Free Founders by James Wesley Rawles Page A

lead to alert them when they weren’t looking behind.
    The course of the river was mostly southwest, but it eventually turned southward—not in their intended direction, which was west or northwest. But it offered the best opportunity to travel undetected and provided numerous wooded and brushy areas where they could rest. They decided to follow the river until they got away from the Chicago metropolitan region.
    A large railroad bridge crossed over the river, just north of Joliet. “Okay, now we’ve finally got tracks that are heading east–west. According to the map, if we stay on the river, it joins with the Kankakee River southwest of Joliet and that creates the Illinois River,” Ken said.
    Terry added glumly, “And that would take us down toward Peoria and Springfield.”
    “Right,” he agreed.
    Terry gave Ken a hug and said, “Following those tracks sounds good to me.”
    The tracks, they later found, belonged to the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway, a regional line. The tracks began westward, but then curved northward. They soon intersected a set of Burlington Northern tracks oriented east–west. They followed the Burlington Northern tracks west for several nights without incident. They were amazed to see that even though the line they were walking along was heretofore high volume, all train traffic had stopped.
    As they got out onto the plains, the Laytons had less frequent opportunities to find secluded places to camp. They continued to split just one MRE per day. This required great discipline, as their growling stomachs were a regular reminder that they were operatingon a caloric deficit. They scavenged a few ears of corn at the edges of fields that had been missed during harvest, and they gnawed them clean, being careful to thoroughly chew the half-dried corn kernels so that they would be digestible.
    They also occasionally found a sugar beet that had fallen from an open car hopper to the railroad ballast below. These they peeled, sliced, and ate raw. Ken called them “Manna from Heaven.” Each time Ken said this, Terry would counter, “Naw, they’re Manna from the Oracle of Omaha.” By this, she was referring to billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s ownership of the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad.
    Even with the corn and sugar beets to supplement their MREs, they were losing weight quickly. Terry had an extra ten pounds of fat on her hips but Ken was wiry, so he had little to spare. Realizing the disparity, Terry “accidentally” made sure that Ken got a larger portion of each MRE entrée and the supplemental food that they found.
    The weather was growing colder. There was frost on top of their sleeping bags each morning. They bundled up, wearing nearly all of their clothes. Now out on the open prairie, they dispensed with using face camouflage paint, as they had done when “sneaking and creeping” along the river near Chicago.
    Their progress was still slow and stealthy. Wanting to avoid an ambush, they stopped following the railroad tracks whenever they went though large towns. Instead, they bypassed the towns, skirting mostly through farm fields.
    Near midnight, just east of Mendota, Illinois, the Laytons inadvertently stumbled into an encampment that straddled the BNSF tracks. The camp was quiet and there were no campfires burning. Terry was in the lead, twenty feet ahead. When she realized that they were passing through the encampment, she pressed the PTT button on her radio five times in rapid succession to alert Ken. By the dim moonlight, they could see at least twenty tents.Ken quickly concluded that since they were already in the midst of the camp, it would have exposed them even more to reverse their direction. So he whispered into his radio’s boom mike, “Just act brave, and keep walking. Need be, we can bluff our way through. Safeties off.”
    They both thumbed their rifles’ safeties. A man staggered toward the tracks, obviously drunk. He unzipped his fly and