When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry

by Charles Neville Buck

Twilight brought the death of all color save the lingering lemon of the afterglow, and now he had come to the head of Little Ivy, where Uncle Israel had said travel would become precarious. Here he should abandon his mule and cut across the tangles, but a little way ahead lay a disk of pallid light in the general choke of the shadows—a place where the creek had spread itself into a shallow pool across the road. The hills and woods were already merged into a gray-blue silhouette, but the water down there still caught and clung to a remnant of the afterglow and dimly showed back the inverted counterparts of trees which were themselves lost to the eye.

He might as well cross that water dry-shod, he reflected, and dismount just beyond.

But, suddenly, he dragged hard at the bit and crouched low in his saddle. He had seen a reflection which belonged neither to fence nor roadside sapling. Inverted in the dim and oblong mirror of the pool he made out the shoulders and head of a man with a rifle thrust forward. That up-side-down figure was so ready of poise that only one conclusion was feasible. The human being who stood so mirrored did not realize that he was close enough to the water's line to be himself revealed, but he was watching for another figure to be betrayed by the same agency. Henderson slid quietly from his saddle and jabbed the mule's flank with the muzzle of his pistol. At his back was a thicket into which he melted as his mount splashed into the water, and he held with his eyes to the inverted shadow. He saw the rifle rise and bark with a spurt of flame; heard his beast plunge blunderingly on and then caught an oath of astonished dismay from beyond the pool, as two inverted shadows stood where there had been one. "Damn me ef I hain't done shot acrost an empty saddle!"

"Mebby they got him further back," suggested the second voice as Jerry Henderson crouched in his hiding place. "Mebby Joe tuck up his stand at ther t'other crossin'."

Jerry Henderson smiled grimly to himself. "That was shaving it pretty thin," he mused. "After all it was only a shadow that saved me."

As he lay there unmoving, he heard one of his would-be assassins rattle off through the dry weed stalks after the lunging mule. The second splashed through the shallow water and passed almost in arm's length, but to neither did it occur that the intended victim had left the saddle at just that point. Ten minutes later, with dead silence about him, Jerry retreated into the woods and spent the night under a ledge of shielding rock.

He had lived too long in the easy security of cities to pit his woodcraft against an unknown number of pursuers whose eyes and ears were more than a match for his own in the dark. Had he known every foot of the way, night travel would have been safer, but, imperfectly familiar with the blind trails he meant to move only when he could gauge his course and pursue it cautiously step by step.

From sunrise to dark on the following day he went at the rate of a half-mile an hour through thickets that lacerated his face and tore the skin from his hands and wrists. Often he lay crouched close to the ground, listening.

He had no food and dared not show his face at any house, and since he must avoid well-defined paths, he multiplied the distance so that when he arrived on the familiar ground of his own neighborhood, his hunger had become an acute pain and his weariness amounted to exhaustion. Incidentally, he had slipped once and wrenched his ankle. Within a radius of two miles were two houses only, Lone Stacy's and Brother Fulkerson's. The Stacy place would presumably be watched, but Brother Fulkerson would not deny him food and shelter.

Painfully, yard by yard, he crept down the mountainside to the rear of the preacher's abode. Then on a tour of reconnaissance he cautiously circled it. There were no visible signs of picketing and through one unshuttered window came a grateful glow of lamplight.