The Big Sky Read Free Page B

settled his shoulders against the base of a tree, feeling his muscles melt. He would get up in a shake and go on, he told himself, and fell asleep at once. He woke up worried and stiff with chill. By the looks of the sunless sky he figured the time to be high noon. He got up, anxious with the feeling that he had wasted time that might go against him, and set off again.
He kept to the side of the trail now, in the cover of the wooded ridges, and scanned the back track when the view opened behind him. The going was rough, this way, but safer, and for mile after mile he climbed and dipped and wound through the timber, until dark began to settle again and he stood high above the valley of the Kentucky river, and through the thickening dusk saw below him a spread of buildings that he took for Frankfort.
    He stood still, and felt tiredness on him like a weight, pulling at his muscles, trying to drag him down to earth. As he halted there on the height where the rolling Blue Grass fell away toward the river, he began to shake with cold. Even yet there was a dampness in his clothes which went chill against his skin as the wind blew up the river, driving through his homespun coat and worn jeans. Little riffles ran across the muscles of his chest and back, and, unless he kept his jaw clenched, his teeth set up a fine clicking.
    There was no help for it, though. He hadn't thought to bring flint and steel, and though he had heard that a man could get himself a fire by shooting at close range into powder sprinkled over lighters he shied from the risk of both shot and blaze. He might go down into the town, of course, and ask for a place to sleep, but there was no telling what people were like, living crowded up that way. Probably there was more law there than a man could believe, and a peck of rules to go by or run into trouble. Anyhow, it was too close to home. Maybe someone there would know him. Maybe they already had heard the law was after him.
    He started angling down the long slope, aiming to the right, away from the town. It was dark when he reached the river, but a light shone from a window downstream and he went toward it, walking soft, letting the noise of his steps lose itself in the sound of the heavy water by his side. He tripped and picked himself up, and then laid down his sack and groped backward until his hand closed on a rope. He followed it down, until it ended at the nose of a boat. His hand went out and explored her bottom and found it dry, and on the gunwales felt the oars shipped in their locks as if the owner had left her against a quick return. He stowed his rifle in her, and his bag, and then, following the rope back up the bank, untied it from the tree and pushed off.
    He wasn't a knowing hand with a boat, and the stream was high and strong, but by and by he got her nosed well into the current and felt her push ahead as he put his back to the oars. The shore faded to a dark rim, far and dim as a cloud in a night sky, and now there was only the river running black beneath him and the pull of it against the boat and the busy whisper of the water. The light ashore fell back and was gone, leaving no point by which he could judge his drift, but he felt the stronger muscle of the current as he came into the channel and knew that he was being carried far downstream. He kept at his oars, bending far forward and coming back with all the power of legs and back and arms, feeling the shuddering give of the blades as he brought them through. A second light peeped at him, distant on the other bank, and he took it for his guide and bent harder to the oars until the current let up and the shore rose like a wall before his eye. He eased her in, then, and pulled her up and tied her and, taking his rifle and bag, set out toward the light.
    He tried to go quiet in the dark, feeling ahead with his feet before he let them down, but a tangle of short growth on the slope crackled under his softest step. From the direction of the house a