The cork Poudlum had driven into the hole in our boat had succumbed to the pressure and popped out of the hole. A fountain of river water was pouring into our boat.
Poudlum dropped his paddle and grabbed a blanket, wadded it up, and pressed down hard on the spurting fountain.
I moved to the front of the boat where I could alternate my paddle strokes on each side of the boat. Without us both paddling, our speed decreased considerably.
“You got it stopped?” I called back over my shoulder.
“I can slow it down, but I can’t stop it!” he answered. “It’s too much pressure pushing up! Keep paddling and when you get too tired, we’ll switch places.”
About ten minutes later, we made the switch, and I had to wade through several inches of water in the bottom of the boat. When I sat down and pressed the soggy blanket against the hole, I couldn’t help but notice Mr. Kim was closing in on us. I kept my eyes on him while I held back the water, and it wasn’t long before I knew we were in trouble because I could see the water splashing up from his paddle strokes.
“We got to head for the bank, Poudlum!”
He looked back and said, “I hope we can make it before he catches us!”
In desperation, I cast my eyes toward the eastern shore and just beyond the low growth on the bank, I saw the leafy mound of the top of the giant water oak tree we had camped under.
“There!” I pointed. “Head for the big tree!”
“I see it,” Poudlum called back. “But I don’t know if we can make it!”
I gauged the distance between us and Mr. Kim and the speed we were making and concluded he was right. The water in the boat was up over my ankles now, and the extra weight of it was slowing us to a crawl, which brought me to the conclusion we would be overtaken before we could reach the safety of the bank.
There was only one thing left to do. “We got to swim for it, Poudlum!”
“I heard Silas say he was gonna get two hundred dollars from that Chinese man for us. The way he’s coming after us, I reckon he expects to get a lot more than that.”
“I don’t think he wants us for cabin boys anymore, Poudlum.”
“Huh, what you mean?”
“He knows we saw him murder Silas. I know most folks would probably say he wasn’t hardly worth killing, but it was murder still the same.”
A shiver went through me when I heard Poudlum say, “You’re right! That’s why he’s coming after us so hard—he wants to get rid of the witnesses!”
“Got to leave our shoes,” I told him as I ripped mine off.
“You think we can make it?” Poudlum asked as he did the same.
“We might can if we swim hard.”
The last thing I heard Poudlum say before we abandoned ship was, “I know I can swim faster than we can paddle this boat.”
The sinking boat lurched under us as we dived into the water. The coolness of the river actually felt good after all the hard paddling.
I surfaced, blowing water and stroking hard, with Poudlum at my side. Back over my shoulder, I could see the wispy ends of Mr. Kim’s long, skinny mustache fluttering in the wind.
The shoreline was only about twenty yards away, and Mr. Kim’s boat was about twice that distance behind us. Even though his boat was moving slightly faster than we were swimming, I was beginning to believe we were going to make it.
I knew we had at least made the bank when I felt the low-lying bushes on the edge brush against my face. I reached up and grabbed a strong branch and used it to pull myself up on the bank. A moment later, I reached down and pulled Poudlum up next to me.
Through the leafy branches, we saw Mr. Kim, his black shirt plastered to his body with perspiration, and a pained look in his dark eyes. He was that close, and as his boat came crashing into the underbrush, we turned and broke into a hard run.
As we raced underneath the great and beautiful tree where we had hung our hammock and slept, I heard the rattling of Mr. Kim’s paddle as he dropped it in his boat.
We didn’t look back for a good long spell. We just ran. We ran as hard as we had ever run in our lives. We dodged trees, leapt over dead logs, ducked under low limbs, and crashed through thickets for what seemed like an eternity.
Finally, completely exhausted, we collapsed next to a large cottonwood tree. As I lay against its smooth bark, my chest heaved, ached, and burned.
As soon as we could quiet our heavy breathing, we began to listen. We cocked our heads and listened as hard and intently as we could, and the forest was as still and quiet as a graveyard at midnight.
“How come everything is so quiet, Poudlum?” I said softly.
“Probably because of all the racket we made running. We done scared all the birds and varmints, and they doing like we doing—listening to see what they can hear.”
“You think he’s still coming?”
“His feet must not be touching the ground if he is, ’cause I don’t hear nothing.”
“Maybe we done outrun him.” I said. “You think he just quit and turned around and went back?”
Poudlum thought about this for a moment before he said, “Not him, not the way that man paddled. He could be right back there behind us just resting and listening like we are.”
That thought was enough to get us up and off like the wind. The only trouble was we had left our shoes in the sinking boat and eventually our feet were getting tender. When we crossed a good-sized clearing, we stopped again, and this time, we had the advantage of being able to see a good way behind us.
After we had caught our breath, Poudlum said, “We can’t keep on running blind like this. I done jammed a toe.”
“Yeah, and I stepped on a sharp rock,” I said as I rubbed the ball of my left foot.
“I think we been running in a pretty straight line away from the river,” Poudlum speculated.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “That would make us going east. At some point we got to turn left and head north if we want to get up to the bridge at Jackson.”
“I’ve heard tell they is some bad swamps up that way. I shore don’t relish the idea of going through them, ’specially without no shoes.”
“Me, neither,” I said. “We could keep going east, and sooner or later we ought to come out on the highway.”
“Yeah, but how far you think that is?”
“I don’t know, Poudlum. It could be a long way.”
“Yeah, and they could be some swamps that way, too, and you know the worst part?”
“What?”
“We left them biscuits we took from Silas in the boat, and I shore am hungry. Remember, the Klan men made us lose our hushpuppies up at the ferry. Just because of the Klan, a Chinese slaver, and river rats like Silas and Dudley, we gonna starve to death.”
The mention of Dudley kind of made me cringe and feel sorry for him. I told Poudlum, “I wish we hadn’t of left old Dudley all trussed up like we did. When Mr. Kim went into the cabin and saw us gone, all he had to do was slit his throat like he was just a hog.”
Poudlum shuddered as he said, “Maybe he didn’t do that. But it’s for sure he’s after us, and here we sit with sore feet, hungry, thirsty, and half lost. So what we gonna do, head for the swamps or stay straight on?”
“I got an idea,” I said.
Poudlum’s head snapped up, and his eyes grew large as he said, “What you got in mind?”
“If we keep going, through the swamp or through the woods, our feet are just gonna get worse, and we could even get lost. Besides that, we ain’t got nothing to eat or drink, and we don’t even know if we could get through the woods before dark.”
“So what’s the idea you got?”
“We got to get back to the river.”
“Back to the river? How in the world we gonna do that with a murdering slaver between us and the water?”
“We’ll go around him,” I said as I searched the far edge of the clearing for any movement. “Instead of running hard, we’ll have to move real quiet until we know we’re behind him.”
“Then what?”
“Then we’ll run like heck back to the river and take his boat?”
“Now you talking!” Poudlum said.
We started working our way around the big clearing, slowly and quietly, staying inside the tree line, while we kept a sharp eye on the spot on the far side we had emerged from.
We were about two-thirds of the way around it when we saw him. Mr. Kim came out into the clearing, bent low, searching for our tracks.
I figured we had left a clean trail in the woods, what with us running with abandon the way we had, but he was having a difficult time finding a trail over the open ground.
“When he gets inside the woods on the other side, it won’t take him long to figure out what we done,” Poudlum whispered.
“We’ll start moving again soon as he disappears into the woods,” I whispered back.
When that happened, we carefully completed circling around the clearing until we reached our original trail, where we began walking softly back toward the river.
Just before we thought it was safe to start running again, Poudlum offered up what I thought was some good advice. “I don’t think we ought to run full out at first. Maybe save ourselves in case we have to really run for it later.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “And we can’t stop till we get to that boat.”
It was easy to follow the way we had come, except it wasn’t in fast motion this time. We constantly cast cautious glances over our shoulders as we loped along at about three-quarter speed.
We proceeded this way for quite a spell and figured we were about halfway back when we passed the cottonwood tree where we had rested earlier.
That was when we heard the loud shriek behinds. “Stop! You stop!”
We didn’t have to guess to know who it was, and it was close enough to scare us back to running wide open.
Once again, the trees swept by as I sucked air into my tortured lungs. But I knew I had some more hard running in me, and was grateful we had taken Poudlum’s advice.
The pain of my bruised foot was forgotten as I made long leaps over fallen logs.
Poudlum, at my side, called out, “If he catches up with us, you go right, and I’ll go left. That way he won’t get us both!”
I didn’t know how he had the breath to talk, so I nodded agreement to him and kept running hard, and was thankful again for Poudlum’s foresight in advising us to save ourselves in case we needed to have something extra toward the end. If we hadn’t we surely would have been overtaken by the mad Chinese man.
And now, in spite of the burning deep inside my chest, we seemed to be leaving our pursuer farther and farther behind. Every time I glanced backwards, I couldn’t see any sign of him through the woods and couldn’t hear any sounds of him.
“Maybe he give up!” Poudlum called out.
“Maybe,” I gasped. “But we need to keep going. It’s not far now!”
We were real close now, and I spied our big beautiful oak tree just ahead, and was so happy to see it until I lost my concentration and tripped over a vine. The ground came up like a spring and slammed me in the face and multicolored lights exploded inside my head.
By the time I got to my knees, Poudlum was kneeling beside me, breathing hard. “You all right?” he asked as he glanced nervously back behind us.
“I think so. It just knocked me dizzy.”
“Can you get up?”
“In just a minute,” I said as I tried to clear my head.
“If you can’t, tell me, and I’ll carry you ’cause we don’t need to keep piddling around here.”
“You think we left him?”
“For a little while, but he won’t quit, and he could come busting through them bushes any time now,” Poudlum said as he pulled me to my feet.
With his help, we made it over to the big tree, where I leaned up against the giant trunk of it trying to get my senses back.
What cleared my mind was a swishing sound, a flash of something spinning in the air, and the sudden thud as Mr. Kim’s murderous blade struck the trunk of the tree, where it stuck and stood vibrating with a low humming sound an inch from my head.
It not only cleared my mind, but also sent us dashing like the wind for the river’s edge. We crashed into the underbrush, and there was his boat, our chariot to safety. As we flung ourselves into it. Poudlum snatched the tie rope loose and pushed us off.
I was still slightly dazed, and Poudlum had to encourage me. “Grab a paddle and pull! He’ll be coming at us any second now!”
Poudlum’s words proved true a split-second later as Mr. Kim burst from the bushes and dove straight into the water.
He had retrieved his weapon, and as we stared in horror, he stood waist deep in the water and once more launched his wicked blade at us.
I saw the flash of the sun’s reflection on the long steel shaft as it came twirling straight toward us.