Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [75]
But for the next several hours we could faintly hear the hounds barking and baying out in the woods. After a long period of silence we could hear them again, coming closer, their voices faint and far away. The day went by. We had our Smoking Period and then we had beans. Still the posse didn’t return. Yet all this time we went about our work with straight faces and in dead silence, unable to express our inner hilarity, our derision for the inept forces of the Free Men who weren’t even able to catch a man in chains.
After we checked into the Building that night and found that there was still no word of Luke we began to grin at each other. We knew. We knew that in some miraculous way he was going to make it.
So again, we were simply overjoyed. After the Last Bell we turned over in our bunks to smirk at the doubled mattress as Carr finished his count and reported to the Wicker Man.
Fifty-one, Boss. And two in the bushes.
What? Another one? Who is it this time, Carr?
The same one, Boss. Cool Hand Luke.
21
AGAIN, THERE WAS NO SLEEP. IN THE SILENCE of the Building our imaginations were roaring. We lay there with closed eyes, the inner surfaces of our lids emblazoned with that fugitive landscape across which Cool Hand was running, his legs making that quick, shortstepping gait of a Chain Man, the shackle leaping and snapping like an iron viper clinging to his heels.
Fitfully we tossed in our bunks. It was a hot and airless night and we sweated in the dank humidity. At one end of the Building someone let go with a loud fart, one that made a moist flapping sound. Eighteen bunks away, someone answered with a high pitched, alternating note. For an hour there was the soft sound of a poker game, cards riffling, coins clinking, then the quiet tread of Carr’s shoes as he paced away another night of his sentence. Always there were the noises of a man getting up to go to the john, the squeaking of springs as a man turned over in his bunk.
An hour or so before dawn there was a commotion outside the fence. A truck drove up. There were voices. The truck motor started again and droned its way around the Messhall, the kitchen and the laundry shed, past the woodshed and the Floorwalker’s Shack. There were rattles and bangs. A few dogs let out some brief, unenthused barks. It was quiet. There were footsteps on the porch. A voice spoke to the Wicker Man who went outside and unlocked the door, locking it again as the Dog Boy stepped into the Chute. Carr swung the gate open, the Dog Boy came in, Carr shut the gate and the Wicker Man locked it. The Dog Boy shuffled over to his bunk, pulled off his shoes and his clothes and then fell back with a sigh, throwing his arm across his eyes to shut out the light from the bare bulbs in the ceiling.
A few of us rolled over on our sides, raising our heads and exchanging puzzled looks with other men. It looked as though they had given up. The dogs had been called off. But it wasn’t until the end of the following day that we were able to get the full story of how Luke managed to get away, piecing it together from fragments of random information.
When the posse started out they expected to run him down in an hour, especially since he was making no attempt to lay down a false trail but instead was running in a perfectly straight line. At first they thought that he had no choice. He was in orange grove country. The ground was well cultivated and soft and his footprints were so clear and unmistakable they didn’t even need the dogs.
But then they began to get suspicious. His traces were too definite and showed no signs of indecision. He was just running, running as hard as he could. But he was heading somewhere. He had a plan.
The groves came to an end and they reached an area of scrub pines and palmetto bushes, approaching a place where two unimportant state roads joined together in a junction. In the apex there was a tiny hamlet of Negro shacks huddled together in a warped and sagging, unpainted heap.
This was the same hamlet that had been attacked by a mob of white men about a year