One thing we hadn’t counted on was the Klexter. We found out later what he was called and that his job was to guard the outside perimeter of the Klavern.
It was our bad luck that in his circling he was right on top of us when we saw who the Exalted Cyclops was, and he had heard us gasp out loud.
Suddenly a loud voice not ten feet from our hiding place shouted, “Give the password and show yourselves!”
For a moment we were frozen to the ground with shock and fear. The entire horde of Klansmen turned in our direction as the Klexter pulled a pistol from inside his white robe and fired into the air.
The sharp crack of that pistol shot launched us into action. We leaped to our feet and went crashing back through the dark woods oblivious of anything that got in our way. We bounced off tree trunks, dived blindly through bushes, and clawed our way through clinging vines.
Our luck wasn’t all bad. When we emerged onto the trail it was visible to us. The moon had come up and it lit our way as we ran like scared rabbits back toward the creek.
We skidded into the clearing, and past the three boats, but just before we hit the woods again Poudlum said between ragged breaths, “You think we ought to set them boats loose?”
I contemplated it for a moment, then we heard the beating of running feet on the trail behind us. “No time,” I panted. “Let’s get to our boat and get down the creek!”
The going was easier getting back through the strip of forest that separated our boat from theirs, and I breathed a sigh of relief when my hand closed around the rope I had moored the boat with.
“We gonna be all right, Poudlum. They can’t chase us ’cause they don’t have no paddles,” I said as I began pulling the rope towards us.
That’s when I became aware there was no resistance. Then the frazzled end of the rope where it had broken was in my hand.
Poudlum was real close to me and I held the end of the broken rope up close to his face so he could see what had happened.
“Told you that rope was rotten,” he said. “We got to go get one of them Klan boats and paddle it with our hands!”
We turned to do that, but it was too late. Through the woods we could hear the voices and see the light of their torches and lanterns as they arrived at the creek.
We heard one of them call out, “They must have come in here by boat. Take one boat up the creek and two of them down the creek, ’cause I figure they must have followed us up here from the river.”
Then we heard thumping sounds as they began to board their boats before one of them yelled, “Where’s the paddles? Did one of y’all do something with the paddles?”
There was a moment of silence, then a voice said, “Looks like whoever it was took our paddles. You two, get on back up to the meeting and let ’em know what’s happening and ask for help.”
Poudlum said, “If we hadn’t thought to dispose of them paddles we might be dead meat by now.”
“We might still be,” I whispered back.
“What you think we ought to do? We can’t take off down the bank through the woods. They’ll hear us for sure.”
“Only one way to get out of here without making any noise,” I told Poudlum.
“How’s that? We gonna fly?”
“No, we’re gonna swim.”
“In the dark?!”
“We sure can’t wait for daylight. What we can do is slip into the water real quiet like and just swim right on out of here.”
“What about our shoes?”
“We’ll take ’em off and tie the laces together around our necks.”
“You think they gonna be any snakes in that water at night?”
“Naw,” I lied. “They sleep at night. Let’s get our shoes off and just slither on out of here like we’re snakes ourselves.”
It was with a small degree of dread that I slowly and quietly slipped into the dark water, and I could tell Poudlum felt the same way when he let out a small shiver as he joined me.
I was surprised the water actually felt good. I supposed it was because we were overheated with all the running we had done. As we treaded water I whispered as low as I could, “Try not to make any noise ’cause you know sound carries real good on the water, especially in the quiet of the night. We’ll dog-paddle until we get well out of hearing. Let’s stay close together and close to the bank. In case they figure out a way to get a boat after us we’ll just get back on shore before they get to us.”
As we dog-paddled along Poudlum said, “It’s makes it harder to swim with all your clothes on.”
“Yeah, it does,” I whispered back. “Maybe we’ll be able to pick up a log or something floating to hold on to as we go along.”
In the moonlight, we could see the outlines of both banks of the creek.
Suddenly I saw the dim flash of light from something sticking out from the bank of the creek. It was the bleached wood of the blade of one of their paddles. I retrieved it and said, “Look at this, Poudlum.”
I slid it across the water in front of us and we both rested our arms on it. “Now all we have to do is kick our feet and we won’t get so tired.”
After a while we were down the creek far enough that we didn’t have to whisper anymore and were beginning to believe we were going to get away clean, but I still took the time to occasionally turn my head and look back up the creek. Once in a while we would stop dead in the water, and just listen for any sounds of the Klan chasing us.
One of those occasions Poudlum asked, “What we gonna do when we get back to the river?”
“I think we ought to stop at our campsite. We got dry clothes and something to eat there.”
“I shore do wish you hadn’t mentioned eating. I’m powerful hungry and all this swimming making it worse. I do hope some possum or some other kind of varmint hadn’t got to our stuff.”
“They can’t eat the stuff in the cans,” I told him.
“That’s true, but they can make short work of our cheese and crackers.”
Mainly just to get off the topic of food, I said, “You know what, Poudlum?”
“What?”
“I think we learned a valuable lesson tonight.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Not to go to no Klan meetings.”
“I don’t mean that. I was thinking about that rotten rope that caused us to lose the boat. The lesson is that it’s a good idea to keep your equipment in good shape and pay attention to details.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “That’s so. But speaking of details, do you think yo’ Uncle Curvin gonna be upset with us for losing his boat?”
“Naw, he’ll understand. Besides he wouldn’t even have the boat if we hadn’t told him where to find it after we helped Jake use it to get out of the county.”
About this time I took another look back up the creek, and my heart soared when I saw what I saw. It was our boat. We had swum right by it. Anybody coming up the creek could have plainly seen it, but it wasn’t visible to anyone coming down the creek because it had drifted up into a little cove across the creek from us.
When I pointed it out to Poudlum, he said, “Praise the Lawd!”
Now all we had to do was swim across the creek and get it.
We started that way and were slap dab in the middle of the creek, which was starting to get wide at this point, when we heard something that sounded like a giant horsefly coming down the creek.
We both knew what it was because we had heard the same sound on the creek where Poudlum had discovered the moonshine still.
It was a motorboat and it was coming fast, and we both knew we didn’t have time to get to either bank before they got to where we were.
“Oh, Lawd,” Poudlum exclaimed. “I do believe they got us!”
“Not if we go under,” I told him.
“Not if we do what?”
“We got to go underwater. It’s the only way,” I said as I gave the paddle a shove toward our boat. “Dive deep and swim underwater toward our boat! Take a deep breath and do it now!”
I had swum under water before and had even opened my eyes while I was doing it, but never at night. It was the darkest dark I had ever seen, blacker than black, as I descended deep in the creek. I felt the vibration of the boat’s motion and the motor as it swished by on the surface above me, after which I immediately began kicking and pulling for the surface.
When I emerged I saw the lights of the motorboat as it disappeared down the creek, then I turned round and round in the water, riding the wake of the boat, looking for Poudlum.
I was just about to panic when he finally burst up from the depths, spitting and spouting, closer to the boat than I was.
We both began swimming toward our boat and after we had grasped the side rail of it, Poudlum asked, “How we gonna get in it?”
“You go first,” I told him. “I’ll hold it to keep it from tipping, then after you get in you can pull me in.”
After we got aboard we both just lay there in the dry bottom of our boat for a while, catching our breath.
Finally, Poudlum said, “Shore is glad to back on this boat.”
“Yeah, me too.”
I dimly saw Poudlum start moving about and he said, “This boat even got paddles.”
“In fact, it has three now,” I said as I reached over the side and snagged the one we had been floating down the creek on.
“You figure that motorboat be coming back this way any time soon?”
“Sooner or later it will,” I told Poudlum. “But I figure they’ll go up and down the river a while first. We ought to have time to get back to our original campsite. We’ll cover the boat back up when we get there, get us some dry clothes on and break out them cheese and crackers.”
“Sounds like a good plan to me,” Poudlum said as we both grabbed a paddle.
We took the padding off the handles so we could go faster and began paddling hard. It only took us a few minutes to get back to our campsite, where we drug the boat up on the bank far enough so it couldn’t drift off. Then we covered it back up with the saplings we had cut earlier.
All our gear lay undisturbed where we had left it. We were beginning to get chilled so the first thing we did was change into dry clothes. Then we broke the hunk of cheese in half and feasted on it with crackers in the moonlight.
“Shore would be nice to have a fire,” Poudlum said after we finished our late dinner. “What time you think it is?”
“Probably about ten or eleven.”
“Where you think that motorboat come from?”
“It probably come from further up the creek and belonged to some of the Klansmen who come to the meeting from up that way.”
“Uh-huh, after one of the ones who didn’t have no paddle run up that way and told ’em.”
“Yeah, they probably thought we were in a paddle boat and they wouldn’t have no trouble catching us.”
“We would have been and they would have caught us if that old rotten rope hadn’t broke.”
I thought about what Poudlum had just said and realized he was exactly right. “You know what, Poudlum, you’re right. We was real upset when we first realized the rope had broken and our boat was gone, but it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to us.”
“Uh-huh, looks like the Lawd was looking out for us. Hope he keeps on ’cause we ain’t out of this mess yet.”
No, we weren’t, and we set to thinking and talking about what we should do next. What we finally decided was that we couldn’t venture out on the river until that motorboat went back past us up the creek. And once that happened, we came up with a plan we would implement.
Since we were real tired, we decided to roll up in our blankets under the bushes and get a little sleep, knowing the sound of the motorboat would wake us up when it came back by.
I saw the moonbeams dancing off the water in the mouth of the Satilfa as my eyelids grew heavy. Poudlum was already snoring softly next to me.
In a deep and peaceful sleep I was dreaming I was at the old sawmill where I had first met mine and Poudlum’s friend Jake, and I could hear the droning of the giant saw blade. Then the sound became more refined as I climbed toward wakefulness, and finally as I sat up fully awake, the sound turned into that of a motorboat speeding past our resting place.
“Wake up, Poudlum!” I said as I reached to shake his shoulder.
“Shoot, I’m wide awake,” he said. “Who in the world could sleep through a racket like that? They must be going wide open.”
“Yeah, it’s late and I ’spect they wanting to get home,” I said as I stood up and began to study the sky to see if I could figure out about what time it was.
The moon was glowing bright in a clear sky way up over the river so I knew it was well after midnight, maybe one or two o’clock in the morning.
“That’s about a brightest moon I ever seen,” Poudlum observed. “Shoot, it’s about light enough to pick cotton. We ought to be able to see good out on the river now. What time of night you think it is?”
When I told him he said, “You want to let’s get on out of here while the gitting is good?”
“I think it might be a good time to do that instead of waiting for daylight. Let’s get our stuff loaded on the boat.”
The river was wide and bright as we paddled into it from the mouth of the creek. The current wasn’t too strong, but it was still slower paddling upstream instead of down.
“Looks like it’s pure silver in this moon light,” Poudlum said between paddle strokes. “With nary a Klukluxter to pester us.”
The river was quiet as a church when the collection plate is being passed. It was just Poudlum and me alone with the river, but some nagging little doubt kept popping up in the back of my mind, telling me that all wasn’t right.
A few minutes later it came to me and I cried out, “Wait a minute!”
“Good Lawdy, what now?” Poudlum moaned.
“Those men whose paddles we took! They must have got some more paddles and I bet they put their boats in the water just like we did, which means they could be out here on the river right now!”
“Or, they could of paddled by while we was still sleeping,” Poudlum suggested.
“That’s true,” I agreed as I looked back down the river behind us. “On the other hand they could come up from behind us.”
“They is a mighty big shadow that comes out a ways from the riverbank on the Choctaw County side, cast by the moon. If we paddled in that shadow couldn’t nobody see us.”
“That’s a good idea, Poudlum. Let’s get out of the middle of this bright river.”
By and by we could see the dark outline of the road across the river from the ferry up ahead. At first I though it was lightning bugs, but as we stayed in the shadows and drew nearer we saw it was actually the light of several lanterns and some pickup trucks, and there was quite a commotion going on up there.