A Favor for Charlie

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I felt a lot better now. The cabin, set in a cleared place in the mountainside with some straggly corn growing in the rocky land around it, had been deserted. I guess the family had took a day off and gone to town in their flivver. I’d broke one of the little windows, which was barely big enough to squeeze through. I reckon it was stealing, but I helped myself to a bellyful of grub, a change of clothes — and a pistol that I stuck in the waistband of my denim pants, and a carbine that I carried in the crook of my arm. I loaded a couple pockets with live ammo. I patted the carbine barrel and decided that if they got wind I was in this neck of the hills and cornered me, they’d better come shooting.

I got out of the cabin just before nightfall. I hoped the folks that owned the place would understand, somehow. I wouldn’t have been stranded if the man I'd been traveling with hadn’t hit me in my sleep and made off with everything I had. No matter how lonesome I was, I should have knowed better than to travel with a hill renegade. I admit that I was on the renegade trail myself, but I ain’t that kind. I wouldn’t hit a man in his sleep, and I take a bath, if I have to do it in an ice-cold creek, rubbing myself down with sand.

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