"What’s that other kid pulling off?" yelled the stranger Bickram, and Ferd sprang at Randy — too late! Randy’s knife edge had found the length of cord that held down the sapling to the root.
There was a windy whoop of sound, almost like an explosion, as the stout stem whipped itself back to the perpendicular. It almost struck Ferd as it unexpectedly straightened before him, and he leaped back. At the same moment, two startled yells rang through the night, the yells of Jebs and Emory. Staring, Randy saw them snatched aloft as by the talons of some flying monster, upside down.
Then the two remaining enemy were upon him. A grip fell upon his wrist, quick and crushing as the jaws of one of the beaver traps he had been springing. He dropped the knife with an involuntary howl. He struck with his other fist, and heard a gasp as he got home into somebody’s wind. He wrenched free from the hold on his wrist and ran in the only direction still clear, toward the lake.
"Let him have it!" roared a voice behind him, and a gun went off, sounding as loud as a cannon in Randy’s ears. The bullet went whick over his head, and he threw himself forward in a diving leap, to get close to the ground and out of range. But he struck water, and seemed fairly to whizz through it and under it.
As he struggled to free himself, Jebs saw it all. He and Emory, caught together in the noose, made a double weight that after the first upward spring of the sapling dragged the top down again, so that they both hung partially on the ground, floundering with arms and shoulders in the dirt while their feet were still pulled into the air. Now Ferd came hurrying toward him, groped to find the rope and the tightly drawn noose, and brought out his own knife to cut the prisoners free.
Between them Emory and Ferd laid rough hands on Jebs and dragged him to his feet. They held him fast by the arms and faced toward their adult companion, who stood, revolver in hand, gazing out over the lake.
'’Did you get him, Noll?” demanded Ferd.
"Hmm, don’t know,” was the grumbled reply. "He didn’t come up out of the water again.”
"Here’s a flashlight,” said Ferd, kicking something with his foot and stooping for it.
It was Randy’s, dropped when the boys had come out of the lake after freeing the trapped beaver. Still holding Jebs with one hand, Ferd flashed the beam on and sent it hovering over the water. No ripple showed on its surface.
"You must have drilled him, Noll,” suggested Emory, clinging to Jebs’s arm with both hands. Jebs, with a sinking heart, silently agreed.
The man called Noll shook his head heavily.
"Nope, don’t think so. If I’d hit him with that bullet, he’d have bobbed up to the top of the water, for a moment anyway. He didn’t bob.” Noll cleared his throat grimly. "I’d have seen him if he had.”
"And if he’d seen you—” began Emory.
"Shut up, Emory!” barked Noll. "I’m not going to be seen by anybody who’ll carry the news to the law. And you know why.”
The weapon lifted in Noll’s hand, and Jebs felt a new coldness in his blood. Why was this man so ready to shoot, and shoot with intent to kill, over a crime no more serious than fur theft?
"Maybe he got clear across to that point past the canal, where the bushes grow back from the water line,” offered Ferd. "He could have climbed out there, and slid away out of sight.”
"I don’t think so,” demurred Noll again. "Hey, give me that flash, I’ll go and make sure.”
Flashlight in one hand, revolver in the other, Noll walked to the point where the canal joined the lake, sprang powerfully across it, then waded along the shore line beyond to the point Ferd had called to his attention. Jebs could see Noll bending down and examining the muddy bank in the glare of the flash. Finally he turned and waded back, crossed the canal again, and rejoined them.
"Not a mark or sign there,” he announced. "He’s still there in the lake.”
"He couldn’t swim under water this long,” protested Ferd, and Noll chuckled, softly and cruelly.
"No, Ferd, you sure up and spoke the truth there. He couldn’t stay under water — and live. He must have caught on a snag or something. And by now he couldn’t be saved, even if we tried.”
Emory sniffed mockingly. "I’m not going to try, anyhow. You know, the beavers stick the bottoms of their lakes full of sticks and logs to eat the bark off of. Probably he got caught on one of them. Too bad, huh?”
Jebs found his voice. "You’re talking about my friend,” he told Emory. "If you won’t dive after him, let me —” "Let you nothing,” put in Noll brutally. "You were fixing to take a prisoner tonight, it seems like. Well, you’ve been took prisoner yourself, young feller. Bring him along, boys.” He turned and led the way straight into the brush. Emory and Ferd hustled Jebs along after him.
THE BICKRAM LAIR
Half a dozen steps were enough to take the three Bickrams and their captive deep into the lakeside woods, with leaves and branches thick all around and overhead to shut away the moonlight that had touched the open space by the water. But Noll Bickram, in the lead, moved as surely and swiftly as though he were walking along a corridor in a familiar building. Emory kept his hold on Jebs’s elbow and shoved him roughly along, and Ferd seemed to keep a rearguard position, carefully pushing branches and creepers into place again behind the travellers. That, decided Jebs, was so that there would be no sign of the way they had departed.
“Here’s the first log,” called Noll softly from up ahead.
A moment later Jebs found himself hoisted up to walk along a big fallen trunk. He managed to keep his balance on it, lest he fall into water or mire to either side. Keeping hold of him, Emory growled a warning to step to a second log. Here a trifle of moonlight filtered through the branches of a dead tree, and Jebs could see solid ground on either side of the log. Suddenly he understood — more care to avoid leaving a telltale record of their departure.
At once he pretended to stumble, and threw himself sideways off of the log. He landed upon his knees among some brushy twigs that gave and snapped under his sudden weight. Emory snarled in surprised protest and blame, and jumped down beside him to hoist him back upon his feet. Ferd, coming along the log from behind, paused and peered.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Old clumsyfoot here took himself a fall,” replied Emory ill-humoredly. “Get up, you, before I pull a chunk clear out of you.”
He caught Jebs by the shoulders in both hands and pulled him erect. Jebs had managed to clutch weeds in both his own hands, and he kept hold of them as he continued once more along the log. When they left its far end, he felt hard clay under his feet, a well-traveled path, on which tracks would not register clearly.
“Come on, come on,” called Noll from ahead of them. “Don't take all night. We’re almost at the turnoff.”
Turnoff? Jebs had another inspiration. He kept the weeds grasped in his hands until Emory, hurrying him close up behind Noll, gave him a shove to make him change direction and follow the older Bickram along a smaller, less packed down pathway. At that point Jebs let his handfuls of torn leafage and stems drop to the ground.
This Bickram trio, he decided, must be master woodsmen, even at night. Plainly they were fully experienced in threading the labyrinths of the woods beyond Laurels, and no easy job awaited those who might try to follow them. He, Jebs, would help mark this trail the Bickrams strove to leave unmarked. Stealthily he snatched at a bundle of twigs close beside him, let the leaves strip away in his hand so that new- trimmed switches were left. At a bend in the trail further on, he dropped the leaves. There was another clue for a search party to spot. Unconsciously, Jebs chuckled.
“What have you got to laugh about?” challenged Emory, with his habitual bad temper.
"I'm trying to keep my courage up,” said Jebs. “It’s spooky here in these woods.”
"Now don’t get telling me about spooks!” snapped Emory. "I don’t like that kind of talk.”
Silence fell for the moment. Jebs, prodded along, remembered the cross-pattern o
f nails Emory wore on his shoes to guard him against black magic. This overgrown young lout was superstitious. Jebs made another try.
"All my life I’ve heard about the ghost that walks around in this patch of timber,” he improvised on the spur of the moment. "They say its head came off, and it carries the skull around in one hand, like a lantern — the eyes shine with a green light —”
"Now you shut your trap!” blusterd Emory, almost crushing Jebs’ elbow in his hand.
"Don’t let him scare you, Emory,” said Ferd from his position at the rear of the party. "I sure do wish you’d grow up and forget all those ghost stories.”
"Yah, I’ve known you to be scared of ghosts yourself,” Emory defended himself. "You and Noll both.”
"We’re not either,” growled Ferd, rather fiercely for one who meant what he said.
Noll had paused up ahead once more. "We’re getting there,” he said softly as Emory guided Jebs up to a position beside him. "Drift out away from this path. We don’t want to wear any entry into our hideout. Let me slide down first, and signal you when to follow me in.”
He handed his gun to Emory. "Take this. If our guest acts too anxious to leave early —” Noll paused significantly.
Emory nudged Jebs in the side with the hard muzzle of the weapon. "Don’t make a move unless I tell you you can,” he warned. "Come on, head this way.”
He pushed Jebs roughly away through a thicket of small, close-grown young trees, and through some thorny bushes just beyond. Jebs felt them prickle and scratch through his clothes, and managed to break more twigs.
"Halt,” said Emory in his ear, and he found himself standing on the edge of moonlit open space, both ahead and below. Thus the two of them waited silently, while elsewhere Jebs could hear the muffled sounds of Noll and Ferd in among the trees. Finally there was a noise of scrambling, and more silence. Then the voice of Noll came from somewhere beneath his feet.
"All clear here,” said Noll. "Where are you, Emory? Speak up.”
"Right here,” Emory told him.
Noll had apparently moved to a point almost directly under them. His voice, coming up, sounded balefully businesslike.
"Let that fellow scramble down,” he said. "Now listen, boy. You thought you were just messing with some petty- larceny clowns, but you bumped into somebody with a good reason to stay clear of the law. And if I have to use a lump of lead to keep you quiet, I’ll do it. You hear me?”
"I hear you,” said Jebs with helpless fury.
"Down he comes, Emory,” commanded Noll. "I’ll be right here to take charge of him. You two follow him down.”
"Down you go,” Emory commanded Jebs, who stooped and groped. He stood at the very edge of a root-matted drop, and managed to lower himself without mishap until he sat with his feet dangling into space. He found an earthy face with his heels, and he dug them into its almost perpendicular surface and slid cautiously down. It was a drop of six or seven feet, and as he landed on a less abrupt slope at the bottom, Noll’s hand closed upon his wrist.
"I’ve got him, Emory,” said Noll. "You can follow.”
Emory dropped heavily after Jebs, and Ferd came from somewhere else to join them. Straining his eyes, Jebs saw that they were in a gorgelike depression among the trees, its bottom sloping away toward some gloomy central point. As before, Noll took the lead and moved in the darkness with an assured quickness that showed his familiarity with the ground. They came to where a small trickle of water ran at the lowest point of the little ravine, and moved upstream along it to where Noll’s dim figure seemed to vanish suddenly. Emory shoved Jebs along again, and Jebs found himself stooping to enter a sort of hole in the steep bank. Ferd, coming along at the rear of the party as usual, busied himself with some kind of rustling vegetation.
"Get the door covered, Ferd," said Noll.
"Got it," replied Ferd.
"Okay. Then strike a light."
One of the three snapped a match on his thumbnail.
Jebs looked curiously around him at what the flicker of light revealed. He and the three Bickrams stood inside an earth-walled, earth-floored chamber of irregular shape and considerable spaciousness. The match was in Ferd’s hand, and as he touched it to the wick of a kerosene lamp and carefully slid a glass chimney over it, the light rose more strongly and revealingly.
This cave, Jebs decided, must have been a natural recess in the bank, perhaps the work of washing waters, possibly enlarged by the scratching claws of foxes. More recently it had been made into this parlor-sized refuge by spades and picks in the hands of men. Overhead, the ceiling was braced with planks set on rough poles cut in the woods. The walls were cut squarely, with nooks and recesses picked out here and there to serve for shelves and cupboards. The floor, leveled out by more work, was covered neatly and evenly with a layer of pine straw. Toward the rear of the cave lay pallet beds, made up of old quilts and blankets, three of them. Near the center stood a rustic table, of planks set upon stout poles driven into the floor. Two old boxes, an empty nail keg, and a stump-like section of log were arranged to serve as chairs. In some of the wall niches stood stacks of brightly labeled canned goods, and across pegs driven into the hard earth slanted a well-kept shotgun.
The entrance to this hidden lair was by way of a door recess several feet deep. Outside it hung a profusion of branches and vines, apparently rooted in the bank outside, so cunningly and thickly matted, that they must obscure any light from inside.
Ferd set the lamp on the table, and Noll turned to look at Jebs. His harsh face was deeply shadowed by the light that angled across his cheeks and chin.
"Well, boy," said Noll, "we’ve got you."
"You won’t have me long,” replied Jebs. "I’ll get away."
"Better not try. You might get hurt trying. Maybe I’d better tell you a few facts, so you’ll see how it’ll pay you to keep quiet and do what you’re told."
"Go ahead," said Jebs.
Noll sighed, a long gentle sigh that somehow sounded ugly. "Well," he said, "I’ll be frank with you. If you happened to lead any policemen to me, they’d know me right quick. I’m wanted bad, boy. I was doing time in a prison out west of here and I got away. If I had to go back, it might be for more years than I care to do." He looked at Jebs, intently and expressionlessly, as a cat looks at a mouse under its paw. "You think that over, and you’ll see why I can’t let you go and carry any news about me."
"You don’t make me want to stay here with that kind of talk," replied Jebs, as fiercely as Noll himself.
“You’ll stay," said Noll confidently, "until we figure how we can turn you loose without anybody finding us. Just how we’ll arrange that, I can’t tell you now. But you’d better wait and see. Try to break loose from us, and you’ll never be heard from again, any more than your buddy who sank down under that beaver pond."
At the thought of Randy, Jebs’s heart sank as though it, too, sought the bottom of some unknown deep. He fought hard within himself to give no sign, and when he replied his voice was steady and his tone was bold.
"You’re the biggest fool in this bunch of fools," he said defiantly to Noll Bickram. "You’re going to be caught and locked up before you’re through bragging to each other about how smart you were, getting away."
"Don’t you go calling us fools," spluttered Emory. He made as if to jump toward Jebs, but Ferd, who had seated himself on a box near the doorway, quickly put out a hand and caught his younger brother by the sleeve.
"Quiet down, Emory," bade Ferd in a stern tone. "Now look here, Jebs Markum — that’s your name, isn’t it? — if you’re trying to comfort yourself that you’ll be followed by any search party, you’d better get wise. Nobody’s going to follow us here."
"No," added Noll. "We broke our trail in half a dozen places. The paths that lead here are all hidden, over and over again. Even if they bring out bloodhounds, let them whiff the peppersauce we use to soak our shoes in, those hounds won’t nose along any other tracks for a right good spell."
<
br /> "And anyhow, who’s going to identify us?" demanded Ferd. "The only people who knew about us for sure were you and that stranger kid you had for a partner."
Jebs half opened his mouth to explain about the cast of
Emory’s footprint, complete with the cross of hobnails, but he closed it again. True, that information might shock his captors like a sudden application of electric current, but it might serve them as a warning.
"And nobody ever heard of this cave," Noll took up the mocking explanation. "We’ve been gouging it out ourselves all spring, for a place to put our skins when we get them. Of course, when the hunting season begins next fall, somebody might blunder in here. But we’ll be gone before that, with all the beaver pelts we can lug away, for sale to the fur companies up north. And you’ll be gone, too."
"No," said Jebs. "I’ll be found."
All three Bickrams glowered at him. "Okay, who’ll find you?” demanded Emory in tones of deepest scorn. "Your pal, you think? Not him. He’s done for."
"No," replied Jebs. "Randy’s alive."
For suddenly he had become certain that he spoke the truth. Randy lived, planned and followed.
SUPERSTITION
All three of the Bickrams now stared so fixedly at Jebs that he fancied he felt their eyes leaning against him, like heavy weights. Jebs stared back, from one to another. His captors were alike in a certain brutal thickness of feature and in their rough clothes; but each was different in his own personal quality of menace. Emory had the stupid, overgrown aspect with which Jebs was already familiar. Ferd, leaner, older and shrewder looking, was a sort of human fox in contrast to his brother’s character of a bad-tempered bull calf. Noll, oldest and biggest of the three, seemed also the wisest and coolest. Where Ferd and Emory looked amazed and protesting, Noll had more of an expression of unfriendly curiosity.
"You can’t give us that stuff,” said Noll to Jebs. "If your friend had lived, he’d have come up out of the water again.” But, Jebs told himself again, that was all wrong. It was the other way around. Had Randy been killed by the bullet Noll sent after him, had he been even hurt seriously, he would have risen. Randy had stayed under water because he had swum deeply and on purpose. Maybe a snag had caught him? No, Jebs told himself yet once again. The water at that part of the lake couldn’t be so deep that some disturbance of the quiet upper reaches would not have been noticeable. Randy had dived, escaped to — to where?
Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1953 Page 10