Manhunt. Volume 14, Number 1, February/March, 1966

He crawled, staying under the palmettos until they petered out. By then he had reached the little footpaths he and Harris had made between the camp and the outer thicket. He started along it, trying to trot quietly as the flowery jungle closed in like the green walls of a narrow hallway.

Cypress roots clutched the edge of the path and fronds touched down every which way, and he didn’t give it a thought when his left foot slashed through one of the crisscrossing creeper vines.

Something instantly started to give and he caught a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye, and he threw himself sideways as a heavy ten foot dead log came crashing across the path.

He looked at the log, at the vine his foot had triggered. It stretched across the path, through a cypress root, and up the side of the log where it had been tied by hand. A deadfall.

He rigged a widowmaker for me, Ramsay thought blankly.

He left the path, plunging into the jungle and scrabbling down to the mucky bank and the looming thicket. He started wading into the ghastly marl, stepping over hoop bushes and clawing his way around the pindowns. The thicket thinned as he approached the log litter where they had left the airboat.

But the boat wasn’t there.

So Tanner hadn’t hung around after he killed Harris. He had gone directly into the jungle and set up the deadfall, knowing that Ramsay would come along the path sooner or later. Then he had hauled off the boat and hidden it. Where? God, it could be in any little setback in the thicket. It would take him hours to find it!

And Tanner was probably somewhere in the thickets too. Where? How near? He looked at the.22’s cylinder. No, he thought, and he quickly broke open the pistol.

One.22 long rifle cartridge. One. Because that was all Harris had needed, knowing that if he missed with the first one a second slug of that caliber wouldn’t do him any good.

“Ramsay!”

The gut-grabbing bellow reacted on him like a bomb. He jumped and shrank into the lofty tules, trying to see everywhere at once.

“Goan kill yuh, taxi boy! Goan feed you to the gators!”

Then Tanner laughed — a high, maniacal laugh that got a short-winged cooter bird all asquawk.

Ramsay crawled into the reeds, the echo of the savage laugh ringing in his ears. He realized that for the first time in years he was at the edge of a complete and violent loss of temper. Tanner had killed a good man, one of the few really good men Ramsay had known. And now Tanner was playing games with Ramsay’s life.

In an odd way he was almost glad that the boat was gone. Now he couldn’t run for help. For the first time in his life, out of all the false beginnings and phony endings, he was going to have to stick to one thing and see it through.

He snaked through the tules, under the pindowns and around the gargoyle cypress knees — then stopped in consternation when he suddenly found himself face to face with a big bull gator drowsing on a fallen tupelo. The huge saurian started to unhinge its ponderous jaws with a wet hiss, and Ramsay beat a hasty detour.

The marsh dust was balling in the air, covering him with a fine powder, turning to mud where his clothes were wet. The sun was straight up and hell hot, but the jungle was looming now, and he plunged through the last of the reed and gained the mucky bank.

Here at its outer edge, the jungle was thickly grown with cocoplum, bay and willow shoots interlaced with bamboo. The thorny vines tore his shirt, entangled his feet, snatched at his pants.

Sweating a pint a minute, he smashed through to a place where the ground was still marshy but the island more open. Dense laurel bushes crowded him, and the gums and bay trees and swamp pines rose higher, their branches spreading overhead.

Stopping to listen, he thought he heard Tanner following the run of the creek. But it might have been anything from a gator to an otter.

He crept along the path that led to the downstream bog at the foot of the trapline, looking right and left. He actually didn’t have any plan in mind. He was simply keeping on the move.

He came to an abrupt stop, staring at a length of grapevine across the path. It was partially concealed with dead leaves, as if a breeze had banked them there. Crouching down he pawed aside the laurels on one side of the run.

A six-foot sapling was cocked back to the ground and held in place by a forked branch. The end of the grapevine was tied to one tine of the fork. A hunting knife, blade up, was lashed to the tip of the taut sapling. A spring trap.

He triggered the vine with an outstretched foot. The fork flew out and the sapling sprang at the path with a swish, the steel blade describing a flashing arc. Ramsay yanked the knife free, looked around, and let out a sharp, painful cry — “Aagh!”

Dodging into the sheltering laurels, he dropped to his knees. His damp hand gripped on the butt of the.22 as he waited. He felt like a guitar after a quadrille solo, beat and trembly.