Marihuana Read Free Page A

subject———"
     
    Turner's foot edged forward along the floor, pointing toward the hall doorway and escape. His body followed it. He was leaning forward above the waist in crafty, narcotized stealth. They kept their backs turned toward him, absorbed in their befuddled attempts to revive the inert figure on the divan.
     
    He had already gained the doorway unnoticed, was looking back from the semi-sanctuary of the hall, when he saw one of their heads dip down lower over her. Heard the horror-smothered exclamation that followed. "Bill — oh my God, she's gone! I can't hear her breathing any more. It must have grazed the heart———"
     
    He went wavering down the interminable reaches of the hall, rocking from side to side like someone breasting a ship's corridor in a high sea.
     
    Before he was out of earshot one last exclamation reached him. One of them must have looked around and missed him. "Where'd he go? Get hold of him! He can't run out and leave us with her on our hands, we're all in this together!"
     
    And then the reassuring answer, "He probably just went to the bathroom, to be sick. He won't get out without us, don't worry; the door's all chained up."
     
    Oh, won't I? he thought craftily. He kept going, panic simmering deep within him; ready to boil over into a tide of destruction engulfing anyone who stood in his way. The hallway seemed to be of elastic; the more of it he covered, the more of it was stretched away before him. And the seconds went by so slow. He'd been under way, trying to get to that far front door, for fully fifteen or twenty minutes now. They'd come after him soon, they wouldn't wait back there much longer for him to return.
     
    The first of the side doorways that lined the hall came creeping toward him at last. It had been left narrowly ajar. He stopped. The light was on in the room behind it. He crept forward, paying out his hands along the wall as he went, for balance. He found the crack of the door, peered through it. He saw a slice of an iron bedframe, a motionless hand. Emboldened, he advanced to the other side of the doorway, where the gap was. He looked in through that.
     
    One of the two owners, the man who had been sitting in the front room, was stretched out in there asleep, one hand backed against his eyes to ward off the light. He'd taken off his vest and shoes, and that strap that wasn't straight enough to be a suspender-strap was dangling now around one of the knobs at the foot of the bed. It ended in a holster, with a black slab of metal protruding from it. Turner couldn't take his eyes off it, while the long seconds that to him were minutes toiled by.
     
    That meant out, that black slab, more surely than any door. More than that, it meant a continuance of out, for so long as he had it. And he wanted out with all the desperate longing of all trapped things, blindly clawing their way through a maze to the open. To the open where the equal chance is.
     
    He widened the door, until the gap had become entry. He felt his way across the room toward it, using his feet on the floor the way the hands are usually used across an unknown surface, testing for unevennesses that might cause sound, avoiding them where they seemed to lurk. He kept his eyes on the sleeper's half-shielded face; he knew the danger would come from there first, if there was going to be any.
     
    He'd reached it finally. He tilted the bottom of the holster out, to keep it from striking the iron bed-frame. He knew all the right things to do. All the tricks of stealth seemed to come to him instinctively. Or maybe the self-protective facets of his mind had been made keener. Dangerously so.
     
    He drew the gun up until its snub nose had come clear. Then he let the holster down again. He stood there wavering slightly, but with his perceptions diamond-clear. "I've got a gun now. If this town tries to stop me, that'll be this town's hard luck!"
     
    He moved backwards for the room door, in order to keep his gaze