The Choiring Of The Trees Part 20

"We got a secont?" Ernest requested. "I want to say good-bye to Old Sparky."

"That door." Nail pointed, and Ernest went through it. Nail followed and turned on the one green-shaded overhead light that illuminated the death chamber. The familiar stage seemed strange, empty of all its actors...and its actress. The chair needed dusting. Ernest stood and stared down at it. Old Sparky looked far less menacing than Ernest had depicted it-as harmless, in fact, as some derelict piece of obsolete machinery. Ernest gave its leg a little kick with his shoe and said, "Mr. Spark, I hope you don't never git another customer. You won't git me."

"Come on," Nail urged, leading him out. "Let's git that ladder." Nail reached up into the top shelf of the broom closet and found the key Viridis had smuggled in to him, and the whiskey pint bottle filled with mustard oil. He gave the bottle to Ernest and said, "Carry this. Don't lose it."

"Can I have a drink of it first?" Ernest asked.

"It aint to drink," Nail said. "It's mustard oil."

"What's it for?"

Nail didn't want to take the time to explain. "Now look, Ernest," he said, more severely than he intended, "you let me do the talkin on this little trip. You jist do what I tell you and keep your mouth shut."

Nail unlocked the padlocks holding the ladder to the wall. He decided to return Fat Gill's key-ring to his belt. Then he tightened the fuse that ran to the circuit of the projector. They could hear the men in the barracks cheering as the motion picture resumed. It would be a few minutes before the warden or anybody else would begin to wonder why Fat Gill had not returned. And maybe a lot longer, if the movie was really interesting.

"Let's go," he said. The last thing he did before leaving the powerhouse was to open all of the circuits except the one to the main building, running the projector. The big lights in the guard towers went out. The guards up there would sound an alarm, but now the circuit powering the alarm was open too. By the time the guards could get down from the towers and into the barracks to notify the warden that the searchlights were dead, the searchlights would no longer be needed.

As Nail carried his end of the ladder through his tomato patch, he realized he and Ernest were trampling the young plants, but that couldn't be helped. He didn't mind that he would not be here for the harvest in July and August. When he had planted the tomatoes, he hadn't expected to share in the harvest himself.

The sun was down, but the sky still held some of its light. Nail could hear the guards up in the towers hollering at one another: "What happened to the lights?" and "You got a lantern?" and "Not me. You got one?" Slowly he raised the ladder against the high brick wall. As he had suspected, it did not reach all the way up. That was why he had attached a rope about eight feet long to the top rung: they would have to stand on that rung and reach up and pull themselves up onto the top of the wall and then pull the ladder up after them.

Which they did. Nail went up first and balanced himself carefully on the wall, discovering it wasn't as broad and thick at the top as he had expected. He straddled it and reached down as Ernest handed up to him the end of the rope.

Then came the really tricky part, as they say. Ernest and Nail had to move apart, straddling the wall, so that there would be enough s.p.a.ce between them to pull up the ladder and turn it and lower it to the outside of the wall. Without exchanging a word, they gingerly performed this maneuver, Ernest lifting the bottom of the ladder over his head and pointing it toward the outside, while Nail held the top rung and the rope.

In his months of thinking about the escape, Nail had often wondered if the ground outside the wall, on the east side, would be lower than inside. He had no way of knowing. It stood to reason that the levels would be the same, that the wall stood on firm, flat ground. But from his one trip with Dempsey to the warden's house, Nail had observed how sharply the land on that side, the north side, sloped downward away from the wall, and he was prepared to find that the slope was similar on the east side. But in this darkness they could not see the ground down there beyond the wall.

With Ernest steadying the ladder and letting go of it rung by rung, Nail lowered it until he was holding the end of the rope. The ladder still twisted and swayed. Nail's forehead broke out in sweat. "G.o.dd.a.m.n," he said, just loud enough for Ernest to hear him. "I caint touch ground. The ladder won't reach."

"Must be a long way down there," Ernest said in awe.

Could there be, Nail wondered, some kind of dry moat running around that end of the wall? The eight-foot rope was attached to a ladder of about thirty feet. So was it over forty feet down to the ground? He kicked out behind him with his legs until he lay on his stomach flat across the ridge of the wall. "Hold me down," he told Ernest, and he leaned and stretched as far down the outside of the wall as he could, with the rope in his fist...until finally it seemed he could feel, through the rope, that the shoes of the ladder had touched ground. He tugged the rope end against the wall, but the contact he'd made with the shoes seemed to vanish. He could only hope the shoes would hit ground and the side rails would lean the right way against the wall when he let go of the rope. He let go and waited.

Then, after a time, they heard the ladder crash to the ground.

"YOU HEAR THAT?!?" a voice in the tower called, and another voice answered, "THERE'S SOMEBODY OUT THERE!" and from a third tower another voice tried to subst.i.tute for the dead alarm bell by yelling at top volume, "JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK! JAILBREAK!" The lights in the barracks, on the same circuit as the projector, came on, and Nail knew the movie was aborted.

"Lord G.o.d!" said Ernest. "What do we do now?"

"We sh.o.r.e caint jump fer it!" Nail said. "We'd break our fool necks."

"We gonna jist sit here till they come and git us down?"

Nail pointed. "See that?" Down toward one of the guard towers, about five feet out from the wall, there was the silhouette of a smooth cypress pole of the electrical system, carrying power to and from the engine room. It occurred to Nail that this pole, intended to help bring in the current that would have extinguished his life and Ernest's, now offered the only hope of saving them. "Jist watch me," Nail told Ernest, "and see if you caint do what I do." Nail raised himself and stood up on the wall, balancing carefully, trying to feel the slightest warning in the delicate balance mechanisms within his ears as he placed one foot in front of the other until he was as close to the power pole as he could reach; he bent at his knees as if about to squat, then sprang up and out toward the cypress pole, slamming his body against it painfully but throwing his arms around it, and then his legs. Slowly he slid down the pole until his feet touched ground.

He wanted to kneel and kiss the ground, the free earth of the outside world, but he stood and watched Ernest teetering along the top of the wall toward the same leaping-spot. Ernest swayed and nearly toppled but caught himself, fighting the air with his arms for balance. "Come on," Nail called. "You can do it, son." Ernest reached the spot of springing but hesitated, as if trying to measure the distance, to determine consciously what had been instinctive for Nail moments before: the exact amount of effort necessary to reach the power pole without slamming into it and knocking yourself out.

Still unsteady, Ernest hesitated as he stared at the power pole and then pantomimed the first tentative flexing of his knees in order to leap. Nail realized that it might have been like this if he had gone first to the chair: watching Nail get electrocuted might have made it all that much harder for Ernest. Here Nail only wanted to show him how it was done. But was he leading the boy to attempt an act beyond his strength and ability?

Nail wanted to pray. But he did not. He heard the trees praying for him. Out there, beyond The Walls, they were all over: real trees, saplings and old ones, hickories, oaks, scrub pine and white pine, blackjack, all kinds of trees crooning to Ernest the song to get him out to that pole and down to the ground.

The singing stopped. Light shone on Ernest. The tower guards had obtained lanterns. "THERE HE IS!" a guard yelled, and another guard yelled, "HOLD THAT LIGHT STEADY AND LET ME GIT A SHOT AT HIM!"

"Jump!" Nail yelled up at the boy. "For G.o.dsakes, jump and grab the pole!"

Ernest flexed his knees once again and sprang out for all he was worth.

For more than he was worth: he jumped much too hard and almost caused the pole to bend with the force of his body slamming into it, stunning himself so brutally that he could only make the most clumsy grabs at the pole with his hands before he fell the forty feet to the ground, flat out.

Nail knelt quickly beside him. Ernest moaned. He was alive and conscious. Nail smelled something and realized it was the mustard oil: Ernest's fall had broken the bottle. "Can you move?" Nail asked, and tried to get him to sit up or roll over.

Ernest shook his head and groaned weakly, "I reckon I've done busted ever bone in my body." Nail tugged at his arm. "Ouch! Naw, I caint move. I've had it, Nail. You git on. Git on out of here."

Nail fished the bottle of mustard oil out of the waistband at the side of Ernest's trousers. The bottle was only cracked, and there was a good bit of oil left. He began smearing it on Ernest. "I'll rub this stuff on ye so the dogs caint smell ye, and I'll drag ye off in the woods and-"

"You aint got time!" Ernest protested. "Please, Nail, git yoreself out of yere while ye still got a chanst!"

"I caint jist leave ye!" Nail told him.

"The h.e.l.l ye caint! You'd be a d.a.m.n fool not to. You'd regret it all the rest of the days they'd keep ye back in those walls before they fried ye! Go, G.o.dd.a.m.n ye, git and go!"

Nail heard the warden's bloodhounds, who already knew Ernest's scent, being taken out of their pens. Nail said, "I sh.o.r.e hate this."

"Don't make me baig again," Ernest begged. "Jist go."

Nail began to smear the mustard oil on his shoes and legs and arms and hands. Then it was all gone. "Ernest..." He tried to say some last words.

Then the lanterns of the tower guards found them, and he heard a guard yell, "THERE HE IS! THERE'S TWO OF THEM!"

"Go," Ernest said, weakly. "Go, go, go on and go."

"Good-bye, son," Nail said. "Somebody will take care of you." Then he sprang up and began running.

He heard the rifles firing. Were they shooting at Ernest? Would they kill a fallen boy?

In the dark, Nail could not keep running. It had been a long time since he had taken a good walk, and much longer since he had run. The dogs would be able to outrun him because they could see much better in the dark. But finding Ernest would slow them down. He hoped the guards handling the dogs would stop them before they started into gnawing on Ernest...if they hadn't already shot him.

Nail paused at the edge of the swamp to catch his breath and listen. He heard the dogs behind him, in the distance, trying to find his trail. He had so much mustard oil on him they couldn't possibly sniff him out unless the scent of him in the night vapors was enough to give them a lead. He turned and skirted the edge of the swamp and began looking for the sycamore tree. He hoped he was pointed in the right direction, to the southwest of The Walls. He could still see the penitentiary looming high on its knoll in the distance, and he saw how the ground dropped off sharply on every side. That was why the G.o.dd.a.m.n ladder hadn't reached.

If he could find the sycamore and get that revolver loaded (or maybe she had already loaded it for him), he could shoot those dogs if any of them traced him, and shoot any man who tried to come after them. He plunged onward, and in the dark he could not keep the edge of the swamp clearly in view. He made a misstep and suddenly found himself up to his waist in water. For a moment the shock of the water took his breath away, but then he laughed, because it was the first time he'd been in water since his arrest nearly a year ago. This was his first bath in ages, and he loved deep water. He splashed briefly and then swam hard and fast until he reached the opposite bank of the swamp, and climbed up, and found himself within view of the tall sycamore tree splashing the sky with its fingers, shaking its dark-green mane.

He shook the water from himself; he was wet all over but would soon be in dry clothes. He was concerned that the water might have washed away the mustard oil, but a deep breath told him he still stank of it. He wanted to run up and hug that tree. So he did.

Viridis had told him there was only one tree in the vicinity; this one certainly dominated all the others around it, and at its foot he found the flat rock she had described to him: an ideal place for hiding something. But nothing was underneath it, and his groping did not discover any other flat rock nearby. Nail heard the dogs-running closer, he thought-and the distant voices of men.

Abruptly he remembered that this was Friday night, and Viridis had not planned to hide the cache until Sat.u.r.day afternoon. If this had been Sat.u.r.day night, he might not be alive. He was alive, but there was no cache: no canvas bag, no gun, no food, no money. He thought how hard it was going to be without those things that Viridis had meant for him to have. Would all of his planning, and all of hers, come to nothing?

Nail ran on. Or stumbled on; his wet trousers and debilitated condition kept him from running. He had a sense of direction. The sycamore tree was southwest of the penitentiary, but his destination was to the northwest. He veered. As he struggled onward, around the edges of other swamps, through some of them, getting wet again, he kept pressing to his right, turning slightly without, he hoped, starting a great circle that would take him right back where he came from. Eventually he came out on the cement of the Hot Springs highway, one of the first paved roads in that part of the county, and far up it he could see the headlights of automobiles approaching from the penitentiary road.

Quickly he crossed over the road and found himself in a lumberyard, among stack after stack of sawed and kilned boards. He remembered that many of the men in the barracks were sent out to work in this lumberyard and came back to the barracks smelling of the same fresh-cut wood that now surrounded him. He realized that all these boards had recently been trees in the forests, and those trees had died and stopped singing to make these piles of wood. Or maybe they had not stopped singing: maybe these piney, pitchy, turpentiney fragrances were the continuing song of the trees, who never died as long as they could still broadcast their odors. He moved among the stacks, finding himself in a labyrinth of lumber. The butchered trees imprisoned him. He hadn't helped fell them or cut them, but now they menaced him and would not let him out. He thought of turning back to the highway, but the sound of the automobiles kept him from even turning that way in his frantic threading of the maze. It seemed to take forever to reach the back side of the lumberyard, where he broke free from the stacks of boards and found a high wire fence. He couldn't get a toehold in the links of the fence to climb it. If he followed the fence, he would probably come back to the highway, where the cars patrolled. He gathered up some boards of different lengths and leaned them lengthwise against the fence, their b.u.t.t-ends forming steps for his feet to get him to the top, where he threw a leg over and hauled himself up, and then fell blindly into the darkness beyond. The top of the fence was not barbed, but the sharp ends of the meshed wire snagged and ripped his clothes, and cut a gash the length of his trouser leg, which left him lightly bleeding.

From the fashioned timber of the lumberyard he plunged into a wild, virginal forest on hills that dipped and rose for several miles northward to the Arkansas River. Along the south sh.o.r.e of that river ran the tracks of the Rock Island Railroad, almost parallel to the Iron Mountain tracks on the north sh.o.r.e that Viridis had taken. The Rock Island tracks were his immediate destination: if he could reach them and get aboard a freight train and ride westward as far as Ola or Danville, he'd then be in a position to head north toward a crossing of the river that would get him to the vicinity of either Russellville or Clarksville, jumping-off places for Newton County.

For now, he had this forest to get through. He was already tired enough to drop, and growing hungry, and thirsty almost enough to risk drinking stream water, but although he found and crossed several rivulets and a creek, he would not risk drinking any water he could not see. Unless it was a spring and he could tell just from its feel or sound that it gushed or oozed directly from underground, he would not drink running water, let alone the still water of the swampy places.

Toward the first light of morning, when he figured he must have covered at least eight miles from the penitentiary, and no longer heard any automobiles or dogs or other sounds save the nocturnal soughing of the forest itself, his thirst drove him to dig an Indian well. It would slow him down, but he needed it badly. Near a still pond of water, downhill from it, using a piece of jagged sandstone for a shovel, he excavated a hole about two feet across, until the water began to seep in slowly from the pond. With the scoops of his hands he bailed it out. He let it fill again. He bailed it out again. The third time it filled, and had settled for a few minutes, it was full of filtered water, safe for drinking and for washing his b.l.o.o.d.y leg. His pants and shirt were still soaked, but he couldn't tell, and didn't care, if they were still wet from his plunge in the swamp or from his sweat or from both. He took them off, along with his underwear and his socks, the white cotton ones Viridis had given him. Naked, he dunked his clothes into the hole of water and stirred them around and squeezed them and dunked them again and took them out and wrung them, then hung them over a limb where the morning sun would hit them.

The sun rose about 4:30. A little over eight hours before, he had been a prisoner. Now he was free, and with his thirst slaked and his clothes washed, he began to appreciate his freedom for the first time. Naked, he did a little jig. He laughed. The morning birds watched him oddly. "Howdy, Mr. Sun!" he yelled, and heard his echo off in the woods. He was in a glade, and remembered my letter, and yelled aloud, "I'm glad!" but then he told himself to shut up, even if there was n.o.body to hear him or see him cavorting naked in the sunshine. He jumped into the pond and scrubbed himself, although without soap there was no way he could get all the mustard oil off his skin.

He gave his clothes a couple of hours to dry in the sunshine while he wandered around looking for something to eat. He was hungry enough to eat dandelions, and he did. But he also found a small stream, and from beneath its rocks he picked crawfish, then cracked open their tails and peeled them and ate them raw. It was the first fish he'd had in over a year and the first crawfish he'd ever eaten, cooked or raw; between that and the dandelion salad, he decided, he'd had an elegant little breakfast. And that filtered pond water was as good a beverage as any he could remember.

His clothes weren't quite dry, but he put them back on and resumed his journey. Coming down out of the forest, he saw a house in the clearing and skirted it, but came to another house in a clearing beside a road and had to stay out of scent-range of whatever dogs were there. As near as I can figure by studying maps, he was approaching the Twelfth Street Pike, which today they call Kanis Road, due west of Little Rock. That part of it even today isn't yet developed, and back then you'd scarcely believe that this rural scene was just about seven miles, as the crow flies, from the bed where Governor George W. Hays was sleeping. When Nail crossed the road, he neither saw nor heard anything coming. People were having breakfast; the odors of coffee and cooking bacon drifted to him and renewed his hunger. But the odor of him drifted to their watchdogs and started them barking. On the other side of the pike he entered another woodland and saw no more houses for another two hours of hiking.

The sun was well up in the sky before he came to another road. There was a small village that still bears on maps the name it had then, Ivesville, and he emerged from the woods to the west of it, saw it in the distance, and kept away from it as he approached that last highway he would have to cross before reaching the railroad tracks. Beyond the road on the horizon he could see the bulk of the volcano-like hill that is called Pinnacle Mountain. This road was traveled. He crouched in a ditch behind tall weeds to watch a wagon and team of horses going by, a farmer taking his family to Sat.u.r.day market. An auto came along, and he stayed crouched down. The car was an open Ford, filled with city folks heading for the country. He waited until it was completely out of sight before he rose up. But then, from the direction the car had disappeared, a horse and rider approached at full gallop. He ducked down into the ditch again and hid and waited. The horse, a great roan mare, came into view; the horseman was wearing riding-breeches and whipping the mare's hind end with a riding-crop...but as they came abreast of Nail, he saw that it wasn't a horseman but a horsewoman, her red hair blowing out behind. Nail stood up abruptly and wondered if he was dreaming: it was Viridis! Horse and rider flew on past, toward the city.

He leaped out of the ditch. "VIRIDIS!" he hollered after her. He stood in the road and waved his arms. Horse and rider disappeared into the distance. He wanted to run after them but knew he couldn't run. "VIRIDIS!" he called once more, but the noise of the horse's hooves had deafened her.

What was she doing out here? Looking for him? If so, why hadn't she been looking? She had been staring straight ahead, as if in a big hurry to get somewhere...or as if being pursued. Nail looked in the direction from which she had come, the west, to see if anybody was coming after her, but the road remained empty for a long time, and finally he crossed it.

He was almost certain it had been her. If she knew, as she ought to, that he was on the loose, and she was searching for him, why hadn't she looked? No, he decided: just as she hadn't known he was escaping Friday instead of Sat.u.r.day, and thus had left nothing under the sycamore tree, she still did not know he was free. He knew that she took that mare of hers-what was her name? yes, Rosabone-she took Rosabone for rides out to Pinnacle Mountain. If only he had recognized her an instant sooner.

Soon enough he reached the tracks of the Rock Island, and followed them westward to a place where they began a curve and upward grade. There was a trestle across a small creek (my map calls it Isom Creek, flowing into the Little Maumelle River), and Nail sat beneath the trestle and waited patiently. Large fish lost their fear of him and swam within his view. He could have grabbed one with his hand, or flung it onto the bank, but he had no way to cook it and wasn't about to eat raw ba.s.s. Noon came. He broke off several cattail spikes and ate them; he'd had them before and knew they were as good as wild asparagus, or better, raw. At a place along the creek bank where a spring flowed into the creek and he could easily separate the pure water from the creek water, he scooped up enough to wash down the cattails. While drinking, he heard the train coming.

Slowed by the curve and the upgrade, it was a long freight consisting almost entirely of empty gravel hoppers open to the sky. The first dozen hoppers went by before he decided that no open boxcars were coming. In a burst of energy he ran alongside the train, trying to match its speed, then grabbed on to a hopper's ladder and climbed up. The empty gravel hopper had high metal sides and a bottom that sloped toward the center, where Nail saw a chute for unloading the gravel and a metal beam broad enough to sit on. He hopped down and gripped the beam tight with both hands, as if he were riding a bucking horse; his knuckles stayed white and his hands grew tired.

The rough ride lasted less than a hour before the train stopped. Nail stood up on the beam and could just see over the side. A water tank loomed ahead down the tracks, but the train had not stopped for water. A sign beside the tracks read simply houston, and Nail remembered that the famous man had been an Arkansawyer before he went to Texas. Three men were walking down the track from one direction, and the brakeman was coming to meet them.

Nail ducked back down and heard a conversation: "Seen any riders?"

"Aint looked for none."

"What's in these cars?"

"They're empty. Caint you tell?"

"Wouldn't be somebody ridin one of those empties?"

"Take a look if you want. You huntin hoboes?"

"f.u.c.k hoboes. We're huntin for a man escaped the pen last night."

"Any reward on him?"

"A hunderd dollars."

"Jesus! I'll help you look myself, but there's sixty-three empties on this train. Take you all day to climb up and look into each one of 'em."

"Tell you what. See that water tower up yonder? We'll just climb up on that, and y'all drive under real slow, and we'll look into each of the cars that way, and if we see anybody, we'll wave you down."

The voices stopped. Nail cautiously raised his eyes above the side of the car. The brakeman was heading for the caboose, and the three men were going the other way, toward the water tank. Soon the engine puffed steam and the train lurched and began to move. Nail climbed over the opposite side of the car, hung from the ladder for a moment, watching the tracks in both directions, then jumped down to the roadbed and tumbled into a ditch. He clambered into a stand of weeds and crawled low a good distance from the tracks before he stood up and got as far away from them as he could.

But he continued in the direction of the tracks, because it was a generally northwestward course and that was his inclination. He hiked up through Copperas Gap, keeping the tracks in view, but when he reached the point where they veered sharply westward, he began to think that he ought to abandon his plan to take the train part of the way home. And his sense of direction, which kept wanting to turn north toward home, disliked the train's westerly course. He wanted to get across the Arkansas River and up into the Ozarks. Once in the Ozarks, even the foothills, he would feel as if he were back in his own country, and that would give him strength to walk another week, if need be, to reach Stay More.

Just to the north of Copperas Gap is a place where the Arkansas River, plunging southward and running into a mountain, narrows dramatically and bends eastward. It is one of the river's narrowest pa.s.sages in Arkansas, and it was there, probably, that Nail decided to cross.

In trying to find that spot on my map, I was astonished to discover something very strange: that the hamlet, or settlement, or maybe just a riverbank landing, on the north sh.o.r.e of the Arkansas River, where the current would take him or his body after his attempted crossing at Copperas Gap, was named Nail. Yes, that's what the map said. Now, from my years as postmistress of Stay More and my many dealings with the Post Office Department, I know that two towns of the same name in the same state can't both keep their name very long, and that we already had a town named Nail in Newton County, although in that year, 1915, it wasn't a post office yet and wasn't shown on that same map that showed Nail as a town in the southern part of Conway County, due south of Plumerville, on the Arkansas River. I doubt very much there's anything left of that Nail now, but it was there then. And that's more or less where Nail was headed. Maybe it had been founded by distant kinsmen of his. And maybe it had already pa.s.sed into oblivion, being one of those river towns, like storied Cadron downstream and legendary Spadra upstream, which had once been busy but were now dead. Or maybe, I sometimes think, it existed only as a locale on a map, a name just to show me that this was where Nail would have landed.

He stood on the south bank and measured the river's breadth with his eye, its narrowness at this point compared with its broadening expanse downstream. Just recently, in late May, the river had flooded severely, and now, in June, although the water level had dropped and the banks were more or less back in their original locations, the river was still wide and swift and roiling brown, cluttered with debris.

But Nail was an excellent swimmer. He had swum the Buffalo several times when that wilderness river was at its worst. On calmer pools he had raced his brothers and the friends of his youth, and had never lost. He could swim better and faster on his back than most people could on their bellies. He could swim in the pitch dark...although it was still before sundown when he entered the river. In fact, it was just about the time of day that Sat.u.r.day they would have been coming to take him to another appointment with Old Sparky.

He was aware of this, and he knew that if that had happened, with just him against all of them, his chances would have been slight. Now it was just him against the river, and he was free and proud. Oh, he was foolhardy too, and hungry and tired and weak. And he did not know that no man, however good a swimmer, had ever swum the Arkansas at Copperas Gap when it was as swift as this.

But he was almost sure he could swim that river.

Off.

When she decided to take Rosabone for that run out to Pinnacle, it was to prepare the both of them for a return to Stay More. And her insomnia had been worse than any night since that night before the governor was going to let her (or make her, he thought) get into Nail's cell. She needlessly rose from bed more than once and climbed up to her studio to recheck the contents of the canvas bag she had prepared for Nail and Ernest, to make sure she had remembered it all and to try to determine if anything else might come in handy.

What if they needed a compa.s.s? How about a few yards of mosquito netting? Maybe a bar of soap? Could they use some salt and pepper casters? A pocket watch? At one point in the wee hours she suddenly realized that she had forgotten an important item: matches! They would need to build a fire, if not to keep warm, to cook. She tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen and wrapped a handful of sulphur matches in oilcloth and added them to the other items in the canvas bag, which once again she inspected and checked off her list. Maybe she ought to include a box of raisins. Did Nail and Ernest like raisins?

At sunrise she gave up brooding about the contents of the canvas bag and realized that it would be useless to try to sleep any longer. She got up and dressed, almost automatically donning her riding habit without realizing that was what she intended to do: take Rosabone out to Pinnacle and back. She did not bother with breakfast. She took a few of her own cookies from the cookie jar and an apple for Rosabone.

She rode hard out and harder coming back. "We've got to get in shape, Rose girl," she explained to the horse. "We're going back to Stay More. You liked it there, didn't you? Well, we're going back again in just a few more days."

Usually when she rode out to Pinnacle, she would rest the mare and herself at the foot of the mountain for a while before returning to town. She told herself this time to take it easy, that she wouldn't need to start for the sycamore southwest of the penitentiary until midafternoon at the earliest, but she was too impatient and eager. If nothing else, she could spend the rest of the day finishing her letter to Nail, which she would enclose in the canvas bag, even if it was already too long and, she feared, too candid.

She scarcely gave Rosabone time to dry her sweat before heading back for town. More than once she met or pa.s.sed an auto painted with the insignia of the Pulaski County Sheriff or the Little Rock Police, and more than once an officer waved at her; one time a deputy honked his horn at her before waving. They all grinned as if they would like to give chase but had more important things to do. She did not think there was anything unusual about so many lawmen being on the roads on Sat.u.r.day morning, but later she would remember them.

When she returned to her house, her father was sitting on the porch in his favorite wicker chair, reading the Gazette, as he always did Sat.u.r.days and Sundays. He motioned her to sit in the wicker chair next to his, but she said, "No, thank you, Daddy. I've got an awful lot to do today."

"Meeting someone?" he asked.

"No," she said. "I'm not meeting anyone."

"Are you sure?" he asked, and then he turned the paper so that she could see the front page. There was her original drawing of Nail, with his head shaved for his first appointment with the chair, with a caption: NOTED CONVICT WHO MADE ESCAPE. Her eyes shifted to the headline to the left of it: NAIL CHISM SCALES WALLS AT 'PEN' AND ESCAPES. Viridis s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper out of her father's hands and sat down with it in the other wicker chair.

There were no fewer than four subheadlines, one right under the other: NOTED NEWTON COUNTY MAN, CONVICTED RAPIST PREPARED THREE TIMES FOR ELECTRIC CHAIR, TAKES FRENCH LEAVE, and the second one: ACCOMPLICE IN ESCAPE, YOUNG BODENHAMMER, THWARTED AND CAUGHT, and the third one: $100 REWARD OFFERED FOR CHISM'S RECAPTURE, and the fourth one: NEWTON COUNTY ALERTED; FULL MANHUNT PROMISED.

The accompanying story pointed out that Nail Chism was only the second man ever to escape from The Walls since it was erected; but the first one, J.F. McCabe, had made his escape long before the recent "improvements" that had supposedly rendered the prison escape-proof.

The article even carried a reference to her, not by name, in its fifth paragraph: "A Little Rock woman who had conducted a long campaign to liberate Chism, whom she felt had been unjustly accused of the crime, will be sought for questioning later today by the sheriff's office."