Free Cornered! by James McKimmey Page A

Stewart would have diagnosed the result as a simple fracture of the left radius at the point of the nutrient foramen.
    Billy only knew that he had broken his damned arm.
    Swearing viciously, he held the wrist of that arm and lay in the snow like a rifle-shot jackrabbit. The wind blew, whistling over the back acreage of Ben Swanson’s farm on the opposite side of the highway from Ted Burley’s place. At that moment Billy was just exactly one half mile from the intended target of his gun, who was then making her way into Arrow Junction proper. But Billy didn’t know that. He did not know, in truth, where the hell he was.
    Blinded by wind and snow and pain, he finally staggered off, away from the tracks, until he ran into the barbed wire fence Ben Swanson had replaced only that previous spring. Billy caught that in the face and back of his right hand. A barb ripped a neat cut across his right cheek and another stabbed his hand. But both wounds were superficial, the cold clotting the blood quickly. Billy, undaunted, moved through the strands, swearing a blue streak, and staggered on across Ben Swanson’s field, until he shoved into Ben Swanson’s barn.
    This was what Billy wanted. He wanted protection from the infuriating wind and snow and cold. He found it here, and letting the broken arm hang, climbed with one hand and numb feet to the loft of Ben Swanson’s barn. There, in the hay, he squirmed into relative warmth, teeth set tight against the pain of that broken bone.
    He was, in effect, a wounded animal now—lying small and insignificant in the dark of the great barn. Tony Fearon had a peculiar momentary loss of confidence at that moment in his California cell, wondering if, finally, the one dream he clung to in the face of death would go smash—and Billy would not, finally, make it.
    But if Tony had seen his younger brother at that moment, his confidence would have returned full force. Billy was merely temporarily postponing his moving. Wind, snow and cold, broken bone, barbed wire and torn skin had not stopped Billy. Billy was only waiting for the morning now, to move on. He had a good view toward the entrance of that barn; anyone opening that door during the night would have gotten the entire new clip of bullets in Billy’s waiting gun. But fortunately nobody did.
     
    As Billy waited in the barn, Dr. Hugh Stewart helped Ann Burley to a chair in his office.
    “What happened?” he asked her softly.
    She started to speak, then shook her head. He carefully wiped the blood from a corner of her mouth. She tried again. “It was Ted.”
    He felt a quick flare of anger. Ted Burley was her husband, but that was no matter now. No man should ever have hit her. He tried to keep calm. “Why?”
    Again she shook her head. “Not now, Hugh.”
    He nodded. “All right.” He looked at her, head bent, sitting in that chair. He looked at the unconscious grace of her posture, the fine mold of her hands clenched over her knees, the shape of calf and ankle.
    “You’d better take that coat off,” he said.
    She looked up, and her beauty, even bruised, caught him by surprise, as it did every time he looked at her. She stood up, and he put his hands around her to take the coat as she slid one arm free, then the other. He held the coat, and they stood inches apart.
    “Ann—” he said very softly.
    “You’re too close to me, Hugh,” she said.
    “All right,” he said, but he didn’t move away. Instead he brought his hand in, touching her arm.
    “I don’t want you this close.”
    He put his hands on both her arms. “That’s not true, is it?”
    “I don’t care if it’s not true,” she said. “It can’t be this way.”
    “You’re here, aren’t you?”
    “I couldn’t help coming.”
    “Why not?”
    “Please, Hugh—”
    “You can tell me and mean it, I won’t touch you.”
    “I won’t tell you,” she breathed.
    His arms were around her now. He held her gently at first. Then, as she tipped her head back,