Free The Orphan by Robert Stallman

was Little Robert’s nightshirt hangs about me. I tear it away, knot up the harmonica in one strip of cloth and tie it around my waist. The hut contains shovels, rakes, pick axes, other tools leaning against the walls, and a platform with iron wheels and long levers on top. I am steaming wet and sticky with blood, and the smell of creosote in the hut is suffocating. I block it all out to sleep.
    I wake full of fear at the sound of crunching cinders. The hut is without cover of trees behind, the nearest ones down the track half a mile or more on the side. How have I been so stupid? The crunching cinders get louder. Men’s voices, many of them. I slip to the hole I have made under the back foundation, but there are already men outside settling against the shady side of the hut. Now they are all around the hut in the shade, talking, rattling metal pails. I smell bread, meat, stale fruit. They are eating their lunch. At the double doors in front of the hut the lock begins to rattle. They will come in. My head is foggy. I force my rage to form, clearing my mind, so that I can visualize the layout of the countryside. I have been here in the nights. Behind the hut it is open country at this point all the way to the river, but directly out front and across the track is first a small creek, then a thornapple hedge that extends a long way to the south. The end of the hedge is almost opposite the hut. I have to go out the front or be in sight for a long while to the men sitting in back of the hut. The lock springs open with a rusted sound and the doors are being lifted and pulled across the cinders. I wait behind the iron wheeled platform crouching low, wishing at that moment to shift, but unable to. I put it out of my mind.
    “Let’s wait till after we eat to get it out,” a short round man in overalls is saying. “It’s a heavy sucker.”
    As his companion who is partly behind the opened door is about to answer, I charge toward the half opened door, hitting it hard with my shoulder.
    “Crise-a-mighty!” The fat man is screaming as I hit him with my shoulder and he spins away and down. The other man is larger and is carrying a shovel. I slam past the door, but the other man is swinging his shovel at me. In mid-leap I kick with one hind leg, striking him in the chest so the shovel just grazes my back. Then I am down the embankment, sliding in the cinders into the weeds, leaping the creek awkwardly as I hear a great commotion and crying out behind me, and around the hedge for what should be a long straight run that will put me out of sight and reach. I have forgotten the fences. Barbed wire, the first two of four strands, then another one of five tight strands, and in the distance I can see at least two more. They slow me down, and I can hear the men on the railway embankment running and crying out. I wait to pant a moment, lying up under the thorn hedge. It is very hot, the sun’s heat wavering up from the dark soil of the cornfield where the stalks with their dark green leaves are standing about two feet high. The vivid green rows dwindle in perspective toward the far fences where I see clumps of trees, a barn roof, other buildings. That is behind the Nordmeyer’s east field, the one where the Guernseys graze. My mind snaps, clearing my perceptions at once. I smell the dried blood in my fur. I am being foolish again. I wonder for a second if I am ill, then I hear the noises of iron wheels along the track and excited men’s voices. They are catching up with me on some sort of car on the tracks. There is no cover beyond the end of the hedge, and now they will arrive there before me. I glance back along the hedge row, my eyes just above the weed tops. In the waves of heat rising from the dark soil I see the distorted figures of half a dozen men spread out in a line, carrying shovels, picks, iron bars. Their voices come to me now from two directions as the men on the handcar arrive at the far end of the hedge row. The hedge is