Until You Are Dead Read Free

The change of his color wasn't lost on Bandy McCane.
    "How hard you try?" he asked derisively.
    "Hard enough," Wilson said. "They told me I was Four-F."
    "Lotsa reasons you can be Four-F," Zach observed skeptically.
    "Glad I ain't a reject," Josh said in a solemn voice. "Comes a time to fight, an' this is it."
    Wilson nodded. "I agree."
    "I'd like to see your pictures sometime," Maybelle said, blatantly changing the subject.
    "No time now," Zach shouted, jamming the old Ford into gear and gunning protesting life into the clattering engine.
    "No call for painters in this man's war!" Bandy shouted over his shoulder at Wilson as the Ford's big wheels dug into the earth without slipping and the car shot forward. Maybelle lifted an arm in a languid farewell that Wilson barely saw through the dust as the car disappeared beyond the rise where the road gently curved.
    Wilson walked back up onto the porch, listening to the measured hollow thunder of his boots on the warped planks as he strode to his canvas. The conversation with the four native Ozarkians had disturbed him more than it should have.
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    T wo days later he returned after painting a landscape from high on a nearby bluff to find that the cabin had been broken into and many of his paintings had been slashed.
    He stood staring at the disruption of the cabin's interior, unable to see clearly for a moment as an aching helpless rage flared deep in his stomach, then gradually receded to a painful smoldering. So personal seemed the attack, it was as if the torn canvas were an extension of his own flesh.
    After cleaning up and salvaging what he could of his materials, Wilson drove into Colver to see the local sheriff.
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    "W ho knowed you was at the cabin?" Sheriff Bayne Haynes asked. He was a large man with a vast stomach paunch, beady intelligent black eyes in a fleshy mottled face, and a walnut-gripped .45 Colt revolver holstered to his hip. He was gazing at Wilson amiably from where he sat turned in his swivel chair facing away from the long rolltop desk against the office's far wall. His lean deputy, Rawly Krebs, slouched nearby against a dusty switchboard.
    Wilson hesitated, then told the sheriff about his conversation with Josh, Zach, Bandy, and Maybelle.
    "I don't know definitely that it was them," he added. "They's good boys, but they do tend to act up," Sheriff Haynes said absently.
    "Thass a fact," Krebs added.
    "Anything exceptin' your paintin's broke up?" the sheriff asked.
    Wilson thought about that. "No," he said finally. "A few things were knocked to the floor, furniture turned over, but nothing really broken."
    Haynes rose from his chair with the ease and seeming lightness of an ascending hot-air balloon. There were wide, almost black perspiration stains beneath the arms of his tan uniform shirt. "Down the road a short piece from your cabin," he said, "is a cutoff to Ezekiel Ferber's place. Now, Ferber's got himself a phone. You have any more trouble you run on down there, use that phone to call here, an' me and Rawly'li be up to your place faster'n you can shout rabbit."
    Krebs looked at Wilson and nodded his narrow pockmarked head. "Thass a fact."
    "All right, fine," Wilson said. There didn't seem much else that could be done.
    "If'n it was who we figure, they had their fun an' ain't likely to come back. Thass the way they is, those three boys. Not mean — jus' too full a vinegar."
    "As I said," Wilson emphasized, "I don't really know who it was. But I thought you should know that it happened."
    Sheriff Haynes' bushy graying eyebrows rose and fell like writhing caterpillars. "Oh, you did the right thing, an' no doubt about it." Deputy Krebs nodded silent agreement.
    Haynes licked his lips and squinted at Wilson. "You — uh — do anything to rile them boys? On accident, maybe?"
    "I don't think so," Wilson said. And that was true. He hadn't done a thing. It wasn't his fault they were going into the Army and he was 4-F, or that Maybelle had seemed