Free Cornered! by James McKimmey

cheated him. It was a wild moment of anger and physical desire, both at high peak. Standing there, large body tense, rough-hewn, face strained and lined with fury, Ted Burley looked every bit the man. But inside, the child raged in an infantile tantrum.
    “The dirty whore,” he whispered. “The dirty whore…”

 
chapter nine
     
    The 4:07 train going east out of Graintown was, because of the storm, thirty-two minutes late that afternoon. But before its arrival and departure, Sheriff-elect Jenkins had sent a detail of volunteer assistants to check the railroad area. The detail was to have been headed by Deputy Wade Miles, but Miles had been asked to check the west roadblock before he joined the group. The group of volunteers was not about to investigate the area until given the immediate leadership and moral support of Wade Miles. Thus, while Miles made his check at the roadblock set up by the State Police, the volunteer searchers at the railway depot stamped around the tiny waiting room and talked in angry terms of what they were going to do when they found Billy Quirter as they smoked and spit.
    At 4:39 the train pulled in from the west. But by that time Deputy Miles had been diverted by a report that a local housewife had seen a man behind her garage on the north side of town. A quick personal check, accompanied by State patrolmen, convinced Wade Miles that the housewife was having hallucinations. When Wade Miles reached the Graintown depot, the 4:39 had pulled out as the volunteer searchers stood determinedly in the protection of the depot’s waiting room, watching the arrival and departure of the train like vigilante statues.
    “Hell, Wade,” one of them said to the deputy, “he couldn’t of got on that train or we would of seen him.”
    “Well, damn it,” Wade Miles said, “if you couldn’t search that train, let’s still search the area anyway. Let’s go! Joe, call Arrow Junction and have the train searched there.”
    So the 4:39 was now on its way in the direction of Arrow Junction. And Billy Quirter was on it.
    Thirty seconds after the train had started moving, Billy started running toward it, keeping the cars between himself and the depot up the tracks. At the last second, he’d vaulted up to an empty freight car, kicking like a monkey, and shoved himself through a partially opened door. He’d made it, minutes before Deputy Wade Miles arrived to mobilize the fear-frozen volunteers into belated action.
    But as the train got underway, Billy realized he still had a problem. The map had told him the tracks ran through Arrow Junction, but he had no way of knowing whether or not the train stopped there. It was a chance he had to take.
    Reasonably, Billy struck a match and looked at the map again. The distance by highway from Graintown to Arrow Junction was exactly ten miles. But it was hard for Billy to estimate how long it would take that train to make those ten miles.
    It took, in fact, a little over eleven minutes. The train, in fact, stopped at Arrow Junction at approximately 4:50.
    But Billy, at the end of nine minutes, began to worry, thinking that the train would not stop at Arrow Junction. He pushed himself close to the space created by the partly opened door and looked at the heavy snow whipping by in the ever-increasing gloom.
    He thought, one minute outside of Arrow Junction, that the train had gone beyond the town.
    He slid his legs through the doorway, squirmed around so that he was facing the direction the train was moving, then jumped.
    He missed a switch handle by inches, a collision that would have performed a sudden and complete castration. He hit a heavy drift of snow, which softened his fall and slowed the momentum of his roll. But an unpracticed jumper like Billy was bound to land awkwardly. Billy did, with crushing impact. He was bruised. His knees hammered through the snow clear to the underlying cinders. But it was his left arm that, in the shock, took the real punishment.
    Dr.