Red’s shoulders slumped. He turned slowly and sat on one of the rails, with one boot on a tie and the other dangling. “How soft we are.”
“Walking these ties would tire a coolie.”
Tim ached in every joint and muscle. He wanted to stretch out on a tie and go to sleep. “We’d better move on soon,” he said. “We have to find cover by dawn.”
Red laughed dryly. “It all seemed such a lark when we sat in the jail and made the plans.”
Tim stood up and edged around to take the lead. He tried the next tie with his foot, and they moved on again, stepping as before, each time with an awkward little hop.
They hadn’t gone five hundred feet when the trestle ended and the track reached firm ground again. They moved into another wood, jogged down a slope and jumped across a rushing stream. They traveled through the night, moving from lowland to higher ground and back to lowland again, crossing half-a-dozen trestles shorter than the first.
They stopped just short of another wood and faced each other and realized that now there was light.
Red swayed, his back to the rosy glow in the eastern sky. His face was haggard, his eyes were sunken. He blinked and shook his head and turned to look back.
Tim grinned. “There’s one thing certain. No hound in heaven or hell could follow that route.” They left the track and struggled up a heavily wooded hill looking for a likely bivouac.
“We’re still too near the track,” Tim said.