In the confusion which followed taht blast none of the principal players noticed the shadowy yet grizzled old figure slink over to where the forgotten mule was idly browsing...
"Geeup Ol Sal, we'd best make a break for it. Mebe jest get thar by th' third daybreak. They'll be ahead o' ussen but we might jest fool em one more time. Seems that ol' Saddam guy needs a finger smacking one more time."
With that half whispered thought off they plodded into the creeping darkness past the filthy pit beyond the squalid cockroach infested hut which had been home for so many days and nights.
Out of the encampment past the swamplands following the dusty forlorn trail of a road. Southward they crawled and onward through the night and into the next day and the next night and the next. Bearing for the Rios Uruguay. The bugs, the lack of sleep, lack of decent food and the noon time heat took its toll, but the ol prospector knew what stakes he was being dealt and pushed ever onward. Yet a piece of his heart tarried and resisted the drive. It pulled his thoughts back to the humiliation of that night, when he saw HER yet again. His eyes misted as unspoken thoughts trampled through his mind but his sense of duty drove them deeper and Sal ever onwards.
Manys the tale that could be told, yet in the end none would ever be shared and the drifter would only be a momentary anonymous face in the crowd, disappearing in the seething mobs that surround the daytime activities at the port of Montevideo. He had arrived just in time the prior night. Now with the dawn his work done, he felt no need to hurry, the urgency had passed once again.
The old prospector took an unusual moment of indulgence at a sidewalk cafe that next morning perusing the daily paper for an article on the third page:
alert1.clari.net
And he smiled in a self-satisfactory way knowing what he knew and wondering what the others would be thinking as word spread around. "Better git a move on, Sal will be gitting ornery and looking for her oats, she would..." |
