Alexander Key
They’ll Never Get Me
    He was cornered in the palmettos and every road was blocked. It was just a matter of how many he’d kill before they took him

    In this breathlessness before sunrise, the birds had stopped singing, and there was a stillness here in the flat lonesome pinelands as if all things waited the coming of an old but familiar savagery. It was something that was part of the somber land, as recognizable as the smell of resin in the pines and the feel of yesterday’s heat in the ground. The men with guns were taut intense shadows near the clump of palmettos by the police car. Only the leashed hounds stirred, restless.
    Mel Terry, a ponderous beagle with a badge, said, “Okay,” and I drove through and went on for a half mile and met another car, barely moving, holding the center of the road. I pulled, around beside it and stopped, recognizing Gregori, chief of the county patrol. With him was a deputy from the sheriff’s office.
    “Anything new?” I asked.
    Gregori finished speaking something into the transmitter of his radio, and then rubbed his thin, brown, pitted face; there were heavy circles around his eyes, but his eyes burned with an almost feverish bright ness.
    He peered at me and past me, watching the dark empty road, and said, “Where you goin’, major?”
    “Nick’s camp to fish a bit. I didn’t realize—”
    “You picked a day.”
    The deputy opened his mouth lo speak, then closed it. He was cradling a riot gun.
    Gregori said, “ He got down past Ocala last night, He’s still headin’ for Tampa, seems like.”
    “So I heard.”
    “Did you hear aboul Carleson?”
    “No. Carleson was on the state patrol.”
    “He didn’t report in on the midnight check. Couple hours ago they found ‘im in a ditch below Inverness. No sign of his car yet.” Gregori looked away. ” He was a good man. I don’t see how—”
    You don’t know Morgan Dane like I do. I thought. You don’t realize how fast he is or the thing that’s in him.
    Gregori said. “Dane won’t be driving a state car around in daylight. We got every road covered between the coast and the scrub, an’ four dog packs spotted around, waitin’. Soon’s we find where he put foot to ground, we’ll he after ’im. He won’t go far then.”
    The deputy mumbled, “That’s what they said five days ago, after he broke out o’ Raiford. An’ Carleson’s got two kids.”
    He did not think of the families of the others who were dead, because he did not know them. He knew only Carleson.
    Gregori swore softly. “This time—” Then his lips compressed and he drove slowly away.
    They were all hating Dane now because of Carleson, and Carleson’s family. All but Mel Terry, who hated him for another reason. But why hate the lightning bolt? Or the tiger who strikes the hunter? As I drove on I tried to define and identify Morgan Dane, but I could think only of the South and what had made the South, and I thought of names. 1 thought of the violence of border fights; of Fort Sumter and Missionary Ridge; of something spreading west to spell Abilene, Cimarron, Alamo. I thought of something in all these names, and I thought of Carleson lying dead in a ditch. And l wondered why violence has an affinity for late-summer heat. But then, lightning is the tiger child of summer.
    The road dipped into I he shadows of live oaks and curved around the coolness of a lake that could be seen only in snatches. At the bottom of the dip was a filling station and a store and a few cottages scattered among the oaks. Built against the side of the filling station was a narrow diner for tourists. There was no one in sight, but from the diner came the low squawking of a radio. I parked the car by the diner and went inside.
    A short, hairy, middle-aged Greek, barefooted and wearing only a pair of pajama pants, was sitting at the counter, hunched over the radio. He glanced at me and grunted and went on with his tuning. I said, “Morning, Nick,” and sat down and looked back through the side windows at the lake and saw the sun pop up like a big ripe tangerine over the cypress tops on the other side. Then it turned into a blazing yellow fireball and the heat of it cut sharply through the windows. Outside, the locusts suddenly began their high, thin shrilling. Heat. Heat and violence. I could feel the tiger in the heat.
    “You wanna boat?” Nick asked, watching the radio.
    “Later, maybe.”
    Abruptly a yellow-journal voice on the radio began, “That mad-dog killer, Morgan Dane, has begun his fifth day of liberty by adding another name to his mounting list of victims.” There followed substantially what Gregori had just told me, and then: “All residents of the Central Florida area are cautioned to be on the watch for this madman. He is six feet tall, weighs a hundred and seventy, has wiry reddish hair and brown eyes. There are crossed anchors tattooed on his right forearm. He is believed to be wearing khaki trousers and a blue shirt stolen from a clothesline. He is well armed....”
    “Desperate, dangerous, mad dog.” Nothing was said of the three other criminals who had escaped when Morgan Dane seized a guard’s pistol and shot his way out of Raiford. They didn’t count. Only Morgan Dane counted. Dane was a convicted murderer, due for execution. He had been wanted on a Federal count; he had also been wanted by the marines for shooting an officer; but these facts had not been known at the time of his conviction. His trial – for the killing of n turnkey in a county jail – had been spectacular because Dane, barehanded and manacled, had twice nearly escaped from a crowded courtroom. There were scarred men who would remember those attempts the rest of their lives. There followed a speedy conviction, the setting of an early date for execution, and Dane’s defiant oath that he would never die in the chair. They took him to Raiford, chained. He was out in three hours, without chains, and armed.
    Incredible, unless you remembered how fast he could be under compulsion.
    “His hair isn’t reddish,” I said. “It’s tawny. And so are his eyes. A sort of mustard color.”
    Nick switched off the radio. “I never seen ’im,” be said. “Except in the papers. I don’t wanna see ’im.” Then be said, “You think he’s crazy, mebbe?”
    “No. He’s not crazy. He knows what he’s doing.”
    “Then why you think be came back down here?” “ I’ve been wondering about that. Of course, he was raised down here.”
    “ Mebbe he got woman somewhere.”
    “I’ve never heard of him having one.”
    I’d never thought of that side of him, but now it struck me as odd. One would expect a man like Dane to have women. He was young, and many women must have found him attractive. Yet, as far as was known, there had never been a woman in his life. I did remember a girl in his youth, but she hardly counted. Back in high school there had been little May Kelsey, a thin, sallow, plain girl, one of many in a family of poor crackers. There are May Kelseys everywhere in the South; most of them never finish the grades and early take up the burden of perpetuating their kind. A few, like May, hang on a bit longer, trying to better themselves. I think May had become a waitress somewhere, but if Morgan had ever seen her after that unfortunate incident that drove him from school, I had no knowledge of it.
    Nick got up and went behind the counter. He lit a kerosene burner and put on fresh coffee. “That feller, he got two brothers, remember? Fishermans. Mebby they help ’im get away someplace.”
    “No, I believe they both moved from the coast after the old man died. Jerry Dane went to Texas. I don’t know what happened to Luke.”
    Behind me, the screen door opened quietly. A shadow fell across the counter. Tire angle of the morning sun made the shadow huge and black, so that it seemed to fill the narrow diner. Nick, turning, was suddenly eclipsed by it, frozen, petrified.
    I was able to look only at Nick. The shadow held me as it held him. I heard the quick, sure movement and the click as someone closed the inner door and locked it, and 1 knew the tiger had slipped past the beaters and was in here with us.
    The owner of the shadow said, “Stand up!”
    I stood up, and his hand went over me swiftly.
    “Now sit down, an’ jest stay right there.... An’ you, git me something to eat. Eggs, bacon, coffee! Hurry it!” The voice was low and resonant and drawling, but deadly with the purpose and power in it.
    Nick’s mouth hung open. It seemed to be locked open. A muscular spasm dosed it, and he swallowed; then it fell open again and hung loose, twitching as a piece of live, severed flesh might twitch.
    A long brown arm with blue crossed anchors tattooed above the wrist whipped over the counter, and a band slapped as quickly as a striking snake, twice, rocking Nick’s head to left and right, “Damn you, git a-goin’! Scramble them eggs! A stack of ’em! Anybody comes, you tell ’em you ain’t open yet!”
    “Yeah,” said Nick. “Sure, sure.” And like a hairy puppet vitalized and set in motion by the slapping, he turned jerkily to the stove and began breaking eggs into a pan.
    Beside me, the lean, unshaven man in the blue shirt and khaki trousers placed a band on the counter and flipped his long hard-muscled body over to the other side, and stepped backward into the shallow recess between the stove and the refrigerator, where a door led into the filling station. With the same easy, tireless flow of movement he reached behind him and opened the filling-station door a few inches and glanced in quickly, and then closed it and stood leaning there against it in the half shadow, his narrow, tawny eyes sliding from Nick to me and to the window overlooking the road, and then back to the telephone on the wall at his right shoulder. His pockets sagged with what must have been extra ammunition and other articles taken from Carleson, and Carleson’a big pearl-handled pistol was thrust into his trousers over his belt, but be seemed contemptuous of drawing it or of even letting his hand stray near it. His whole attitude was one of grim contempt for everything.
    He plucked a doughnut from a jar on the refrigerator, crammed it into his mouth, and then opened the refrigerator and found a pitcher of orange juice and drank from it greedily. He replaced the pitcher and closed the door upon it, and slowly drew the back of his hand across his mouth. If be was tired, be didn’t show it. He looked much older than he was, which was only twenty-four, but he seemed fresh and alive and charged with a sort of savage power.
    This was the first time I had seen Morgan Dane in seven years. But 1 realized suddenly that I had always been seeing him, nearly every day of my life. I’d seen his taut, bony face with its hard cheek ridges and flaring jaws all over the South. I’d seen Morgan Dane in the mountain patches of the Carolinas, in the rod clay lands of Georgia, in the piny flatness of Alabama and Florida. I’d seen him riding herd in Texas. For his was the brown, hard, sun-etched face of the South, The South that sweats. The only difference was that this face in front of me stood boldly above all the rest of them, and it was bad. Not evil or vicious. Just bad. It showed the tiger.
    “Hurry them vittles,” he drawled at Nick, who bad ceased to possess an identity and was an automaton pouring eggs into a skillet. “An’ you,” be said to me, “that your car out there?”
    “Yes.”
    “Toss me the keys.”
    I did so, and he caught them and slipped them into a pocket, and then his hand went to the telephone. I thought he was going to tear out the wiring, but instead he did what, under the circumstances, seemed a strange thing. He lifted the receiver and called long distance.
    It was a Tampa number he asked for, and he got it almost immediately. And then a subtle change came over him. He seemed anxious, although there was no hint of it when he spoke. His low, resonant voice said, “You know who’s callin’. I want the two o’ you to meet me. You know where. Git goin’ right away, an’ take ’im with you. I got to see ‘im.”
    The other person must have protested, for he stood there suddenly tense, listening, his full, evenly formed lips thinning, the nostrils of his short nose flaring. So absorbed was he that for a half second I wished I had something heavy enough to hurl at him, and in the next breath I was thankful I hadn’t; I was half again his age and no possible match for anyone of his uncanny speed. It was a side of him I knew a great deal about, for I’d helped in its development. I strained and tried to bear the voice of the person who spoke to him, but could not, nor could I guess whether it was a man or a woman.
    He said abruptly, “You do what I any or I’ll head straight for Tampa an’ all hell ain’t a-goin’ to stop me! I got to see ’im. Now git ’im, an’ git a-goin’. I’ll be there in an hour.”
    He slammed down the receiver and stood glaring with such a look of savage wildness that I half expected to see the phone torn from the wall and hurled through the diner. Nick, scraping a great mass of eggs and bacon into a platter, recoiled from that look and dropped the skillet to the floor. And at the enormity of having ruined part of Morgan Dane’s breakfast, Nick’s mouth again came open with that senseless gape, and he became a puppet with animation suddenly suspended.
    Outside, a car purred off the road and I heard the soft scrape of tires across the hard-packed earth near the filling station. Through the end window I saw it turning – Gregori’s patrol car. At the first sound of it, Morgan Dane did three things almost simultaneously: he pulled his gun, opened the door at his rear and administered the practical therapy of another slap to Nick.
    “Don’t pay ’em no mind,” he ordered Nick. “Anybody comes here, you ain’t open. . . . An’ you, professor, jest sit tight.”
    This was his first admission that he knew me, though he must have recognized me the minute he entered the diner. He’d always called me “professor.” I watched him slide into the dark storeroom of the filling station and stand just inside the partially open door with his gun ready, and while one part of my mind listened to the opening and closing of Gregori’s car door and sought to anticipate and detail the play of each of the several things that could happen here in the next sixty seconds, another part was looking at a seventeen-year-old boy in a coastal school and asking what manner of thing had happened to him to make him what he was now.
    I’ve said that his type was common, but he wasn’t one of the underdogs, one of the poor whites. The Danes were poor, but they were independent. They drank a little and fought occasionally, like any of the other fishermen, but in those days they owned a house at the edge of town and had their own boat. Old Ulysses and the two older boys had built the boat themselves, and they made a fair living with it. And they insisted that young Morgan go to school. Morgan hated the classroom and he reached high school two years behind his age group. He wasn’t dumb. He simply had a contempt for learning and he endured classes only for the privilege of athletics. The school, in turn, end tired Morgan and silently conspired to keep him a scholastically eligible player. Because, on that obscure little high-school gridiron and diamond, Morgan Dane was the shining answer to a despairing coach’s prayer. He was Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth and the Four Horsemen rolled in one. I know, because I was his coach.
    He didn’t play for the crowd. He played only to win, and when he got into action he was a holy terror. His co-ordination and his speed were past belief; there was never any stopping him. I have no doubt that Morgan could have gone on to professional glory if the incident with the Terry boy hadn’t occurred.
    Out of the corner of my eye I could see Gregori’s spare, uniformed figure through the window. He had paused halfway between his car and mine to light a cigarette. In the shadow behind the door, Morgan Dane, motionless as a waiting cat, watched him over my left shoulder. I doubt if Gregori, from where he stood, could see much of the diner’s interior except possibly Nick. Nick, once more the automaton, had picked up the fallen skillet, placed the platter of bacon and eggs upon the counter, and was now in the act of pouring a cup of coffee.
    I saw Oregon drop his match, step on it and come on toward the diner steps. “Nick!” he coiled. “You open, Nick?”
    Nick’s mouth trembled, but no sound came from it.
    Gregori passed from my vision, approaching the door, and then I heard him rattling the doorknob behind roe.
    “Nick, open up! We need some coffee!”
    From the short-wave set back at the patrol car a voice began speaking in a low, indistinguishable blur of sound. Abruptly the deputy called out, “Hey, they’ve found Corleson’s car!”
    Gregori ran. He fell into his car, and I saw it roar off in second, north in the direction where Mel Terry was waiting with the dogs.
    Morgan Dane came unhurriedly from his hiding place and slid over the counter. He placed his pistol on the counter and sat down in front of the platter and began to eat. I did not look at him. I leaned on my elbows and closed my eyes. I felt very weak.
    At high school, the Terry boy had been one of those breezy, popular youngsters with a glib tongue and a finger in everything. He was as toll as Morgan and much heavier, and, I think, secretly jealous of Morgan’s place in the athletic spotlight; anyway, he was always making some quip at Morgan’s expense, and it usually included a reference to May Kelsey.
    The thing happened one morning between classes. I don’t know what the Terry boy said, but it was something about May, and Morgan hit him. They were coming down the stairway, and young Terry was knocked tumbling; when we got to him at the bottom, he was dead with a broken neck.
    It is hard to speculate upon Morgan’s eventual course if the matter had been handled more intelligently by the authorities. The dead boy was Mel Terry’s son, and Mel had a lot to say in county politics. Morgan was immediately jailed and treated as a common criminal – on action that did no one any good, for he broke jail that very night and ran away. Perhaps, though, the jailing made no real difference. For strong in Morgan was something that is old and deep in the blood of man, but fortunately, weak in most of us. He had killed another, and this alone may have been enough to divert all of him into the one channel of violence. The war and a few years in the marines under another name put a final edge to him.
    And now, inexorably, something in his pattern of violence seemed to be swinging him back to its beginning. Carleson’s car had been found; and at this moment, no doubt, Mel Terry and his men were somewhere back in the pines, following the dogs.
    Morgan Dane tossed down his coffee and stood up. He wiped one hand across his mouth and picked up his gun, and his eyes swept from me to Nick. Suddenly he flipped the gun and caught it by the barrel, and in a whipping blur of movement struck Nick over the ear with the butt. Nick collapsed behind the counter without a Bound.
    “Come on, professor. We’re goin’ places.”
    “We?”
    “Yeah. You’re drivin’ for me.” He unlocked the door and threw it open. “Git goin’.”
    I started to tell him he was making a mistake, but thought better of it and went outside. As he followed me through the door he snatched Nick’s hat from a hook on the wall and pulled it over his head. It was one of those cheap cloth hats so popular with summer tourists; it hid his tawny hair and so altered him that we might have been a pair of fishermen who had stopped here for breakfast.
    Halfway to my car, he said, “ Hold it,” and I stopped, hearing motors coming at high speed.
    He stood beside me, his hands folded over the butt of his gun, which he had thrust back into his belt. A motorcycle flashed by in the checkered sunlight, and then two cars full of men. The second car slowed briefly and faces turned, inspecting us, and then the car went on.
    “Okay,” he said, and I went on and got into my car, and he slid into the front seat beside me and handed me the keys. “Now head south, fast.”
    I turned into the road and shot up to fifty. We left the oaks and came out in the flat hot pinelands again. The road stretched empty ahead.
    “Faster,” he said.
    I speeded up and held it at sixty-five. “There’s a settlement about a mile on,” I reminded him.
    “We’re goin’ through it.”
    “You won’t go far on this road . . . or on any other road. There are police patrols everywhere, and road blocks.”
    He laughed. It was a low, throaty, savage sound. “If they don’t stop me in the next ten minutes, they’ll never do it.”
    We approached the settlement. It was just a half dozen shacks near a sawmill and a railroad siding. A few small children were playing tag with a puppy along the edge of the road. There were no cars or waiting men in sight.
    “Slow down,” said Morgan.
    I dropped to thirty, but he snarled, “Damn you, I said to slow down! You wanna run over one o’ them kids?”
    I crept through the settlement, oddly disturbed by this anomaly in a man like Morgan Dane. And then, remembering the affection that even the worst of the poor whites have for children, I realized it was no anomaly. Men are odd creatures; it takes the more elemental ones to perceive that they attain immortality only in their offspring.
    We sped over a creek. “Easy along here,” he said. Then: “Turn right.”
    I swung into a narrow logging’ trail angling through the pines.
    “Where are we going, Morgan?”
    “You’ll find out.”
    “Look, they’ve got dogs after you. When they reach Nick’s place and find my car gone-”.
    “Dogs can’t trail a boat. It’ll take ’em half the morning to learn I paddled to Nick’s. An’ Nick, he won’t talk for a spell.”
    “Yes, but you made a phone call from there.”
    “Yeah? What of it?”
    I started to tell him that every person he had ever had any close dealings with was undoubtedly being watched, then decided to let him find it out for himself. “Morgan, when you broke out of Raiford, why didn’t you head in some other direction? It was foolish to come down here.”
    “I had to come down here.”
    “What for, Morgan?”
    “Never mind what for.”
    “They’ll find out. They can’t help but find out.”
    “Okay, they’ll find out, but I’ll get there first. Ain’t nobody gonna stop me. Nobody.”
    “All right, you’re going to get there first. Then what?”
    “It don’t matter after that. I won’t give a damn. Anyway, I’ll be a hundred miles off before they learn anything.”
    We were nearing the old coastal highway. I could hear traffic ahead. A few minutes on the highway in either direction, and we would be stopped. I knew what would happen then. I slowed.
    “Look, Morgan.” I said. “You take the car. Let me out here, and on my word I’ll not budge for a half hour. I’d rather not be around when the shooting starts.”
    “There won’t be no shootin’ for a spell. They’re lookin’ for one man, not two. Drive on.”
    “Which way?”
    “Straight across. You’ll see a road. Wait for that truck.”
    I waited for the traffic to clear, then shot over into the woods on the other side. A few miles to the south were towns, groves, winter homes, people. But there was nothing ahead. This was just another one of those by-passed stretches between the highway and the sea that you’ll find so much of along the Gulf. Pines, palmettos, fingers of salt marsh, and then dense mangrove thickets where the land ends.
    I drove through it for twenty minutes, twisting, turning, getting nowhere, it seemed. “Do you know where you are going?” I asked finally.
    “Keep on,” he said grimly. “We’re almost there.”
    And then abruptly we came out beside a narrow inlet banked with mangroves. I got a glimpse of bright green sea beyond a dune, and, crouching in the lee of the dune, a small, weathered house bleached a pale gray in the sun. Two kittens played in the shade of an orange tree by the steps. Bordering the inlet was a spindly pier where nets hung drying on a rack. In the palm grove at the aide of the house was an old truck and a small roadster.
    It should have been a peaceful scene, but peace seemed to have vanished with our appearance. The kittens suddenly retreated under the steps, and a white sea gull that had been sitting on a piling rose and soared away in the brazen sunlight. It might have been the dove fleeing the tiger.
    “Who lives here, Morgan?”
    He did not answer. His eyes were on the roadster. It looked out of place here, and it had only recently arrived, for I could see fresh tire tracks curving over to it.
    “Get out,” he ordered abruptly. “Head for the porch.”
    I got out and went up the sloping sand to his steps. He swung beside me, his long body tense and curving. I crossed the porch and stopped abruptly in front of the door.
    A man in overalls stared at us through the screen. He resembled Morgan, but he was stockier and older. I recognized Luke Dane. Luke opened the door, and his eyes widened upon me for an instant while Morgan thrust me into the small hermit-bare living room.
    “Sit down,” Morgan told me. “There, in that chair. Now hold out your hands.”
    I sat down in a heavy wooden rocker, and he pulled from his pocket a pair of handcuffs he must have taken from Carleson, and handcuffed me to the chair arm.
    Luke Dane ran his tongue over dry lips. “Morgan.” he said, “I ain’t blamin’ you for comin’ here. But you ain’t got no call for—”
    “Where are they?” Morgan asked impatiently.
    “Listen, Morgan. I don’t like you bringin’ the professor—”
    “Dammit, where are they?”
    “In there, in the bedroom. But listen, Morgan. You got to leave soon. In jest a little while.”
    “Eh? Does anybody know?”
    “I don’t think so. I don’t think anybody even knows about me movin’ out here. But somebody’s bound to come here lookin’, an’ this is a bad place. Hit’s on a point, an’ if they block the road they got you cold. I don’t want to see you killed, Morgan.”
    “They can’t kill me. It’ll take ’em all day to trace me here. An’ when I leave, the professor, he’s gonna drive me.”
    “No,” said Luke. “No. You’ll git ’im killed, an’ yourself too. People are worked up an’ they ain’t gonna have no sense when they start shootin’. You ain’t got a chance, drivin’. Look, Morgan, I always done what I could for you. I’m gonna do you one last favor, but it ain’t only for you. Hit’s to keep more people from bein’ killed. My boat’s tied up out there, right back o’ the house. I’m goin’ out an’ git it ready. When you’re through here, you come out an’ leave in it alone. But don’t be long, Morgan.”
    “Okay. Luke.”
    Morgan turned to the bedroom door. In front of it he hesitated and took a deep breath, then opened the door and stepped inside, and closed it behind him.
    Luke stood a moment looking at the door and clenching one hand, then he spun away suddenly through the kitchen and ran out where the inlet curved behind the house. Presently I heard the muffled putter-put of a boat engine. The sound should have brought relief to the fear that had ridden here with me, but it did not. Luke, too, was afraid. I could feel Luke’s fear above my own, a sort of extrasensory awareness of something impending in the heat.
    I looked out of the side window at the pines beyond my car and waited, listening. In the hot sky over the pines a buzzard wheeled slowly, like a living symbol. The sun cut down with the sharp brilliance of a sword, and the air vibrated with the high, thin shrilling of locusts. In the bedroom I could bear Morgan talking in a low, urgent voice. Once I thought I heard a woman answer.
    I sat there a long time watching the pines without realizing what I was waiting for, but once, in a sudden futile frenzy, I tried to break away from the imprisoning chair arm. The symbol in the sky wheeled slowly.
    The bedroom door opened and I turned quickly. A girl came out; a thin blond girl in a cheap print dress. It was May Kelsey. The same plain quiet little May Kelsey, but much older. Her peaked face was determined; only her hands showed her agitation. She looked at me without seeming to notice me, and stared out of the window, twisting her hands.
    “May,” I said, “did he come here – all the way down here – to see you?”
    “ No,” she answered in a half whisper. “ ‘Twasn’t on account o’ me. I’m – -I’m just his wife.”
    “You’re Morgan’s wife?”
    “We been married over a year. We—” She stopped, her thin body suddenly tightening as she peered through the window.
    I jerked around and looked across the stretch of sand to the pines and saw, for back, the glint of sunlight on a windshield. There were other cars in the pines. Men were tumbling from them, spreading out in a sort of deadly slow motion of approach.
    May whirled, staring at the bedroom door, and I thought she was going to cry out a warning. Instead, she flattened against the wall and said nothing. Nothing at all.
    “May,” I said, “you’d better get out of here. Right now!”
    She opened her mouth, and then closed it as Luke Dane came back in through the kitchen. “Morgan—” he said, and then his glance followed mine out to the pines, and he cursed. In a stride he flung open the bedroom door and cried, “Morgan, here they come!”
    Morgan stepped from the bedroom. His eyes were wild. He was cradlings baby in his arms, an infant that seemed only a month or so old.
    “Somebody told ’em I was comm’ here!” he snapped, glaring from me to Luke, and then at May. “They got here too quick! Somebody must ’a’ told ’em!”
    Luke said hoarsely, “Get to the boat, Morgan; get to the boat!”
    “May,” said Morgan, “it must ’a’ been you. It couldn’t ’a’ been nobody else. How come you told ’em, May?”
    She gave a little cry and ran to him and snatched the infant from him and backed against the wall. ”I tole ’em ’cause I felt I had to,” she said defiantly. “You come a long way to see your baby. Now you’ve seen ’im. You was due that, I reckon, but you ain’t due no more ... an’ you know it If I was wrong in tellin’ ’em, let God punish me! I’d rather both me an’ the baby was dead than have ’im grow up like you!”
    From the edge of the pines, Gregori shouted, “Come out, Dane! Come out with your hands up! ”
    Luke begged, “Run, Morgan! They can’t see the boat . . . an’ you kin make it easy!”
    Morgan ran into the kitchen, then stopped and whirled around. From the pines, Gregori had called again, but his voice was drowned by the hoarse, vindictive roar of Mel Terry, rising in the hysteria of heat and locust sound and hate of cursing men, “Dane! Damn you, Dane, we’ll blast you out!” And a sudden volley of pistol shots was the beginning of a fusillade that tore through the flimsy walls und shattered the window.
    In a new frenzy I wrenched free from the chair and sprawled flat on the floor. Then I saw that May had gone to the window and was standing rigidly in front of it, holding the baby close to her breast. It was as if, by this act, she sought to do penance for both herself and Morgan.
    From the kitchen, Morgan cried, “Git away from there. May! They’ll kill you an’ the kid!”
    May shook her head fiercely, and then Morgan leaped back into the room and thrust her aside and pulled her to the floor, and then he ran on out. Not to the rear, but through the front door and across the porch, where he gave a great sound that carried him well away from the house and out on the sand in plain sight of everyone. The firing increased, but now the house was no longer a target.
    Even at this instant I believed Morgan’s speed could have taken him to safety. But Mel Terry’s action seemed to have released, like an explosion, all the fury in him, for, in a burst of deadly movement, magnificent and terrible, the tiger charged the hunters.
    I saw him briefly from the window, savagely alive as he crossed the sand, and for a moment supreme. He gained his objective, for when the firing stopped, he and Mel Terry were lying motionless within a few feet of each other. All around them, scattered men, subdued and somehow ashamed, were converging upon this silent focal point in the pines.

    1948
    (Saturday Evening Post, vol. 221, issue 10, September 4)

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