“What you got in mind?” Poudlum asked as we momentarily ceased our efforts to push our boat into the water.
“I don’t think we ought to take the chance of going back out on the river with them having the advantage of a motor on their boat. I don’t doubt we could outpaddle them, but we can’t outpaddle a motor.”
“But what else can we do? We got to at least get across the river.”
“Silas said they would be back by dawn from their whiskey-running. If they see our boat is gone, they gonna know at once we done got away, and they’ll start looking for us. But if our boat is still here, they’ll think we’re still tied up inside with Dudley.”
“But if our boat is still here, then we will be, too,” Poudlum reminded me.
“That’s right. What we could do is hide out and take both boats when they get up to the cabin, and that way they wouldn’t have no way to chase us.”
“We would have to move real fast,” Poudlum warned. “It do sound like a good plan, but we better work out the details, and work them out good.”
“All right, let’s get started.”
The first thing we did was retie the rope which secured our boat and put a slipknot in it so all we would have to do was give the loose end of the rope a yank to free it.
Essentially, our plan was to tie our boat to the back of theirs as soon as they disembarked and began walking toward the cabin. Once that was done we intended to rapidly launch their boat, start the motor and race away before they could get back down to the river after they discovered we had outwitted and overcome Dudley.
“You don’t think it might be stealing to take their boat, do you?” Poudlum asked.
“No, because we’ll be taking it from bootleggers and kidnappers.”
“I reckon I have to agree with that. But where we gonna hide out till they get here? It’s got to be somewhere close by, but we don’t want to be staying in the water that long.”
“Yeah, it’s got to be somewhere besides the water,” I agreed.
There was a big bushy oak tree nearby with branches low enough so we could reach up and grab them. When I proposed it as a hiding place, Poudlum readily agreed and said, “That tree is about the only hiding place close enough for our plan to work, but it might be a little uncomfortable being up there till daylight.”
“It must be about midnight,” I said. “We’ll stay on the ground until the last hour or two before dawn.”
We agreed that one of us should stay awake the rest of the night, and we would take turns being on watch. We devised a method of keeping up with the time by using pebbles, which we scooped up from the edge of the river. They were white and shiny and the moon gave off just enough light to see them and count them.
I took the first two-hour shift while Poudlum took his blanket from the boat, rolled up in it, and went right off to sleep.
To count the minutes and the hours, I took a pebble from the pile and put it in a new pile every time I counted to sixty, representing one minute. When I had sixty pebbles transferred to the new pile, I knew an hour had passed. Then I did it all over again, and when I had 120 pebbles in the new pile, I knew two hours had passed, and it was time to wake up Poudlum.
I gently awakened Poudlum for his two-hour shift. Once I got him fully awake, I showed him my pile of 120 pebbles, which he could discard one by one and then wake me up when they were all gone, which should be about four o’clock in the morning.
I rolled up in his still-warm blanket and went right off to sleep. It seemed like I had just closed my eyes when I felt him gently shaking my shoulder and whispering, “Wake up. It ought not to be but a hour or two before daylight.”
We had agreed to spend the last watch up in the tree with both of us staying awake, so after we had reviewed our plan and walked through it two times, we put the blanket back into our boat and approached the tree. It was only about twenty yards from the boat landing, and we judged the cabin to be about a hundred, so we felt comfortable it would work.
There was nothing difficult about getting up in the tree. We just had to reach up and grasp a massive limb and pull ourselves up. We climbed to the second row of limbs and nestled our backs up against the trunk of the tree and rested our legs on the limbs, which were thicker than our bodies.
From our perches, we were making sure we could see the boat and the shore of the river when Poudlum said, “You remember the last time we was up a tree together?”
“Yeah, it was when that big mean bulldog had us treed.”
“Jake ain’t gonna show up to save us this time,” he said. “We’ll have to do it ourselves.”
“We can,” I reassured him. “All we got to do is stick to our plan and execute it.”
“I feel like a panther laying up here in this tree waiting for my quarry to pass underneath so I can pounce down on it,” Poudlum mused.
“Yeah, but instead of a deer or a rabbit, our quarry is them two boats.”
Things were so still and quiet we could barely hear anything except the movement of the river, and barely that. My eyes got so heavy it felt like I needed some fence posts to keep them propped open. I shook my head to drive the drowsiness away and asked Poudlum how long he thought it was before daylight.
The only response I got was a soft snore.
I reached over and shook his shoulder and said, “Wake up, Poudlum. We can’t go to sleep now!”
“Huh?” he responded.
“A sleeping panther will let his quarry pass by unmolested. We got to stay awake. It ought not to be too long now.”
When a faint light began to sift through the trees from the east, and the frogs began to croak, I knew it truly wouldn’t be long before daylight.
Suddenly, Poudlum said, “You hear that?”
“What?”
“Listen.”
I cocked my head, listened intently, and in between the sound of the toads toasting the dawn, I heard the faint sound of a boat motor.
“It’s them!” I said.
Way out on the river, a dim light appeared and increased with the sound of the motor as Silas’s and Mr. Kim’s boat approached the bank.
We instinctively scrunched up a little closer to the trunk of the tree when we heard them cut the motor off. We also heard the sound of the boat as its momentum caused it to slide halfway up on the low bank of the river.
As the two of them stepped out of the boat and onto the bank, Silas spoke first. His wicked words came drifting up through the foliage when he said to Mr. Kim, “Let’s go get yo’ two cabin boys and get on down the river.”
Mr. Kim didn’t say anything. He just moved slowly and deliberately as if he had some kind of sinister purpose in mind.
“I’m stiff as a board,” Silas said as he put his hand on his hips and stretched his back.
It wasn’t quite daylight yet, but there was enough gray light so that objects had begun to take form, and that was almost our undoing.
Silas took two steps before stopping in his tracks and casting his carbide lamp into our boat. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Them blankets wasn’t in that boat when we left.”
My heart began pounding like a drum, and I felt Poudlum’s grip on my arm as we pressed back against the tree trunk, wishing we could sink into the very bark of it.
“Should’ve left while we could,” Poudlum whispered.
Then we breathed a heavy sigh of relief when Silas said, “Dudley must have already started loading up. Come on, Mr. Kim.” Then he turned and began walking toward the cabin. “I saved one case of shine for you. I’ll wager it tastes a lot better than that sour stuff you fellows brew out of rice.”
We relinquished our grips on the tree slightly as they began walking away. That is until we saw the horrible deed that happened next.
With Silas one step ahead of him, we saw Mr. Kim pull a long shiny knife from within the folds of his long black shirt. It cast a dull glint in the early morning light.
I had to put my hand over my mouth to stifle a gasp when I saw him plunge the wicked blade into Silas’s back. At first I thought I might have fallen asleep and was dreaming the grisly scene, but when I felt Poudlum’s sudden grip on my shoulder and heard his sharp intake of breath, I realized the ghastly murder was really happening right before our eyes.
We watched in horror as Silas stiffened, let out a low moan, and then crumpled to the ground, after which Mr. Kim extracted his murderous blade, wiped it clean on Silas’s shirt and placed it into its original hiding place.
At that moment, I almost panicked, and my muscles contracted as I thought of leaping from the tree and running away as fast as my legs would take me, but Poudlum saved me from making that fatal mistake when he whispered softly into my ear, “Don’t move and don’t make nary a sound.”
What Mr. Kim did next revealed to us that he was not only a murderer, but also a robber. He rifled through Silas’s pockets and we saw him extract a roll of folding money from the dead man’s pocket and tuck it away into his own clothing.
The next thing he did was cast his eyes all around to make sure no one had seen his dastardly deed. When he began walking toward the cabin, I thanked the Good Lord he hadn’t looked up.
When he was halfway there, Poudlum whispered, “Come on, we got to move!”
“I’m not sure I can,” I answered.
“You got to!” Poudlum insisted as he pulled at me.
“What you think he’s gonna do?” I asked.
“I expect he gonna go in the cabin, slit Dudley’s throat, and come back out here looking for us.”
That got me moving, and as we dropped softly from the tree and dashed to the water’s edge, I asked Poudlum, “Can you start that motor?”
“No time for that!” he said as he pulled the slip knot of the rope holding our boat.
When he pushed me aboard and began casting off, I said, “But he’ll catch us with that motorboat!”
“No, he won’t,” Poudlum said as he maneuvered our boat to the rear of the motorboat, where I watched as he reached out and ripped the rubber gas line from the motor and held it up in his hand where it dangled like a baby snake before he tossed it into the bottom of our boat.
Just as he did that, we saw a dark figure emerge from the cabin door and onto the porch.
“Paddle like you ain’t never done before!” Poudlum said as he dug his paddle deep into the water.
Mr. Kim closed the distance from the cabin to the river’s edge on a dead run, but we were moving out onto the water by then.
“What if he’s got a gun?” I said as I strained my muscles on the paddle.
“Don’t matter if he has,” Poudlum said.
“How come? He could kill us as dead as he done Silas.”
“He don’t want us dead,” Poudlum said as he strained mightily with his paddle. “He wants us alive so he can ship us off as slaves on a slow boat to China. Paddle hard!”
Over our shoulders, we saw Mr. Kim board his boat, move to the rear of it and pull the starter rope on the motor. It sputtered and coughed but didn’t fire.
He attempted to start the motor several more times to no avail, and by this time, we had put some distance between us and him.
I was beginning to feel a little relieved until I saw what he did next. I kept dedicating myself to the paddle stroke with my eyes locked on Mr. Kim. He was doing something with the motor. Then I saw him lift it out of the boat and toss it onto the bank. I knew he had realized it was useless, and he was getting rid of the weight of it.
“What’s he doing?” Poudlum asked.
When I saw him grab a paddle, move to the bow of the boat and start paddling like a madman, I said, “I think he intends to chase us.”
“Ain’t no way he can do that,” Poudlum said. “He can’t outpaddle the two of us.”
Poudlum and I could make a boat skim across the water, and in the last couple of days we had developed a link between us so that we both always paddled together and never against each other.
We had reached mid-river by now, and as the sun burned the remaining morning fog off, we looked back and were amazed that the space between us and Mr. Kim had not increased. He was keeping pace with us.
“That sucker can sure enough paddle,” Poudlum lamented.
“Let’s bear down some,” I told him.
Without a starting signal, we both dug our paddles a little deeper and increased the speed of our strokes, and after about twenty minutes of this, my muscles were burning, and I had to keep wiping the sweat out of my eyes by leaning my head to either side and wiping my face on my shirt sleeves.
Sure enough, after a while, Mr. Kim had been reduced to a mere dot way back behind us.
“I guess we showed that sucker how to paddle,” Poudlum said triumphantly.
“Yeah, but we can’t keep this up. Let’s ease up some, ’cause I’m aching all over.”
So we relaxed some, paddled easily for a while, but were shocked when we looked back and saw the dot of Mr. Kim had increased into a distinguishable view of our pursuer.
“Good Lord!” Poudlum exclaimed. “That Chinese man can paddle better than I thought. We better hunker down and get back to it. Do you remember how we used to think about pleasant things when we suffered in the cotton field?”
“Uh-huh,” I told him.
So we both concentrated on pleasurable things in our minds while our bodies labored over the paddles, and it soon paid off as Mr. Kim’s boat once again began to recede on the horizon.
“How far you think it is up to the bridge in Jackson?” Poudlum asked in between ragged breaths.
“I think it’s still a good ways up the river, ’cause we ain’t even come to the place where we hid out under the big oak tree yet.”
We looked back, and he was still coming, and as we tired, he slowly began to close the gap.
Once again, we dug deep into our resolve, and punished our bodies with the paddling. We did gain some distance from the man with the long thin mustache and the long sharp knife, who wanted to enslave us and ship us off to China.
We were once again maintaining our distance and were beginning to feel comfortable when suddenly a geyser erupted in the center of our boat.