Find a Victim

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He was the ghastliest hitchhiker who ever thumbed me. He rose on his knees in the ditch. His eyes were black holes in his yellow face, his mouth a bright smear of red like a clown’s painted grin. The arm he raised overbalanced him. He fell forward on his face again.

I stamped the brake-pedal and backed a hundred yards to where he lay, a dark-headed man in jeans and a gray work-shirt, prone among the jimson. He was as still as death now. But when I squatted down beside him I could hear the sigh and gurgle of his breathing.

Supporting his hip on my knee and his loose head with my arm, I turned him onto his back. The blood at his mouth was breaking in tiny bubbles. The breast of his gray shirt was dark and wet. Unbuttoning it, I saw the round hole among the sodden hairs on his chest, still pumping little bright spurts.

I removed my jacket and tore off my own shirt. Wadding it over the bullet hole, I fixed it in place with my tie. The wounded man stirred, and sighed. The eyelids quivered over the dusty-black eyes. He was a young man, and he was dying.

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