THE LAND ON one side of the channel was solid enough to walk on. It was soggy in places, but nothing he couldn’t cross if he made the effort. He had to believe that Murrill was up there ahead of him. There was the sick smell of rotting vegetation. The blood from his ear had caked; it hurt like hell. He rinsed out his mouth with swamp water. Sometimes it gave you fever that killed you. He was too mad to give a damn.
He spotted broken reeds; that could have been done by alligators. He wondered if Murrill knew where he was going. Probably not. But this wasn’t Tijuana or Galveston, where he could hurry to the depot and take a train. At last he was finally alone, no “business associates” to fix things for him, no crooked policemen to help him over the rough spots. It was satisfying to think that some swamp creature might kill him: a cottonmouth, a bull alligator dying from some disease.
But Gatling knew he had to kill Murrill himself. Nothing else would do. This was nothing like his war against the copper barons of New Mexico. That war was brutal but, in its way, somewhat simple. Fighting Murrill had been the dirtiest fight of his life. He walked on for an hour; the ground was getting solid and dry. Then it dipped down again, and he had to wade through mud. Mosquitoes buzzed around his head, but he didn’t try to do anything about it.
Sunrise came and an hour later the swamp began to steam. He spotted a piece of bloody gauze in the water and waded out to look at it. He threw it away with a gesture of disgust. Then he felt better. He lay down to rest and ate a handful of berries that didn’t taste too bad. The berries made him thirstier than he had been. He thought of cold beer.
Mud was caked in the muzzle of the rifle; he cleaned it out with a slender rod he broke off from a bush. He didn’t know how long he could go without water. In the desert the heat was dry and you could go for days without a drink, though you would die if you didn’t get it. Here it was worse; sweat dripped with every step you took. Sooner or later he would drink swamp water, but he wouldn’t do it just yet.
He fell asleep and woke up when the sun was in the noon position. He splashed about in a pool that was colder and cleaner than the rest of the channel. It had no smell and it tasted all right. He reached down in the water and felt a cold spring bubbling up. He scooped up cold water and drank it.
He moved on through the awful heat, stopping to rest when he felt dizzy. A lot of punishment had come his way in recent days. There was nobody to thank but Murrill.
There was no sign of the boat, no sound except the roaring of bull gators, the squawking of carrion crows. He wondered if the carrion-eaters were squawking for him or for Murrill. Probably both. They went after a man’s eyes the instant he collapsed. He didn’t have to be dead or even unconscious before they pecked out the eyes. Gatling once knew a drunken trooper who lost one of his eyes to a buzzard before his friends rescued him in time to save the other. Losing the eye sobered him up, but he had to leave the Army. He spent the rest of his life shooting buzzards, any kind of bird that ate human flesh. Listening to the circling crows, Gatling knew how he felt.
Now the channel or river was flowing sluggishly between well-defined banks, a sign that he was leaving the swamp country behind. The channel had to have some sort of name, if only an ancient Indian name. He would never know it because he wouldn’t be going to the law with stories about Wilson Murrill and where he died. Once it was over, he had to let it slide into the past. Most of the executions he had carried out could get him hanged, and it made no difference if the men he killed were Australian thugs, Southern crime bosses, or San Francisco judges with beautiful manners and magnificent crops of white hair. Or pimps who wanted to be gentlemen.
The powers that be would survive long after Murrill was dead. In some ways they were more cunning than Murrill, because they were more interested in money than dreams of glory. Murrill had disturbed their soft, dirty world with his big ideas, but now they wanted him dead. Murrill had reached too high, had fallen on his face, and they wanted him out of the way. He had become an embarrassment, a disturber of peace and order and the ways to get easy money.
Gatling thought of all this while he soaked his swollen feet in the muddy channel. They wanted him dead too. Except they didn’t know who he was, and if he faded away and stopped shooting down judges and chiefs of detectives, no great effort would be made to find him. Other crooked judges would be elected, other Mahaffys would run the graft.
He slapped tepid water in his face. It didn’t make him feel any better. Climbing out of the channel, he smashed the head of a water moccasin with the butt plate of the rifle when the snake tried to bite him in the leg. He looked down at the writhing, dying snake. Where was Murrill?
It was possible that Murrill knew where he was going. In the year since he’d been released from prison, rebuilding Laffite’s house, there had been plenty of time to explore the swamps in his steam launch, with his Cajun crew. A man like Murrill would be likely to look for an escape route on the chance that enemies would come at him from the Fontaine side of the lake. Now he no longer had the launch, but he did have a boat and was moving right along.
Gatling knew he had to find something to eat. Berries didn’t do much to keep a man going and the next handful he ate might lay him low. He looked at the dead snake. In his time he had eaten fried rattlesnake, and it tasted like chicken if you cooked it right. They served it in some fancy restaurants in the cities. He doubted if they had water moccasin on the menu.
What the hell! Food was food. He took the double-edged knife from his boot and cut off a portion of the snake and skinned it. He gagged a little on the first slice, but continued to chew resolutely. It was hard to say what it tasted like, but it wasn’t too bad. Still chewing, he moved on. Still no sign of Murrill.
No matter how badly Murrill handled the boat, he was managing to stay ahead. But poling a flat-bottom didn’t take that much skill once you got the hang of it. He remembered his own clumsy efforts when he first started out from Fontaine. He had to face the fact that Murrill had every chance of getting away unless he met with some mishap, like having the boat overturned in deep water by fighting bull gators. If the boat went under and filled up with water and mud, he wouldn’t have the strength to float it again.
Hungry himself, Gatling wondered how Murrill was doing for food. It wasn’t likely that there had been enough time to provision the boat before Murrill started across the lake. Could be the boat was already stocked with food and water. The boat might have been kept in readiness for emergencies. For all he knew, Murrill might be in no danger from hunger or thirst.
Gatling had only a vague idea of where he was. In the desert he would have figured it out, but this country was completely unfamiliar. He had looked at poorly defined maps of the region, but all he knew was that the bayous far west of Fontaine ran into the tidal marshes along that part of the Gulf. Most likely Murrill was making for the sea. The Gulf was dotted with tiny villages where shrimpers and sponge divers made their living out of boats. For twenty dollars Murrill could get somebody to take him up or down the coast—all the way to New Orleans if that was where he wanted to go. Once he got to New Orleans he could find a hideout or board a ship for Central or South America. All he needed was money. He was sure to have money.
Resting under a tree, Gatling fell asleep and woke up cold and shivering. The temperature was over a hundred, but he was cold. So cold his teeth chattered. The fever hadn’t taken hold yet, but his joints hurt when he moved. He didn’t know what kind of fever he had. Many fevers started off with the same symptoms. It could be anything from a mild case of dengue, which would account for the sore joints, to blackwater fever, which was much more serious and would probably kill him if left untreated. Or it could be something else; the swamps were full of fevers.
He moved on in spite of painful, stiffening joints and the dizziness that came and went. A bad time lay ahead, and there was nothing he could do about it. He tried to convince himself that he was still able to think clearly. Maybe, maybe not. He hadn’t gone far before he realized that he was seeing and hearing things differently than a few minutes before.
In places where the trees thinned out, the glare of sun on water seemed to hum with some strange energy. He could hear it. He shook his head and the noise stopped, but it came back a moment later. The squawking of swamp birds was very loud. It was as if thousands of squawking birds were closing in on him. Before this he had hardly been aware of the few birds that fluttered above the muddy channel. He shouted and the thousands of imaginary birds flew miles up into the sky. There were so many birds they darkened the sky and blotted out the sun. He looked up and the sky was black. He could no longer see the birds, but he could hear them.
Sweat ran down his body, but he shivered as if a freezing wind had come out of nowhere. He kept moving though he longed to lie down in a soft, mossy place and sleep. Only the thought of Murrill poling his way to freedom in the flat-bottom made him go on.
A dull pain behind his eyes became a blinding headache that made him stagger. He was losing his sense of balance. He tried to correct that by walking flat-footed. At one point he nearly toppled into the channel, but got hold of himself just in time. He thought it strange that one part of his mind remained lucid, was still able to recognize danger. He had to go on. In spite of the fever, which distorted sights and sounds, somehow he was aware that this was probably his last chance to put an end to Murrill. In past weeks Murrill never had been far ahead of him, so it was possible to follow his trail from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Tijuana to Galveston to the pirate’s house in the lake. All that time Murrill still thought it was possible to repair the damage done to his criminal syndicate.
Now all that was finished. His syndicate was in ruins. Most of his important partners were dead; those still alive had turned against him; he had become a liability. His old criminal allies might kill him if they got the chance.
Gatling found himself laughing and he tried desperately to fight the craziness of the fever. Pain was a drumbeat inside his head; he felt fierce anger at not being able to stay in control of himself. A sudden feeling of helplessness made him angrier. His hands clenched and unclenched as he thought of what he would do to Murrill when he finally caught up with him.
A bull gator bellowed in the channel, and trembling with rage, he unlimbered the rifle, ready to blast the creature. But he lowered the rifle before he fired the first shot. No shooting, he thought. Fire a shot and Murrill will hear it.
Finally he was unable to go on. His feet felt like lead; he hurt all over. He threw himself down in a patch of moss and ferns and drifted off into a sweaty, uneasy sleep. When he woke up for the first time it was dark, and what he could see of the sky was bright with stars. The bank of moss he lay in was soft and sweet-smelling, and he closed his eyes and went back to sleep. One nightmare followed another. Even as he slept he was aware of being cold.
It was dawn when he woke for the second time. His sweat-soaked clothes clung to his body; behind his eyes fever pain still throbbed, but it was bearable. A red rash had appeared on the back of his hands, a sure sign of dengue, but there was no dysentery, so it was a fairly mild attack. Even so, it was bad enough, and it wasn’t over yet.
He listened to the early morning sounds of the swamp: the squawking of birds, the snuffling of some animal in the reeds. No ghost birds in a black sky. He wanted to go back to sleep, but he struggled to his feet and stood on shaky legs. The Lee-Enfield lay beside him. Already tiny spots of rust freckled the barrel of the rifle. He slung it over his shoulder and moved on, sweating hard but no longer cold.
The fever had killed his appetite, but his mouth was dry and his lips were cracked with thirst. In the channel the water was warm and muddy and stagnant; he looked at it with longing. He already had dengue; what harm could another drink do? Like hell! It would probably kill him. Unless the fever kicked up again he had a chance of surviving, and he was going to take it. He had to hold out until he found water that was fit to drink.
The sun came up strong, the bayou steamed, his thirst grew worse. He tried not to think of cold beer with moisture beading the side of the mug. The rash had spread to his shoulders and the rifle sling cut into the inflamed skin. He left the rifle where it was, afraid that he might drop it if the dizziness returned.
Without water, the real enemy was heat, not snakes, not poisonous insects. The still air dripped with moisture—there was water everywhere—but there was nothing to drink. In the desert, a big saguaro cactus might contain a ton of water. Here there was nothing like that.
He didn’t know how long he could hold out. When you lost as much water as he had, it had to be replaced or the entire body could be damaged. If the kidneys stopped working they might not start functioning again, no matter how much water you drank, and you died of the poisons your body couldn’t get rid of. The day before, in his fever craziness, he might have found that funny. His loud madman’s laugh would have set the bull gators to roaring. Bulls didn’t like noises they didn’t know.
Yesterday, fevered and deranged, he had pushed himself until he collapsed. Today he had sense enough to slow his pace, to rest when his weakened muscles threatened to give up on him. He didn’t curse himself because he had failed to kill Murrill long before now. He knew he should have filled a canteen before he started after Murrill, but he hadn’t done it, and that was that. No use whining about it, no point in damning himself for a fool.
So far the channel had no smaller channels branching off it. The channel was more like a sluggish river than a meandering bayou choked with weeds and rotting, fallen trees. Except for Murrill and his Cajuns, it wasn’t likely that anybody had been through here for years. Since he started out from the lake, he hadn’t come across the ashes of a single campfire. Even in the desert you might see an old campfire ringed with stones, a hacked-open bean can, an empty whiskey bottle. In this place there was nothing.
He had lost most of a day to the fever; maybe there was some advantage to that; Murrill might think he had given up and was trying to make his way back to the house on the island in the lake. Thinking that, Murrill might slow down a bit, even dare to sleep.
The next day, about noon, Gatling heard shots a long distance from where he was. It might have been miles. The sound was carried on the hot wind; it was faint but unmistakable. Gatling moved on as fast as he could. Still fevered, though his head was clearing, he figured the shots had come from about two miles down the channel.
Several hours later, resting when he had to, he came to a place where the channel widened and the trees thinned out. A tree had fallen beside the channel and he climbed up on the rotting trunk and used the binoculars to scout the country ahead. Far down the channel he saw a shack with a roof made of peeled bark. The shack had a stone chimney and smoke spiraled up from it. Two bodies lay on the slope between the channel and the shack. One of the bodies was that of a woman; her dead face was turned in his direction. She looked Indian and she was old and her black hair was streaked with white. Gatling couldn’t see the man’s face, but he was small and frail, probably as old as, or older than, the woman. Two flat-bottoms were tied up at a crude dock of split logs. Alligator skins hung on a rack.
While he watched, Murrill came out of the shack carrying a sack. He put it in his boat and went back into the shack. It looked like he was getting ready to leave. Gatling cased the binoculars and waded across the channel, deep at this point, holding the Lee-Enfield over his head. Alligators surfaced before he got all the way across. They came close but didn’t attack. He kicked off the weeds that were tangled around his legs and started down the side of the channel, fighting his way through reeds that were taller than he was. In places he was up to his knees in foul-smelling muck. Alligators basking in the sun-warmed mud flopped into the water ahead of him.
He was about half a mile from the shack, ready to fall down with exhaustion, when he used the telescopic sight instead of the binoculars to see what was happening. Murrill came out of the shack, a big water jug in one hand, a hatchet in the other. Gatling’s hands were shaking, but he knew he had to make this shot because Murrill was about to push off after he chopped a hole in the other boat. Once he was on the move, with all the food and water he needed, there would be no chance of catching him. As soon as he reached blue water he would disappear.
Gatling leveled the rifle, which was short and light, but felt as heavy as the heaviest buffalo gun. He fired and Murrill clapped his hand to his thigh, staggered, and fell down. Murrill was trying to crawl to the boat when Gatling fired again and hit him somewhere in the body. Holding the scope as steady as he could, Gatling looked for signs of life. There were none that he could see.
Two hundred yards from the shack, Gatling came out of the reeds onto cleared ground. Corn and potatoes grew there. He moved forward, holding the rifle ready. He got closer. Murrill lay on his side, one leg stretched out straight, the other drawn up. Gatling was less than fifteen feet away when Murrill raised up with a Sheriff’s Model .45 in his hand and fired point-blank. He missed with two shots and didn’t get to fire a third. Gatling shattered his upper arm with a .303 bullet. Murrill screamed and the stubby Colt dropped from his hand.
He tried to pick up the gun with his other hand, but Gatling moved in and kicked him in the face. The kick broke his nose and blood spattered all over his clothes. He reached out with his good hand, an imploring gesture, then buried his face in the dirt, mumbling something Gatling didn’t catch.
Gatling rolled him over and he lay on his back, his scarred face turned toward the sky, his eyes blank with terror. He was wounded in three places, but didn’t seem to feel the pain. Fear was a powerful anesthetic. The first bullet had torn through his thigh without striking an artery; the wound in his side was just a crease; his arm wound was more serious than the others. If the wounds were washed and bandaged he might live. Like hell, Gatling thought.
Gatling didn’t know why he hadn’t killed him when he’d raised up with the short-barreled Colt. Maybe he’d decided, without making a thought-out decision, that a bullet in the head was too merciful a death for this man.
Murrill was covered with blood, and the bull gators in the channel smelled it and roared.
“Don’t kill me,” he begged, no longer a criminal mastermind but a groveling coward. “Please don’t kill me.” That was what he had been mumbling into the dirt. “In the boat ... fifty thousand dollars ... take all of it, but please don’t kill me ... take me back ... life in prison ... I don’t mind that ...”
“This time they’d hang you,” Gatling told him. He was not a man who enjoyed the suffering of others, but he felt absolutely no pity for Murrill. He had no intention of treating Murrill’s wounds, of dragging him back through the endless miles of swamp. Apart from wanting to put an end to Murrill, once and for all, he had little faith in the law. If Murrill had fifty thousand in the boat, there had to be ten times that amount in banks and other places. A man with that kind of money never went to the gallows. The high-priced lawyers would step in, jurors would be bribed, Murrill would be acquitted. He might not even come to trial. The high-powered lawyers would argue: Where are the witnesses, where is the evidence? Anyway, Louisiana was the only state that refused to extradite its citizens no matter what crimes they had committed, so there would be legal arguments instead of a trial. Murrill would have nothing to fear from the law as long as he didn’t leave the state.
Gatling looked at the two dead people he had taken for Indians. They had Indian blood but they were mixed-breeds, black and Indian, and it was likely that they had spent their entire lives here, in the remotest part of the swamps, harming no one. For some reason, killing them when he didn’t have to seemed the worst of Murrill’s crimes. Their little shack was where he had been heading all the time. He had probably spent the night there, eating their food, sleeping in a soft bed, and when he was ready to leave he had killed them for their food and water. He could have held a gun on them. He had fifty thousand dollars. He could have paid for what he took. They would have been satisfied with a few dollars. But he killed them because that was the kind of man he was.
“Why did you do it?” Gatling asked him, wanting to get some kind of answer that made sense.
“They would have betrayed me,” Murrill answered, stumbling over his words. “They were old ... useless ... what difference does it make ... only half-breeds ...”
Gatling raised the rifle but didn’t fire. Too easy, too merciful. Ignoring Murrill, he picked up the water jug and put it in the boat with the sack of food. It was a five-gallon jug and there was more than enough water for the long trip to the Gulf. It hardly mattered, but he couldn’t leave the old couple to be devoured by alligators.
“What are you doing?” Murrill shouted, his voice rising to a scream. “They’re dead! I’m alive!”
Dragging the bodies into the shack, Gatling didn’t answer. The shack was bare but clean; it had been their home. All the years they had spent here! He picked up a kerosene lamp and smashed it against the wall. He struck a match and tossed it and there was a loud, crackling sound as the shack caught fire. It was the best he could do for them. He didn’t have the strength to dig a grave. It was time to leave. He went down to the dock and chopped a hole in the other boat.
Gatling looked at Murrill. The gators will take care of you, he thought. What he was doing wasn’t right; he didn’t care. Gators were slow to attack humans, but they would eat a dead body or someone who was wounded and helpless. Murrill was losing blood, and in a little while the gators would crawl out of the channel and close in for the kill.
Murrill heard the bulls roaring in the channel, and suddenly he knew what was in store for him. He knew how he was going to die; the muscles in his disfigured face jerked and twitched in absolute terror. “No! No!” he screamed. “You can’t do this! Shoot me! Kill me!”
Two big bulls crawled out of the water, disturbed by the screaming, drawn by the smell of blood. They lay with unblinking eyes, watching their prey, wary of Gatling because he was moving around. Murrill saw them, and his mouth worked, but no sound came out. He tried to crawl away and Gatling didn’t try to stop him. He might even crawl a distance before the gators came after him. Gators could run fast on their stubby legs. There was no way Murrill could get away from them.
It would be dark soon and other gators would come slithering from the water. The bulls would fight for their share of Wilson Murrill. It was as bad a way to die as a man could imagine.
Smoke from the burned shack drifted over the channel. Gatling untied the mooring rope, picked up the long pole, and pushed the boat away from the dock. Behind him, on the slope, Murrill kept on screaming.