Woods Runner by Gary Paulsen

one side of the oxen, carrying a wooden staff, which he used to guide them, and a woman walking on the other side. On the wagon seat were two children, probably three and four years old.
    They passed head-on and Samuel thought neither of them would say anything. The man just nodded at Abner. But before he was well past, Abner called: “Dragoons ahead, patrolling the road west.”
    “Thankee,” the man said with a nod. “We’re obliged for the knowledge, but we’re going south at the turn. Head down for Philadelphia, if ’n it’s still held.”
    “Held solid. Good journey,” Abner said, “for you and the family, and good health.”
    “The same to you.”
    And they were gone.
    “Why don’t the British soldiers come at them? Do they have a pass?”
    “Probably not. I doubt anybody really gets a pass like mine. But the soldiers aren’t always a problem. Sometimes they take things, act up rough, but other times they seem to follow some kind of rule. Unless they be Hessians. Then even the pass might not work.” He shook his head. “They ain’t nothing good about the Hessians. They were born bad.”
    Annie nodded. She had been so quiet Samuel had almost forgotten she was there, sitting between them. Her voice was brittle, like it could break in the middle of a word. “They’re all bad.”
    It will be years, Samuel thought, before she can forget. Maybe her whole life. And I don’t blame her—I feel the same and I didn’t see my parents bayoneted.
    The thought of his parents brought back the memory of the question he had asked Abner, which had not been answered. “We never heard why you want to help us,” he said. “Couldn’t it make trouble for you?”
    “No more’n I make for myself.”
    “Still.”
    “You’re pushing at this, ain’t you?” Abner smiled, though in the hair and spit stains it was hard to tell. “Kind of like a root hog, digging at it.”
    “I want to know. It doesn’t make sense. You don’t know anything about us. But you’d risk trouble to help us?You’ve got to admit it seems strange—I mean, I’m grateful. Mighty grateful. But …”
    “Well, thinking on it, there’s two reasons.”
    “We’re listening.”
    “First, when you get old and start to smell an end to things, your brain starts doing things on its own, whether you like it or not. You might be looking at a piece of meat cooking on a fire, hungry and ready to eat, or sitting up here alone, watching the mules pull on a lazy sunny afternoon, and your brain starts in adding and subtracting, measuring your life.”
    “What do you mean?” Annie looked up at him.
    “Well, it says you’ve done this many things wrong and this many things right. Like a ledger with lines down the middle. Maybe you helped somebody load a wagon once and that would go on the good side, and then maybe you ate a piece of pie somebody else wanted, somebody else deserved, and that would go on the bad side.”
    “Well, we all do that, don’t we?” Samuel asked. “Think about things and then try to do the right one?”
    “We can hope so, but until you get old you don’t really start adding them up. When you’re young you forget some of the things, both good and bad, but when you get old, it’s amazing how much you remember. I keep pulling up parts of my life from when I was barely off the milk, bawling after my mum in Scotland. I stole a tiny piece of bread I wasn’t supposed to eat on the ship on the way over here, and
that’s
in there, waiting to be added in,even though I puked it up not two minutes after I ate it.” He snorted and spit, this time almost to the noses of the mules. “I wasn’t one for sailing. The boat rocked once, the first time I got on it, and I was sick all the way across.”
    He stopped the wagon because they met some young men on foot, obviously fleeing. There were three of them and one had bandages around his upper left arm. They waved but kept moving west along the trail at a trot.
    Abner warned the men