Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [67]
Yo’ll been makin‘ too much noise out here. Ah don’ want to hear that screen door slammin‘ no more either. Ah done put two men in the Box fer that. If yo’ll don’t wont to git to go in there with ’em, why, yo’ll better watch yoreself.
The Yard Man shifted his teeth a few more times, turned and went back into the Free Men’s Messhall. We looked at each other, knowing then what had happened to Coon and to Four Eyed Joe.
Just as the last few men were checking into the Building a Highway Patrol car pulled up in front of the Captain’s office. The two guards who had started out after Luke the night before got out of the back seat and shuffled towards their messhall. They had mud on their shoes and pants right up to their knees. Their shirt tails were half out, their shoulders slumped, their hats shoved to the back of their heads.
We waited. Several men kept a careful watch through the windows. After they had finished eating they shuffled across the asphalt apron, over the porch and into the Guard Shack. Anxiously we waited for Jabo the Cook to finish up his chores. He no sooner had checked into the Building when men began to sidle up to him. And after he got his Juke open he had a run on candy bars and cold drinks, every customer lingering as long as he dared in order to hear as much as he could about the latest developments in the chase for Cool Hand Luke.
Thus we got our information third and fourth hand but nevertheless we heard all about that wild night of running through the woods and the fields, the swamps and the groves. The main fact was that a bloodhound is virtually useless on a manhunt if he is running loose. A dog must have the restraint of a leash and the guidance of an intelligent trainer. Otherwise he will simply follow his nose, exhausting himself with wasted efforts.
The other fact was that Big Blue was the leader of the pack of dogs kept at the Camp. And whenever they heard Big Blue’s voice baying way off in a swamp or a grove somewhere ahead they would answer hysterically, surging along the trail, straining at their leashes, refusing to obey the commands of the Dog Boy.
They would fight their way through briers and mud and over barbed wire fences, Big Blue howling and barking somewhere in the darkness ahead of them. But then out of the night and the obscurity, just a hundred feet or so to their left, they would hear Cool Hand Luke yelling at them. Not content with outwitting and outrunning them he actually began lingering in the neighborhood, waiting for them to catch up. Wafting through the night like a hunting horn, his voice would boom out of the blackness,
Hey! You stupid bastards! Not that way! Over here!
The men in the posse would know what had happened. Luke had backtracked and then waded through some kind of water barrier, made a big, wide loop through some open country and then returned to a point near his original trail where he would just lie down and make himself comfortable.
But they could never convince the dogs who insisted on following a direct line of scent and the sound of Big Blue’s voice up ahead. The guards would wrestle with the dogs, kicking and beating them, swearing and tripping over themselves in the dark. Finally striking out on the new trail they would quickly lose it again at the edge of a pond. Again they would have to go around in everwidening circles until they found the place where the scent left the water.
As a boy Luke had done enough hunting with coon dogs and possum hounds to have learned their ways. So his trail was not the straight, fatal line of desperation of a city-bred convict. It was a bewildering maze of crisscrossing spirals, back-tracks and water barriers. It was like playing ticktacktoe over the entire countryside. Eventually they expected Cool Hand to give out from sheer exhaustion. But later they came to realize that he was periodically taking naps here and there after having temporarily thrown them off.
He knew the area well enough. He had worked on virtually every road in that part of the country and he had the natural sense of direction of