Trails to Two Moons/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
Hilma Ring did not obey Ma Agnew's injunction to sleep round the clock. On the contrary, long before the dictated span, she came broad awake with that wrenching jar back to consciousness which leaves one trembling and with a fear shadow inherited from our ancestors, the tree folk,—a vague terror of things unseen in a half-formed world. Suffocating darkness engulfed her. Not a ray of light anywhere. Not a sound. No tangible bound of demarcation between the world of unconsciousness and the domain of sentient life.
The waking terror abided with her as she lay moveless and forced her mind to orientate itself there in the blackness. Bit by bit the pictures of past days' adventures fell into a pattern as bits of glass in the barrel of a kaleidoscope emerge from chaos to geometric exactness. Particularly did the events just preceding her sleeping bulk large and assume significance unguessed when her mind was numbed by fatigue and the strain of convoying the Killer through Two Moons' Main Street. As the girl lay in bed, drawing long, slow breaths—the conscious act of breathing assisted her to confirmation of the belief she really was awake—as she lay thus, her mind leaped to find deductions for the present out of the immediate past.
She was under a jail roof, or she had been when she went to sleep, and a groping hand identified the bed as the same in which she had laid herself down. Zang Whistler also was under the same roof, but behind bars; of that the girl was certain. This big-voiced sheriff with the suave manner of hospitality had spirited Zang from the breakfast table to a cell without even permitting Zang a farewell word with her. Then right away he had insisted she should go to bed.
Hilma's body suddenly stiffened under the thrust of a thought powerful as a blow. She was in jail—arrested!
There could be no doubt about it. The suave sheriff and his wife simply had conspired to effect the trick without a possible scene, first removing Zang Whistler beyond power of protest, then neatly trapping her.
So Original Bill Blunt, the range inspector, had indeed sworn out a warrant against her as Zang had said he might; assault with intent to kill,—was that the way Zang had said it would read?
The girl leaped from bed and began groping. Her hands encountered a wall. Noiselessly she felt her way, hand over hand, along this wall. The stiff cambric of a window shade touched her fingers. She pulled one edge away from the window and looked out. A window, sure enough, framing lighter dark without by its sash. She could see lights in a house some distance away and the faint line of willows along a creek bed. Also, she noted there were no bars across her window.
Absence of bars did not shake her belief she was a prisoner. Evidently, Hilma reasoned, there was no provision for women prisoners in the jail, and the sheriff had locked her in this room temporarily, trusting to her innocence concerning his intention to hold her as sufficient assurance against escape.
The panic that gripped her slowly gave way to determination to escape while opportunity offered. Hilma did not know what the hour might be; the lights she saw through the window indicated it could not be after midnight, at least. She guessed the sheriff and his wife were abed. There was a chance.
Very gingerly the girl raised the shade just enough to lighten the solid blackness of the room. By this uncertain light she groped for her clothes and hastily donned them. She wondered what had become of her precious bundle,—the apron-bound tin box containing her father's sheep books and the photograph of a bridal couple. Wherever it might be, no chance to look for it now.
Fully dressed, Hilma stepped to the window and groped for the lock. She cautiously threw it back and raised the window by inches, shrinking at the dry squeaking the sash made in its groove. Now she had the lower sash raised full length. She leaned over the sill and looked down. Perhaps ten feet below was the darker shadow of the ground. She carefully climbed through the window, lowered herself by her hands gripped on the sill, swayed for an instant, then dropped.
Just as she landed in a heap on the ground, the girl heard a rifle shot, sharp and clear; then another and another. The fusillade seemed to come from the other side of the courthouse building—from the street side. Hilma decided she had let herself out of a room at the rear of the sheriff's quarters, for there was no fence in sight, just prairie.
Now a single hoarse cry and two more shots; then the sound of rapid hoofs.
Hilma bent double and started on a run for the distant line of willows marking the creek's course. She had no definite plan except that of the instant, which was to put as much ground as possible between herself and the jail. Her fear-goaded imagination credited the shots to the sheriff's discovery of her escape; he was summoning a posse or something like that to scour the town in search of her.
She came stumbling through the dark to the first fringe of willows and fell panting into their black shadows. Momentary relief was hers, but when, on looking back to the dark pile she had just quit, the girl saw a light flashing from window to window on the ground floor, black terror engulfed her again. Now she was certain Agnew had discovered the untenanted bedroom, the opened window.
Where could she hide? What was her next step? Like a trapped lynx the mind of the girl roved madly at the end of a short chain, a pitifully short chain of circumstance. She was afoot and more than thirty miles from that little cabin on Teapot recently abandoned so carelessly but this instant seeming precious sanctuary because beyond reach. She had not a friend in Two Moons; there was none in Two Moons she knew except Original Bill, and he was the author of her present abysmal distress. If she remained anywhere in the vicinity of the town she would be caught and locked up in a more secure restraint than what she had just escaped. But how to get back to her cabin, or even to Woolly Annie's home ranch on Poison Spider, where protection might be given her because of the business association that existed between the sheep queen and her father?
There was but one way—a desperate way. That one Hilma determined to pursue, come what might. She started to follow the stream's fringe of willows to that point where the creek made a wide bend in toward the town and passed under the bridge at the far end of Main Street. The intermittent popping of revolvers and snappy answer of rifles punctuated her gropings and stumblings among the willow roots. Nearer and nearer she drew to the black cardboard shapes which represented Two Moons. More vicious became the firing.