Part 4
Scout answered to Max as if the name had been waiting inside him. He licked the boy’s wrists and face, whining while the boy clung to his neck. Frank turned away long enough to wipe his eyes with his sleeve.
“His working name is Scout,” he said gently. “But Max belongs to the two of you.”
The boy looked fourteen and seven at once. His cheekbones stood out beneath skin gray from cave light, but his eyes followed every movement with practiced caution.
He wore three sweaters in different sizes, the outer one patched with feed-sack cloth. A burn scar crossed two fingers, and the soles of his makeshift shoes were cut from tire rubber. When I offered my canteen, he examined the seal before taking it and drank in measured swallows. Nothing in the cave was done carelessly, because carelessness there had consequences.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked.
“No,” I said. I lowered myself to one knee so I would not tower over him. “We came to take you home.”
“There isn’t a home. Uncle Travis said Mom and Dad died because I ran away. He said the police know what I did and they’ll lock me up if I come out.”
The gratitude in his voice made the lie uglier. Travis Cole had not needed bars. He had fed a frightened child just often enough to make captivity look like mercy.
“Did he hurt you?” Frank asked.
Eli watched the dark passage. “If I tried to go past the yellow signs, he didn’t bring food. Once he fired over my head. He said the next one would be for me.” His hand tightened in Scout’s coat. “But when I got sick, he brought medicine. Bad men don’t do that.”
Frank’s answer came slowly. “Sometimes a man does one useful thing because it lets him keep doing something cruel. The useful thing doesn’t make the cruelty disappear.”
“Your parents did not die because of you,” Frank said. “Your mother is alive. She never stopped looking.”
Eli stared at him, then buried his face against Scout’s neck. “My mom?”
He asked what color her hair was now. He asked whether she still baked cabbage rolls on Sundays and whether the blue house had been sold. We could answer only the first question from newspaper photographs. Each uncertainty frightened him more than a polished promise would have, but he kept listening.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re going to her now.”
We had barely helped him into the main chamber when voices entered the passage. Men shouted over the barking of dogs.
Eli moved without being told. He kicked loose dirt over the newest ashes, swept the carved dog into his sweater, and reached for a water jug. The routine was so practiced that I saw how often he had hidden from the very men who claimed to keep him alive.
“Tracks are fresh. The old men came through here.”
“Find them before they get the kid out.”
Frank killed my flashlight. Scout stepped between Eli and the entrance, his growl so low I felt it through the soles of my boots.
“Another way out?” I whispered.
Eli pointed upward. A pale opening showed near the ceiling, perhaps thirteen feet above us. “Smoke hole. I can reach it from the ledges.”
The passage brightened with a powerful lamp.
One of the dogs outside lunged against its chain. A man cursed and ordered it forward, but the animal balked at the smoke-dark opening. The delay gave us seconds, nothing more.
“Come out,” a man called. “You have nowhere to go.”
Frank braced himself beneath the wall. Eli climbed onto his shoulders and caught a shelf in the rock. For all his weakness, he moved with the economy of someone who had practiced that route alone. He reached the opening and pulled himself into daylight.
I slung the shotgun across my back and followed. Halfway up, a metal canister clanged into the chamber and began spilling white smoke. My eyes closed against the burn.
“Graham, move!” Frank shouted.
I reached the last hold. Eli lay above me with both hands locked in my coat, adding his slight weight to mine until I rolled onto wet moss outside.
I turned at once. “Frank!”
His face appeared below the opening through the smoke. “Get the boy away from here.”
“I have the rope.”
“No time.” The men were in the chamber now; boots struck rock and someone yelled. Frank looked over his shoulder, then back at me. “If all three of us die in that hole, the truth stays there with us.”
Eli reached down. “Scout!”
The dog looked up at him. For an instant he was utterly still. Then he turned from the opening and planted himself beside Frank.
“No,” I said. “Scout, come.”
He did not obey me. Frank put one hand on his back.
“He’s made his choice, Graham. Now make yours.”
The first man broke through the rear passage. Frank dropped from sight. The shotgun boomed inside the stone chamber, followed by Scout’s furious barking.
The rope was still looped around my shoulder. I threw one end down, but smoke swallowed it before Frank could reach. A hand appeared through the rear crack behind him. Scout struck at it, and the man screamed. Frank seized the rope once, then let go to turn the gun toward the passage.
“Take him home!” he shouted.
I pulled Eli away from the vent. We scrambled up the slope through low pine and loose shale as another shot cracked beneath us. Then came a burst of gunfire, brief and brutal.
Eli stopped.
I caught him around the chest before he could turn back. He fought me with a strength his body should not have possessed, clawing at my sleeves and calling Max until his voice broke. The men below would hear every sound, but silence had already cost him seven years.
Below us, smoke rolled from the vent in slow white ropes. A loose stone shifted under my boot and rattled down the shaft. No one answered Frank’s name. No command reached Scout through the rock, and no second burst came from the shotgun.
“He stayed so you could leave,” I said against his hair. “Don’t make him choose twice.”
The hollow had gone silent.
He looked at me with both hands pressed over his mouth, waiting for the bark that did not come.
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