Starfish_ A Novel - James Crowley [54]
“Now, listen. I ain’t gonna hurt ya, but I do need you to answer me this right away. How far back are these folks that did this to ya?”
Tom looked up at Mr. Hawkins with a curious expression. “They’re a ways back. I’ve been running through the night, but they’ll catch me. I know they will.” Tom looked wildly around, resting his gaze on Beatrice and Lionel. “They’re looking for you!”
“Me?” Corn Poe retorted, appearing from behind the big tree with Junebug at his side. “Go figure.”
“Corn Poe, make yourself useful and get this boy something to drink,” Mr. Hawkins instructed. Tom, although battered, bruised, and bleeding, looked to have calmed down a bit. “Now, who’s after who, son? who ya running from?” Hawkins persisted.
“The men, the government men from the outpost. They’re here. They’re here somewhere in the woods.”
Mr. Hawkins’s face tightened. Lionel watched, but Beatrice’s expression remained unchanged.
“Barney decided he’d try to collect the hundred dollars for the return of the horse, but these men…Lumpkin and Jenkins…they’ve gone crazy. went to hittin’ me and Barney after we left the captain.”
“The captain?”
“Yeah, when he heard that his horse was up in the mountains, he formed his own party to set out to retrieve ’im. Jenkins convinced the captain to let him and Lumpkin go ahead to scout. Made me and Barney go with ’em.”
Corn Poe reappeared with a small flask of water and handed it to Tom, who drank it all in a single gulp.
“We were supposed to go back to where the captain is camped to report, but Jenkins, the one with the scar, he said that we’re close enough and that he don’t need the captain to apprehend renegade children, so he made us keep going.”
“How many men’s he got?” Hawkins shot, in a tone that Lionel wouldn’t have recognized as his voice before today.
“Well, back at the captain’s camp, they got about ten, maybe twelve, but Jenkins got about five with him, five not including Mr. Lumpkin. I left in the night ’cause Jenkins hit the bottle and went to beatin’ on me and Barney, claiming we knew more than we let on and that we was leading him on what he called ‘a wild goose chase.’”
Tom paused and tilted the empty flask back toward the sky, draining it of its few remaining drops.
“Barney got the worst of it. I don’t think he cares for the one hundred dollars no more.”
Mr. Hawkins sat back on his haunches and looked up at Junebug, who stood at the base of the tree next to Corn Poe.
“What?” Corn Poe asked.
But Mr. Hawkins stayed quiet.
Chapter Thirty-One
BACK ON THE RUN • ELK AT THE STREAM • SWIMMING • A FIRELESS CAMP • THE TRUTH ABOUT AVERY JOHN & JUNEBUG HAWKINS
THEY RAN as a group back to the meadow in silence, Mr. Hawkins prodding Corn Poe and Tom Gunn to keep up for the majority of the journey. when they got back to the meadow Mr. Hawkins told the boys to take Tom to clean up down at the stream.
They left Mr. Hawkins and Beatrice standing in front of the lodge with the horses, and Lionel felt a heaviness that he had not experienced since they had run away from the boarding school, the same haunted presence that had left him that first night at their grandfather’s house on the Milk River.
Lionel walked ahead, leaving Corn Poe rambling on to Junebug about his various theories as to the true motivations of the government’s pursuit. Junebug was a good listener and therefore Corn Poe’s preferred audience.
When Lionel got to the stream, from the corner of his eye he saw something move. He turned, hoping for a moment that his grandfather, having heard that there was trouble, had come back. Instead, he found that he had interrupted a family of elk drinking from the swirling stream.
Lionel watched as the elk casually drank their fill and moved from the water to the woods. Lionel locked eyes with the bull elk as he paused to show his wide antlers before fading into the trees. Lionel was still thinking about the elk’s dark black eyes as Corn Poe, Tom, and Junebug reached the stream.
“My vote is that we head to Canada. They already