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timbers they’d laid over the mucky ground for a distance of a quarter-mile to where the ground was higher and the track became a solid limestone trail.From there the going in the wagon was easier the rest of the way to their father’s whiskey camp at the edge of the deeper swamp and but a few miles from Twin Oaks.
    But now they heard the chugging of a motorcar and made out dim headlamps coming along the open ground. The lights progressed on a narrow raised-rock road a timber company had once used to take out pine logs. After clearing the trees for twenty yards on both sides of the road the company went broke and abandoned the site and the Ashleys had since used the road for their own purposes. It originated at the Dixie Highway about a mile to the east and terminated at the palmetto thicket.
    “Who you reckon?” Bob asked, looking off at the coming lights.
    “Nobody we call friend, I’ll wager,” John Ashley said.
    They made for a better vantage point closer to the road as the motorcar came on. They were hiding in the high shrubs near the end of the road when a Model T sedan came clattering into view in the dawn gloam and halted. The motor shut off and the headlamps extinguished and two uniformed county deputies got out of the car and stood staring at the seemingly impenetrable palmetto thicket before them. One of the men said something the brothers couldn’t hear clearly and the other said, “Maybe so but Daddy said check it and thats what we going to do.”
    “Bobby Baker,” Bob whispered. “And Sammy Barfield with him. How you reckon they know about this camp?”
    “No tellin who’s seen us comin and goin on that road,” John Ashley said. “It’s too open. I told Daddy we ought of quit this camp.”
    The deputies now found the narrow path the Ashleys had cut through the palmettos and they trudged into the thicket in the direction of the camp. The Ashleys set out after them, following at a short distance and moving easily as shadows. Halfway to the camp the path abruptly opened into a small clearing where the Ashleys had felled most of the pines they’d used to make the corduroy track—and now John Ashley raised his fist in signal to Bob and they quickly closed in on the lawmen.
    The deputies heard them too late. They turned and saw the brothers emerging from the brush not fifteen feet behind them, saw Bob Ashley holding the carbine at his hip like a long-barreled pistol and John Ashley pointing the .44 Colt as he came.
    “Oh shit,” the one called Sammy Barfield said, and he quick put up his hands.
    The other kept his hands at his sides as Bob Ashley hastened toSammy and snatched his service revolver from its holster and lowered the carbine and pointed the pistol squarely at Sammy’s chest. Sammy’s arms were up as high as they could go and he said, “Oh shit, Bob, dont shoot me.”
    “You’re under arrest, Johnny,” the other deputy said.
    John Ashley was smiling widely as he came up to this deputy and said “Hello to you too, Bobby. How’s daddy’s little deputy?” Bob Baker’s father George was the high sheriff of Palm Beach County and had been since the county’s inception three years earlier.
    John Ashley relieved him of his revolver and gave the piece cursory examination and stuck it in his waistband. Then said: “Under arrest, you say?” He laughed. “Hell, Bobby, do I look under arrest?”
    “For murder, John.”
    “That right? Who’m I sposed to killed?”
    “DeSoto Tiger.”
    “ Who? ”
    “Quit the bullshit. We know you shot that Indian. We got a witness.’
    John Ashley grinned hugely. “Well if I did, I guess it wouldn’t mean nothin to shoot the both you too. I mean, they can only hang me once, aint that right?”
    “Even you aint that damn dumb,” Bobby Baker said.
    John Ashley laughed. He spun the .44 on his finger like a storybook cowboy and then affected to aim very carefully between the deputy’s eyes from a distance of four feet.
    “You dont scare me a