Dead Man Walking by Derek Rutherford

Author:Derek Rutherford [Rutherford, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Robert Hale
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The ride this morning felt longer, hotter, and harder than the previous day. Jim knew this was because he had slid into the darkness last night and had filled his body with poison. It had felt good at the time. Or rather, it had stopped him feeling bad. But he hadn’t gone through everything in New Mexico to slip backwards into that previous way of living. He rested his hand on McRae’s gun at his hip. They hadn’t killed McRae for nothing back in the Crossing either. No, last night had been a one-off. The shock of seeing the captain again had snapped him back in time. But it wouldn’t happen again.

He stopped at the creek, drank as much as he could, and filled his waterskin. He was still shaking. Not through fear, though he did recognise that fear was present, deep inside, like a small warm rock. The shaking was his body’s reaction to all that whiskey. He was glad that none of his friends back in Parker’s Crossing had seen him. He had lived like that for months until breaking free of that life. People had died – some at his hand – to make it happen.

Whatever happened here, he wasn’t going back to that life.

The sky was clear blue and cloudless. A hawk circled lazily on thermals. There was freshness in the air – the scent of grass and pine trees – and a very slight breeze that lifted the whiskey sweat from his skin.

He circled Camp 13 and found the creek that flowed down through the camp far below. He stopped in the thick copse of trees from which the creek emerged. Down below he saw the usual guard at the gate, the kid and his dog running back and forth over by the big house. He watched the dog chase a rabbit into the trees behind the house. The creek had, in wet years, worn quite a deep channel into the clay ground. The channel, coloured with parallel lines of clay in different hues of red and brown, ran behind the huts and, although it wasn’t perfect, Jim saw that a man could probably crawl all the way up from the camp and into this copse of trees without being seen. Well, he would be seen if someone was looking carefully. But if there was something better to look at in the opposite direction, say where those massive piles of lumber were, and say it happened during the day when almost all of the guards were out in the timber fields, then that fellow would likely make it. He could even get beneath the fence where the creek flowed under the wire. Probably wouldn’t even get his head wet. And if there was a horse waiting for him in this here copse of trees and if there was somewhere for them to head towards and hide out in, some water and some food waiting, a fellow might just get clean away. It wasn’t a prison after all.

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