His jowls were spiked by barbs of graying beard.
His small, mean eyes regarded Marty steadily, unblinkingly.
His eyes were threaded by little filaments of red as if tiny veins had burst and flooded blood into them.
As he chewed his gum and exuded wheezing breath, Marty smelt the reek of bad whiskey.

Marty recognized the man.
He had driven the car that passed them on the road outside Admassy's place.
This was Acey Squire, proprietor of the juke joint.

Marty smiled at Squire pleasantly and said, "There was a cab waiting for me here.
Do you know where it might have gone"?

Squire chewed his gum, his jaw moving in a steady rhythm.
He looked straight at Marty.
He did not answer.
Marty scanned the faces of the others nearest him, looked into their staring eyes.

"Did anyone see my cab"?
He asked, keeping his voice casual.

He avoided showing any surprise or annoyance when no one answered him.

"I have to get back to Jarrodsville", he went on.
"I see there are some cars here.
I wonder if one of you gentlemen could drive me back to town?
I'd be happy to pay for the favor, of course".

The seventeen men stood and stared at him for a moment longer.
And then a startling thing occurred.
It was so utterly unexpected that Marty stood for several moments with his mouth hanging open foolishly after it had happened.

There was no word spoken, no apparent signal given.

Yet the men all moved at the same instant.

They piled into the waiting cars, motors roared, the cars sped off.

The station wagon and the old Plymouth headed east toward Jarrodsville.
The Ford and the pickup truck sped west toward Sanford's Run.

In seconds all four cars were out of sight.

Marty Land stood alone on a red-clay road as storm clouds gathered ominously in the sky again.
From a great distance thunder growled and broke the silence.

Land looked back toward the dilapidated house.
He thought he saw a pale face at a window.
Perhaps it was Dora May.
Perhaps she would be glad that they hadn't hurt him.

There were other farmhouses nearby.
Across the road there was one no more than a hundred yards away.
There was another on this side, a little further down.
There were many more between here and Jarrodsville.
Telephone poles lined the road.
They reared tall and mocking.
Their wires stretched out into infinity.
Not a single strand of wire reached into the silent houses beside the red-clay road.

There was nothing he could do but walk.
And Jarrodsville was more than three miles away, down an old dirt road that the rain had turned into a quagmire.

Marty faced east and started walking down the left side of the road.
After he had proceeded a few feet, he paused and turned up the cuffs of his trousers, which were already damp and mud-caked.
The viscous mud was ankle-deep, and in places great puddles spread across the road and reflected the murky light.

As he approached the first farmhouse, thunder sounded behind him again, closer now and louder, like a steadily advancing drum corps.
There were several people on the porch of the farmhouse.
There was a very old man and a young woman and a brood of children ranging from toddlers to teen-agers.
For just an instant he thought of appealing to them for help.
Perhaps they had a car or truck and would drive him into town.
Then he realized the utter futility of the idea.
They were staring at him in the same blank and menacing way that the men outside the gate had stared.
Even the eyes of the smallest children seemed malicious.

On his side of the road there were two farm hands, well back in a field, leaning against a plow.
They, too, stared at him.

The drums of thunder were right behind him now.

A foolish thought came into his head.
He remembered a story he had read as a youth.
It was probably one of Kipling's tales of the British Army.
It concerned an officer who had been disgraced and drummed out.
The steady roll of the drums had sounded behind him as he walked between the endless ranks of the men he had commanded, and each man about-faced and turned his back as the officer approached.
Marty wished these poor farm people would turn their backs.

The fencing by the roadside ended.
Now the dirt highway was bordered on either side by a fairly deep drainage ditch, too broad to leap over unless you were an Olympic star.
The day's rain had been added to the stagnant water.
He was trapped on the road when he heard the sound of an approaching car.
It was coming toward him.
The car was now in sight.
Marty's heart skipped a beat when he recognized it.
It was the station wagon that had passed his cab on the road, the station wagon that had been parked at the Burch farm.
Acey Squire's station wagon.
It had headed back toward Jarrodsville.
That had only been a ruse to lure him out on the deserted road.
Now Acey and his friends were returning to seek him out.

The station wagon came to a stop a couple of hundred feet in front of him, beside a fenced field.
Then there was another sound.
A second car was coming from the west, from the direction of Sanford's Run.
It was the Ford that had been outside Burch's farm.

Marty looked helplessly in both directions.
It was a narrow road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass.
He could not leave the road because of the water-filled drainage ditch.
When the two cars were equidistant from him, the station wagon started up again and the Ford gathered speed.
They bore down on him.
There was nothing he could do except jump into the ditch.

He jumped, and sank to his knees in muddy water.

As the two cars roared by, there was a high-pitched eerie, nerve-shattering sound.
Marty knew how the Union soldiers must have felt at Chancellorsville and Antietam and Gettysburg when the ragged gray ranks charged at them, screaming the wild banshee howl they called the Rebel yell.

For moments he stood in water, shivering and gasping for breath.
He had turned his ankle slightly, and it pained him.
The cars, with their load of howling men, had disappeared in the distance.
There had been two more cars parked at the farm, a Plymouth and a pickup truck.
They would be coming for him next, bearing down on him from both directions.
And then the station wagon and the Ford would seek him out again.
He would be harassed repeatedly and would escape death by inches time after time, all the way to Jarrodsville.
He still had three miles to go.
Back East the more affluent juvenile delinquents, who could afford hyped-up autos instead of switch blades as lethal weapons, played this same game and called it "Chicken".

He could not go through the fields.
That way was barred on both sides of the road by a high barbed-wire fence.
He had to make for the section of road just ahead that was bordered by the rail fence, the section by the farmhouse.
At least he could climb up on the fence when his tormenters roared by again.
The Admassy place could not be far now.
He would go in there, climb through the window, and at least be safe for a little while and able to rest.
There was even a bare chance that the phone had not been disconnected.

He did not dare climb back up to the road.
He was deep in water, but at least they could not reach him there.
He splashed on, mud sucking at his feet with each step, until he reached the end of the drainage ditch and the beginning of the fence that enclosed the farm.
He climbed back to the road, and he felt utterly exhausted.
He stood, panting, for a moment.
And then he saw something that he had not seen before, and panic gripped him again.

The fence, his only refuge when the metal death came roaring at him, was made of rails, all right, but the rails were protected by a thick screening of barbed wire that would rip his flesh if he pressed against it.
He lurched on down the road despairingly, because there was no place else to go.

He lost all sense of dignity.
You could not stand on dignity when you were soaked and muddied and your life was at stake.
Probably people were watching him from the porch or from behind the windows of this farmhouse, too, but he did not bother to look.
He broke into a dogtrot, breathing heavily, streaming with sweat.
He had to reach Admassy's place.
It was his only sanctuary.
The fences on both sides of the road bristled with the barbed wire.
The fences stretched on endlessly.

And then he heard them.

And now he saw them.

The Plymouth was coming at him from the east, the pickup truck from the west.
They had timed it better this time.
They would reach him at almost exactly the same instant.
He stopped stone-still.
If he backed against the fence, one of the cars would brush him as it passed, and he would be cruelly lacerated by the wire.

He stumbled to the middle of the road and simply stood there, waiting for them, a perfect target.

The cars must have had their gas pedals pushed down to the floor boards.
They were coming on at reckless speed for such old vehicles.
They thundered at him.
He held his arms close to his sides and made himself as small as possible.
When the Plymouth neared, it veered toward him and seemed about to run him down.
He forced himself to stay frozen there.
If he moved, he would be in the path of the other car.
He thought the fender of the Plymouth brushed his jacket as it went by.
In a fraction of a second the pickup truck hurtled by on the other side.

The weird, insane sound of the Rebel yell reverberated again and echoed from the distant hills.

He did not leave the middle of the road.
He did not try to run.
He trudged on, his aching eyes focused straight ahead.
He was nearing the Admassy house.
He was going to make it, he told himself.
And then he heard a car coming from the east, and he felt as if he would break down and weep.

"Oh, no, not again", he said aloud.
"Not again so soon".

There was a new sound, a sound as piercing as the Rebel yell, yet different.
It was the sound of a siren.
Now he saw that the approaching car was painted white, and he began to wave his arms frantically.
It was the prowl car from the sheriff's office.

The car drew up alongside him and stopped.

"Get in", Charley Estes said brusquely.

He staggered into the back seat and lay back, fighting for breath.
There was someone in front with the sheriff.
It was Pete Holmes, the cabdriver.

Pete turned around and said to Marty, "I guess you think I'm a yellow-bellied hound.
But there wasn't no use in me staying there.
I couldn't fight a dozen or so of 'em.
If I'd stayed, all that I'd have got was four punctured tires and one busted head.
Why didn't you wait at the Burch house?
You must've known I'd gone to get the sheriff.
I was lucky they let me go, I guess".

The sheriff was occupied with maneuvering the car around in a very narrow space.
When it was finally pointed east, he said, "You should never have come out here alone.
This is redneck country.
Every man in every one of these houses is a Night Rider.