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Ashley went to the deputies’ car and punctured all four tires with his buck knife, then opened one of the hood panels and reached in and yanked several wires off the engine and flung them far into the brush.
    “Now you boys get goin,” John Ashley ordered. “And tell your daddy, Bobby, the next time he sends someone after me he best send a whole man.”
    The two lawmen started off for the highway with their arms around each other’s shoulders, their three-legged gait awkward and shambling and the Ashley brothers’ laughter in their ears. The brothers watched them at their slow progress until they were distant figures nearly a half-mile away against the redly rising sun. Then John Ashley went to the disabled Model T and tossed the wooden leg onto the backseat and he and Bob went on to their camp.
    An hour later the brothers had the hides on the wagon and had retrieved and hitched the mule and were on the corduroy track for home.

THREE
    March 1912
    F OLLOWING HIS RELEASE FROM THE P ALM B EACH C OUNTY J AIL he’d made directly for the deeper reaches of the Everglades, avoiding all the various waycamps he and DeSoto Tiger had ever used, bypassing widely all Indian villages and the possibility of informers who would point out his direction to some who might come inquiring. For five days he poled his dugout through the maze of waterways winding through sawgrass and around hardwood hammocks and palm islands and pine stands and along sloughs wide and narrow until he arrived in a region unfamiliar even to him, who had lived in the Everglades all his life and hunted and trapped and ranged over a considerable portion of it. For five nights he slept in the dugout or on the raised ground of hammocks, face and hands coated heavy with muck against the mosquitoes. Quick rain showers came and went, drumming on the hard crown of his bowler. And when he was at last so deep in the wilderness he could not except in the vaguest sense have said where he was, he beached the dugout in the high dark shade of a cypress-and-palm hammock and there made a camp of sorts and settled in to let time pass and to ponder the possibilities of his future.
    He’d heard that John Ashley had been warned about the murder warrant and had left the state to avoid prosecution, but the put little stock in the rumor. No telling where the man might be. He could be hid out somewhere in the Glades just as he himself was and who’d know it but them who’d never tell. Besides, there were other Ashleyswho might come looking for him and any of them capable of settling accounts for brother John. Lay low was the thing to do. Way out here where none but the wildest ever ventured.
    He subsisted on fish and turtles, on eggs pilfered from bird nests. He built small cookfires of lighterwood only in the brightest hours of the day the better to hide against the sunlight and clouds whatever smoke might ascend through the thick cover of the cypress branches. He napped often but never deeply and always with an ear cocked for anomalous sound. At various times every day he climbed high in a tree and scanned the horizon for signs of encroaching others but saw none.
    A week went by and then another and with the passing of each day he grew more confident that his hideout was a good one. He constructed a solid lean-to of saplings and palm fans against the occasional rain shower and the nightly dew. He built a bed of palm fronds. On the far side of the hammock he discovered a wide shallow creek just beyond the reach of the tree overhang, its current clear and smooth and thronged with turtles and bream and bass as long as his forearm. His immediate thought was of a trotline, a line with baited hooks affixed to it at intervals and let to hang into the water from one bank to the other overnight and retrieved the next day with its catches. In the dugout he had a sufficient length of line and plenty of hooks, and about ten yards onto the grassy bank on the other side of the creek stood a small