gun barrels. A shout came from behind; Collins turned his head; three more ponderous beasts, mounted by farmers lustful for the hunt, were coming across the fields, traces flying behind, spurning with their broad hoofs shining clods. Again he struck his horse with the butt of his rifle—and the breath began to whistle in its throat. A bullet snarled by, close to his head; from the upper window of a farm-house a shot-gun bellowed. He passed a school-house; he saw the children, released for recess, swarm out of the doors like bees; he glimpsed their white faces; their shrill cries came to him in one brief note as he swept by, and then he swerved to the left into a road that went through a pasture and then on toward the mouth of a cañon. He had to open a gate; he fought at it long, it seemed, but when remounting, he cast a look backward, he saw the winded plough horses still toiling up the hill, and behind them, strung out, the two posses. Behind, there were more horsemen; and to the right and the left, horsemen; the whole world seemed aroused, converging upon him. He picked up his sagging beast between his knees, and galloped into the dusk of the cañon.
It led away from the hill he had for goal. He went on half a mile, left his horse in the brush, went on afoot another half mile, leaving a fairly visible but diminishing trail, then, crawling through the underbrush, doubled back along the walls of the cañon, toward the south.
Crawling, springing from stone to stone, always in the brush, covering his rare tracks carefully, he climbed diagonally up across the face of the hills for several hours; and the afternoon sun struck him in a warm wave as at last he came out upon a round plateau, crowned with a circle of black pines; running to the centre, he thrust his face into the cool tufts of water-cress and drank, in long sucking gulps, like a horse. The boy had told him right.
When he had quenched his thirst to some degree, he stood up and listened, intent. A quiet was about him, a great golden quiet; a little bird went by his head with a squeak and a whir, and the silence came flowing back in long ripples, like a sea. It was the silence of altitudes, vibrant, supersensitive, through which a sound passed aquiver like a pain; along its crystal, a whisper, a mutter, the crackling of a twig, would come for a mile. Collins listened: there was no crackling of twig, no shout, no cry, not a breath, not a sigh.
He walked to the edge of the plateau and looked down the slopes to the valley beneath. Along the ribbon of road, small like mice, and gliding without rise and fall as upon wheels, he saw specks of horses mounted by dots of men; they were going up and down the road in sudden swift flights, as if bewildered. He had outwitted them.
He returned, dragging his rifle, a little aimlessly to the centre of the plateau. He knew what he should do—plunge on into the depths of the mountains rising and falling ahead to the south, dark with pines. But a laziness, almost an indifference, possessed him—the strange influence that had been with him since the ceasing of the rain. It had left him in the excitement of the chase; now it was with him again, a vague weariness, an indolence. He looked about him. The plateau, ringed with a circle of pines, fell off toward the centre in a gentle depression. In the depression was the spring, bubbling up silvery among the cress. The little stream wound lazily for a few feet, then tumbled abruptly over a mossy log in miniature cataract. About it the grass was lush and high, and in the grass flowers peeped—pink flowers, like small roses, and blue ones, like eyes. The grass looked very thick and very soft. He sat down.
And then immediately, sudden as a blow, there came to him the realisation that he was outside. He was out in the open.
He had been out for three weeks; three weeks before he had passed forever outside of the prison’s gray walls. During that time he had travelled, he had fought; he had slept in the rain, he had slept under the stars; the sun had poured upon him, the wind had slashed him; not once had he been under a roof. And now, for the first time, he realised that he was outside.
He realised the golden stream of sunlight slanting to him across the hills, the smell of fresh earth, of lush grass; he breathed deep and felt within his lungs the clean clear air of out of doors; he saw the sky above him.
It was blue, the sky, a fresh tender blue. And right at its highest point, overhead, was a little white cloud. He let himself fall back, and lay there, eyes up. The little white cloud receded, receded, seemed about to withdraw within a secret door, up there in the blue dome. He shut his eyes; when he reopened them, the little cloud was again in its place.
A bee buzzed by—an hour passed. A golden spider weaved a fragile net from one blade of grass to another.
A soft drum of hoofs on the sward threw him sitting up, his hand on his rifle. At the edge of the meadow a colt stood regarding him obliquely, half-scared, its long knobbed forelegs far apart. “Phoo!” said Collins. With a defiant flip of hind-heels, the colt vanished down the slope.
Collins remained thus, seated, rifle in hand, a moment. His movement at the approach of the colt had been slow; now a languor was in him—in his limbs, in his veins, a heavy languor, rather pleasant. He lay down again and gazed up at the little white cloud. It retreated within the depths of the heavens. He shut his eyes. It sprang forth again, playfully.
And meanwhile a posse was laboriously climbing toward the rounded hill crowned with pines. It filed up slowly, in long zigzags. At its head was the sheriff, patient and grim; he was guided by the boy whom Collins had met at the watering-trough.
The posse debouched upon the plateau, and quietly, following the gestured commands of the sheriff, the men scattered in a circle behind the pines crowning it.
One of the men stepped upon a dry twig, and Collins sat up to the crackle. He saw the man, dodging behind a tree, and at the same time, another, then arms passing or faces peering from behind other trees. He grasped his rifle and half stood up.
He remained thus, on his knee, a moment; he seemed listening intently, listening not to what might come from the outside, but to some subtle inner command. And a great wave of lassitude, of the inexplicable lassitude that for several days had lurked about him, now whelmed him in a long, heavy and enveloping caress.
“Oh, hell!” he said—and he lay down again on his back, in the lush grass, and gazed up at the little white cloud far up in the blue sky, the ‘fresh tender blue sky.
And to the sheriff’s raised ordering hand, the man-hunters began to shoot. They shot from a circle, at the stretched figure in the centre. It was hidden by the grass, it lay flat, it was a hard shot; the thing took a long time. Bullets spattered all about Collins; after a while one went through his left arm, which lay across his chest. To the sting he rose, half angrily, and made a movement toward his rifle, then, ‘‘Oh, hell!” he said again, with heavy indifference.
It was almost sundown when the wily old sheriff, taught by many lessons the futility of haste, ordered a concentric advance. The men rushed forward; they met face to face above a lifeless body.
The sheriff touched it lightly with the tip of his boot. “Well,” he said, and his low voice in the still air had an unexpected, booming finality; “well, he was a bad one.”
But John Collins, with glazed eyes, was staring up at the cloud.
THE END