it was not time to go. They were still there, hatefully, maliciously alert, waiting for thirst to strangle him, or that draining ebb of blood to weaken him until he could no longer hold his gun. Then they'd come. They'd come when he fell insensible, and shoot his old hide full of holes.
More than half delirious from the pain of that pleural effusion, Dunham had no thought of how long he had been in the car. Only that it was not night, it wasn't time to go. He began rehearsing the plan for getting out of there again, which took him with impetuous rush to the boarding-car and the bucket.
He got to thinking of Charley Mallon after that, how he shook the lemonade with the chipped ice in it, and put it down heaped with creamy foam, rich and cool with the soothing mucilage of raw egg. And then he thought of water in the springs he knew back home, and of water in creeks and the swift clear river, and water over ice at the time of spring thaws, when the smell of sap was in the maple trees. Water, any kind of water: water in the ruts of the road, water in horse tracks in the road, water in scum-green ponds, fetid water where vile creatures tracked the slime, but all of it blessed water that he would have flung himself down and drunk until he had drowned the fearful fire of his thirst.
And then of Charley Mallon again, his hot eyes bulging from his head, it seemed, with the pressure of pain behind them that crowded his brain so full of agony it was puffing in horrible enlargement, like a kernel of corn in the fire. Charley Mallon and the copper
