Hunter and the Trap Read Online Free PDF Page B

what?”
    â€œIt’s hard to explain, Monte.”
    â€œYou have to prove you’re brave. I’m scared. I don’t want to prove anything.”
    â€œI’m scared, Monte.”
    â€œAnd you won’t run. My God, Andy,” I begged him, “what else is there? What’s the alternative?”
    â€œI don’t know. Maybe it was just too much for me alone. Maybe I don’t know how to be alone. Maybe I don’t know how to be hunted. Maybe it’s something you have to learn. You don’t have to stay with me, Monte.”
    â€œGo to hell.”
    A slim kid with heavy black glasses came over to the table and said, “I recognized you, Mr. Bell.” He was so nervous from his own presumption that he could hardly speak. “I’m a researcher for Life. If I could get some kind of exclusive interview with you, it might be the turning point in my career. I know I got no call coming over and barging in on you like this. My name is Harry Belton. I guess you can see how scared I am—”
    â€œI can see.” Andy nodded, smiling slightly.
    â€œBut, you know—”
    â€œI hate to send you away,” Andy said.
    â€œIt’s just a set of circumstances,” I told the kid. “It’s impossible now.”
    â€œI understand.”
    â€œSome other time. Not now.”
    â€œI understand,” the kid repeated. “I just want to say that I am a great admirer of yours, Mr. Bell. I read one of your books when I was nine years old. I don’t know whether I understood everything in it, but I read it through. I was only nine.”

11
    About Andy and myself—I met him in 1938 in Spain—I mean the first time that I ever met him and knew him, although I had heard about him. Moving back from a tour of the front lines, I was in a car with five other correspondents and one of them was Andrew Bell. The car was a big, yellow Buick touring car, a 1934, which was one of the best and most enduring Buicks ever built, and it took us east from the front over some of the worst roads I ever traveled. At one point, where the road was too narrow and too curved to pass another car, we found ourselves tail-gating an old truck loaded with Republican soldiers back for leave. The truck appeared to have no springs left; it was a platform truck with gate sides and a couple of pieces of old rope backing it, and possibly good for two tons when new. Now there must have been thirty-five or forty soldiers packed into it—men full of laughter and pleasure at being alive and returning from the front, standing, most of them, swaying gaily with the truck’s motion and singing the Spanish round about the farmer, the sheep and sodomy.
    And then the truck driver, trying to demonstrate he could go along as briskly as we in the touring car, took a curve too fast and the truck went over. One moment a truckload of singing, happy soldiers on leave, and the next moment a hillside covered with broken, bleeding bodies, a burning truck, and the kind of horror that you do not want to witness twice.
    The correspondent driving the Buick came down on the brakes very hard, and we skidded to a stop; and then we tumbled out of the car, and Andy raced to the scene of horror, myself behind him. He went to work with his first-aid kit, with torn shirts for bandages and tourniquets, with whatever he could put to use in stopping bleeding or holding a broken bone in place. I was behind him, and then I found myself assisting him and responding to his instructions; but when we turned back to the touring car for a moment, we discovered that the four other correspondents were standing at the edge of the road, watching, and preserving their bright, expensive Abercrombie uniforms in pristine spotlessness, free of nasty bloodstains and soot stains.
    â€œLousy bastards,” Andy said. Those were the first words he ever addressed to me. That was how I met him.
    Now he was still talking to the