For a moment Lennie seemed bewildered. And then he whispered in fright,
‘I done a bad thing. I done another bad thing.’
He pawed the hay until it partly covered her. Lennie was scared, he
knew he had done another bad thing, ‘Now George won’t let
me tend ’em rabbits no more . . . why did you die?’ He
stood up and he backed away, out of the barn and he ran. He ran
for all he was worth. Soon he was out of breath so he stopped and
reflected,
‘I . . . I . . have to hide in them bushes and wait, wait till
George gets here. I remember you can bet!’ Lennie had started
running again. He stumbled a few times because he wasn’t
paying attention to where he was actually going. He was just running in
some casual direction away from the ranch.
Candy entered the barn, ‘Lennie, Lennie where
are you? I been figurin’ some more bout’ them rabbits you
know . . oh I’m sorry . . I didn’t know you was here
ma’am, you shouldn’t be sleeping out here. Oh Lord
almighty . . ’. That’s when Candy noticed Curley’s
wife was dead. He wasn’t sure what to do, so he went to George
first. When George entered the barn he immediately understood who it
had been, because of the hat lying there. So he ran to the bunkhouse.
He gathered all his belongings and most of Lennie’s stuff. As he
was finishing, a police officer entered the bunkhouse.
Lennie couldn’t remember where it had been
that they had slept the week before. He couldn’t find the nice
pool where he had drunk that good water. So all he could do was walk
along the road leading away from the ranch,
‘Oh my God, George where are you?’ Lennie said, as he kept
walking and walking. The path ahead seemed never-ending to him.
‘O man it’s ‘im awright,
that’s the companion of the man who raped the lady back in
Weed’. The police officer was talking to the boss while
George was handcuffed at the back of the room. ‘As soon as I saw
that advertisement in the papers, I recognized them, they’re
unmistakable, so I called you.’ The boss was proud of the capture
because there was a good reward for them, ‘Now all we need is
Lennie, only he ain’t nowhere to be seen, maybe we could use
George here as a bait for ‘im ’.
All of a sudden Curley stumbled into the room,
running into George who was standing there. George cursed but Curley
had no time for that, ‘Dad, dad…’.
He was out of breath, ‘My…w-w-wife’, he stammered
but the boss didn’t understand anything. ‘What happened,
tell me!’,
‘She’s…. dead’, said Curley. The policeman intervened,
‘It must be that big monster, it must be ‘im, the big
un’ Lennie, yes, I’m sure about it, she’s got
her neck broken and his hat is lying close by’. Now the boss
spoke,
‘So that’s why he was packing so rapidly’, he added.
George didn’t know what to say, he knew Lennie had killed
Curley’s wife, only it hadn’t been an arranged mission to
kill her.
Lennie was exhausted and he needed to drink. He had
run for a long time and now nearly a whole day had passed. He was
walking hurriedly trying to get away from the ranch where he had
stayed. As he was walking, he noticed that after every two trees there
was an poster displayed. Lennie was attracted by them, and was curious
to see what they said, so he went to have a look at one.
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE
Lennie Small, George Milton
Two men, one small and smart, the other tall and strong.
Both have brown hair and brown eyes.
REWARD
$100,000
At first Lennie couldn’t understand what
was going on, then he remembered what George had told Slim,
“The girl said she was raped by Lennie, so they are tracking us down”.
Lennie was scared by the thought. He sat down to reflect on what to do
because a lot of people might have seen these advertisements. Maybe
they went all along the road back to Weed. So he decided to spend the
night there.
Meanwhile the police officer back at the ranch
had decided to take George to the County jail until Lennie was found.
They had said, ‘Now you don’t try to go anywhere or
we’ll shoot yer mighty legs so you can’t walk’, but
George was so trussed up he couldn’t actually move at all.
Lennie woke up because of something poking
him. He turned around and saw that he was surrounded by people pointing
pickaxes and spades at him. His first instinct was to jump up and run,
only . . . he couldn’t seem to move because his feet were tied
together. The men got him up and tied his hands behind his back. Lennie
tried to escape, but one of the men pointed a shotgun at him and said,
‘Hey where d’ya think yer goin’?’
‘But what did I do?’ Lennie blurted out in confusion, then
he remembered the advertisements he had seen the day before.
Lennie was led somewhere quite some distance
away by a cheering group of people . They were yelling,
‘Get him lynched. . . let’s lynch the madman . . ’,
Lennie was scared of this crowd of people who where raging against him.
The group following increased in number as more joined in on the way,
adding to the loudness of the mob.
George heard the chanting and he got scared because
he thought they had caught Lennie. His fears were confirmed when a low
rank policeman came in running and yelling, ‘ They caught
‘im, they caught the other one. Lennie!’
George was now terrified because they took him out and put him in the
crowd close to Lennie. At first Lennie didn’t recognize him, but
when he did, he began screaming and pleading for George for help him.
But George couldn’t hear him over the roar of the crowd.
It was late in the evening and the birds where chirping
peacefully. But there was a bad smell in the air that disturbed
them. The smell of death. George and Lennie were hanging from a tree
where they had been lynched. The people thought it was the right thing
to do but they didn’t know that Lennie had never raped anyone,
nor hurt anyone on purpose. It had been wrong to lynch them both.
