Red came out of a bramblebush, cursing and laughing. Tim stood up. The strap of his haversack had broken and some of his clothes were scattered on the ground. He fumbled for them while Red fixed the strap by tying the ends together with a clumsy square knot.
As the thunder of the train became a distant rumble Tim pointed north across the dark landscape to the shapes of the hills beyond. “If we walk fast, we’ll be at the border by dawn.”
Red hooked his hands around the straps that held his haversack. “And what does it look like, Timmy boy? Is it a bright green ribbon twenty feet across?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
As the sky grew light in the east they came to the edge of a rolling pasture. They climbed a knob of land but couldn’t see a farmhouse or a barn or any other signs of life, so they walked in the pasture at the edge of a wood. They topped another rise and there was a tethered cow. It seemed she had been there all night. Her udder was bulging and her teats touched the tips of the winter grass. Red’s eyes sparkled. “The poor thing is suffering something terrible, carrying such a load of milk.”
Tim moved up to the cow, clucking and talking in a soothing voice. He took the tin cups and kneeled in the grass and milked. They drank and milked, and mixed milk with rokeeg and ate a ration of mush. Tim filled their canteen and then, in a spirit of fun, he milked straight into his mouth.
He got to his feet and patted the cow and she turned her head and gave him a gentle bovine stare. Tim said, “I wish we could take her along.”
“Might cramp our style when we cross the mountains.”
A shout broke the air and they saw a man about two hundred yards to the east, running with a shotgun in one hand and a milk pail in the other.
As they crashed into the cover of the nearby trees they heard a bang and Red was seized by a frenzy of high-spirited mirth. “The man’s ungrateful, that’s what he is.”