Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [77]
All day and into the night they would find the trail and then abruptly lose it again in a cloud of spices, quite aware that Luke was hidden within a stone’s throw of them, lying in the bushes somewhere and watching them, resting up for his next dash. But all they could do was persevere, patiently unraveling the snarled patterns of his escape.
After dark Luke began to use other tricks. He walked right down the middle of a highway to mix his spoor with the smell of asphalt, rubber tires and carbon monoxide. When headlights would appear he dropped flat in the ditch and covered his face so that it wouldn’t be reflected in the light. But the Dog Boy caught on. Afterwards they simply followed the ditch, skipping along from one ducking place to another as though they were stepping stones in a brook.
Luke soon learned what they were doing and switched to other tactics. Several times he climbed over a barbed wire fence, made a gigantic loop through open grazing land and then returned and recrossed the fence. Once again he would make another long, complicated curve, repeating the same pattern he made on the other side. Then he broke the pattern, running along the fence, crossing it, running a mere hundred feet or so and crossing the fence still again. Even with chains on it was far easier for him to climb over the barbed wire than for men trying to control an hysterical pack of hounds straining on their leashes.
Finally his trail led directly to the edge of a large lake and stopped. The posse split up the pack and went around the lake on both sides. But when they couldn’t pick up the new trail they concluded that he had merely gone up to the water’s edge and then back-tracked the way he had come. But again his trail was heavily spiced, the dogs temporarily helpless, the men forced to rely entirely on their wits and imagination.
They decided that Luke had back-tracked to a brook that he had previously forded. Wading knee-deep for over a mile he then came to a railroad bridge and followed the tracks, walking on top of the ties which were new and soaked with fresh creosote, their odor strong and acid.
Time and again Luke threw them off with one ruse after the other just as they thought they were about to run him down. Still, they were persistent, prodded by the stubborn enthusiasm of the Dog Boy who kept hitching up his pistol belt and wetting his lips with his tongue, coming up with yet one more solution to every riddle that Luke presented.
But Luke eventually beat the dogs. At two thirty in the morning his trail had been fresh and hot when it disappeared finally and forever in the backyard of a farmhouse at the stump of a live oak tree which was used for a chopping block. They could read the story spelled out by the marks on the ground. Luke had lain on his back, the shackle draped over the stump. With several awkward but powerful strokes of the axe, he had cut his own chain.
He was gone. The only evidence of his departure was a broken chain link and the dulled old axe sticking up straight, the handle silhouetted against the moonlit sky like a gesture of derision. Once again he had disappeared, wafted away in a fragrant cloud of pepper, borne up into nothingness with a sneeze.
We were beside ourselves when we heard this part. We could see it all—the dogs milling about in the yard, yelping and coughing, the chickens squawking, cattle stampeding in the pasture; voices, curses, lights put on in the farmhouse. We could just picture Luke running off through the woods, singing as he went, his legs graceful and swift. When the thin silver of the crescent moon peeked out from the clouds we knew that Cool Hand had stopped to look aloft and grin—
Yes sir, Boss! I see yuh up there!
So it was really our own watchful eye that he had left behind in the dust, the shining, twisted center link of his chain lying there winking up in defiance at the outraged moon-eye of Boss Godfrey.