"I couldn't run if the devil himself poked me," Ewenge said, watching him go. Jefferson waved as he disappeared from sight. The Jamacian marine mechanically removed the horse's saddle and wiped the sweat from its back.
"They'll be here soon. Walk around a lot and mess up the tracks," Valentine told Post. "If they ask about me, tell them I took off hours ago."
"What about me?" Ahn-Kha asked.
"You left now. Scared Grog running for tall timber."
"You'll leave tracks just like Jefferson, Captain," Striper said. "Maybe they follow you too."
Valentine nodded to Ahn-Kha, who was, as usual, ahead of his human ally's thoughts in throwing a blanket over his shoulders. Ahn-Kha bent over and Valentine climbed onto his back. He clung there like a baby monkey.
"One set of tracks," Post said. "Good luck, sir. Don't worry about us. Remember to find Gail. Gail Foster, her maiden name was. Tell her..."
"You were wrong," Valentine offered.
Post bit his lip. "Just 'I'm sorry.""
Valentine thought of telling Post that he could tell her himself, but with hope vanished from the Ozarks like the winter sun, he couldn't bring himself to offer an empty lie to a friend.
* * * *
Ahn-Kha ran, legs pounding like twin piledrivers in countersynch, clutching his long Grog rifle in one hand and Valentine's empty gun in the other. The trees went by in a blur.
They splashed up an icy stream, startling a pair of ducks into flight. If the freezing water hurt the Grog's long-toed feet, he gave no indication.
Valentine heard a distant shot from the direction of Post's group.
"Stop," he told Ahn-Kha.
Ahn-Kha took two more steps, and placed Valentine on a flat-topped rock midstream.
"You need a rest?" Ahn-Kha asked, blowing.
"I heard a shot."
"Maybe a signal?"
"Or something else."
Only the running water, wind and an occasional bird could be heard in the Arkansas pines and hardwoods. Ahn-Kha shivered. Valentine saw a fallen log upstream, felled by erosion so that it lay like a ramp up the riverbank.
"Let's cut back. Carefully."
* * * *
It was Tayland. His eyes were shut, and he had the strangely peaceful look of the recently dead.
They'd just left him in the woods on his litter, wrapped in blankets that would soon be disturbed by birds or coyotes, a bullet hole dead center in his chest. The tracks said that a group of men and dogs had turned after Jefferson, but no one had bothered to follow the lone Grog.
As he said a few words of prayer over the deceased, Valentine remembered Tayland, wounded as they fled the ambush at Bern Woods, cutting the horse free from the traces of a teammate with a big bowie knife. He rooted around at the man's waist, and freed the knife and its scabbard.
The blade was sticky with its owner's blood.
"Shall we bury him?" Ahn-Kha asked.
"No. They might send a party back to get the body. You never know."
"The tracks lead back to town," Ahn-Kha observed. A wide trail showed that men walked to either side of the short-stepping prisoners. They'd probably put them in shackles.