Ladies and Gentlemen

by Irvin S. Cobb

He finished the job of getting his line loose, then broke the second joint of the rod just below the top ferrule, making the fracture clean and straight across so it might appear that a whizzing missile had cut it through. By pounding it with a stone he battered the reel to bits. Where the outflung verge of the slip met the creek he tipped up as heavy a boulder as he could raise with the trunk of a snapped-off lodge-pole pine for a lever, and propped the large boulder with a smaller one. Into the cranny thus provided, he shoved the butt of the rod and the fragments of the reel; then kicked out the prop and eased the main boulder down again into its former place.

The broken second section stuck out, pressed flat upon the gravel in the creek; the stout casting line held fast the rest of that section and the tip, so that they bobbed in the shore ripples, scraping on the wet pebbles. There was the marker plain enough to see. To any trained eye it would be like a signal post. The finders would pry up the big stone, but that was as far as they could go. Behind and beyond, the mass of the slide arose. They must inevitably figure him as dropping his fishing gear when the danger impended and fleeing blindly rearward, not away from but directly into the path of the avalanche.

He satisfied himself that no sign of his handiwork, nothing to suggest human connivance, was left behind at the scene of this artifice. Then the refugee started climbing the wall down which less than an hour before he had descended. The trail was rocky; it would register no tell-tale retreating footprints. Even so, he took pains to leap from stone to stone, avoiding any spots of hard-packed soil.

Two-thirds up he came to a flattish stretch where a vein of fine gravel and coarse quartzy sand was exposed. Coming down, he recalled having noticed that sandy streak. It presented an obstacle, being fully twenty feet broad. Immediately, though, an old Indian device for deceiving a pursuer occurred to him. As a boy in Iowa he had heard it described. So he turned the other way and backed across the strip, lifting his feet high at each step and setting them down again well apart, with the heels pressed deeply in so that the toe impressions would be the lighter. From the farther side he looked back and was well content. Anybody would be willing to swear those prints had been made by a man going down the trail, not by one returning.

After that, until the afterglow faded out and darkness caught up with him, he traveled north, holding to the ridges whenever he could. All along he had a nagging feeling that he had overlooked something or failed in something. Something had been left, something forgotten. But what was it? Or was it anything? This harassment first beset him at the top of the rim when he was crawling over it like a fly out of an empty teacup. He hesitated momentarily and was inclined to turn back and make search but could not muster the will for the effort. His nerves had had a tremendous jolt and that silent void below him, with the shadows sliding up its sides as though to overtake him, already was peopled with ghosts.

It abode with him, this worry did, through his flight in the sunset and the twilight. It walked with him through the dusk, lively as a cricket and ticking like a watch, and bothered him that night where he slept lightly in a gully among clumped huckleberry bushes. It was next day before it left him. He shook it off finally. Anyhow, he couldn’t put a finger on it, whatever the darn thing was, and probably it didn’t matter anyhow.

He traveled north, as I was just saying. Nobody saw the solitary swift figure of the fugitive when occasionally it appeared against a sky-line. There was nobody within ten miles to see it. That evening, finishing a forced march, he passed the international boundary without knowing it, spending the night in an abandoned shanty on an abandoned coal prospector’s claim. He had huckleberries for supper. His dinner and breakfast had been the same.

On the second morning he was dead tired and his stomach gnawed and fretted him, but he resisted a strong yearning to enter a very small town which he saw below him in a wooded valley, with the Canadian flag floating from the peaked roof of a customs agency. He was across the line then; he had hoped he was but until now hadn’t been sure.

Having mastered his temptation, Chaney swung wide of the settlement. By good luck the detour took him through a pass in an east-and-west spur of the foot-hills and brought him out on a flatter terrain and presently, to a railroad track. He followed along the track and so he came to a water-tank looming like a squatty watch-tower above an empty, almost treeless plain. This was about the middle of the forenoon.

Chaney had the virtue of patience. He dozed in the shade of the tank until a west-bound freight came across the prairie and stopped to water the locomotive. He had money in his pocket; he might have tried bribing the train crew to let him ride in the caboose. This didn’t suit his plan, though. Avoiding detection for as long as possible, his pose after detection did come would be that of a penniless adventurer, a vagrant wandering aimlessly. He found the door of a vacant furniture car open and hopped nimbly in.