All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By Read Online Free PDF

depot," I said to Jenner, as Brakestone eased me into the scout car. I was sweating coldly, and every move I made intensified the pain in my ankle. My mind flashed with chaotic images of madness; Clipper's tormented face became a black beetle crawling inside a hard, white skull.
    "I know what the general said; damn it, I have family business to take care of! It won't wait."
    The Southern Railroad's main line and Gaston freight yard were located in a mile-long valley a stone's throw from the playing fields of the institute. To the south the valley was steeply walled by one of the several finger ridges that culminated in the now charred and devastated Blue Ridge just a few miles away. From the widow's peak of Railroad Ridge, a favorite Sunday picnic ground for cadets and their dates, one had a clear view of school and town, on twin hills immediately to the north.
    At the eastern end of the valley the Roanoke Highway crossed the tracks on a sooted iron bridge. The brownstone depot and passenger platforms were beneath this bridge. When we arrived, the famed Washington-New Orleans flyer, the Jean Lafitte, was standing in the station. Smoke lay thickly over the rail yard—a combination of wood and train smoke. Boss's long train had been parked on a southerly siding hard against Railroad Ridge. There was an impressive Missouri Pacific mountain-type engine at the head of the train (the railroad which we owned in Eastern Arkansas, the Delta, St. Francis and Dasharoons, had nothing to compare with this jumbo locomotive) and a total of ten cars, including two flatcars for the convenience of those wedding guests who had brought their own limousines along. Behind the flatcars were a baggage car, a Pullman and a diner for servants, a lounge car, a restaurant car, more deluxe stainless steel Pullmans with the best of drawing room accommodations, and Boss's own 90-foot car.
    We crossed the bridge and bumped down a narrow bad road to the private train.
    Somehow word of the disaster had already reached those servants who had not taken advantage of free time to have a few drinks and a game of cards in Foxtown, Gaston's colored section. They were milling on the tracks outside the train, their agitation clearly defined even from a distance. One of the maids had been encircled by others; she gestured toward the hilltop institute. I surmised that she had been waiting at the chapel for an elderly mistress, perhaps peeking through a vestibule door at the wedding. When the carnage began, she ran in a panic all the way back to the train.
    Bull Pete was there, of course, the only colored man Boss ever trusted with a gun, the only man I knew large enough to carry a .45 automatic in his back pocket and scarcely show a bulge. As long as Bull Pete was in charge, the railroad's property would remain inviolate, and each and every nigra—there must have been fifty aboard, counting the New Orleans jazz band—would be the picture of decorum.
    Bull Pete was alongside the scout car as soon as it stopped. Behind him some of the women were keening and crying, throwing themselves down in the filthy ballast between tracks.
    "Lord, Mist' Champ!" Bull Pete said, eyes bulging in distress. "What's happened up there? Dubretta say Clipper went clean out his head! She say—"
    "Bull Pete, has Nhora heard about it?"
    He was slow to speak again as he struggled with the impact of the news. Murder, destruction, calamity. And Boss dead. The worst news of all. I could see it in his eyes. Day and night he had watched over Boss, for twenty years.
    "Suh! Suh!" Tears were rolling down his cheeks. He held on to the scout car, quaking at the knees like a common drunk. I thought he would fall down too. "You gots tell me. It cain't be true. Aowwwww, suh! Not the Boss! Not the Bosssssss!"
    "Boss is dead," I said sharply, tasting bile. "Clipper— Corrie Billings too. I can't explain, not yet. For God's sake get control of yourself. Quiet those women down. I have something