The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [162]
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 Saturday 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 Saturday, 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