By Friday morning, the U.S. Marshals had added the escapees to its 15 Most Wanted fugitives list. One hundred and sixty-eight state troopers from the New York State Police had been assigned to a 24-hour roving patrol. Dozens of investigators continued to pursue new leads. Age progression mug shots of the inmates had been released. Search parties had cleared more than six hundred miles of trails through Clinton and Franklin Counties, where abandoned buildings, seasonal camps, railroad beds, and hundreds of occupied homes had been investigated, yet no sign of the inmates had surfaced.
“We're not going anywhere,” said Guess, speaking at an 11 a.m. press conference outside of Clinton. “Our plan is to pursue these men relentlessly and until they are in custody. We will not stop our search and we will not stop chasing leads until we have put Richard Matt and David Sweat back in prison.”
• • •
“Here, take these.”
Sweat pushed a pile of cigarette butts toward Matt, then handed him a wad of rolling papers. He had spent the afternoon scouring the cabin for the discarded ends. Even a few grams of tobacco might diminish the side effects of Matt’s nicotine withdrawal, he thought, and therefore curb his desire to hit the bottle.
Matt’s mouth widened in a goofy, inebriated grin.
“Where’d you get these? I looked all over the place!”
Sweat laughed. It was clear his friend’s vision had been compromised by the spirits.
“Hey, what’s that?” Matt’s eyes roved from the ends and fell on the fifty-cent piece Sweat was flipping in his hand.
Sweat held it up for him to see.
“Nah,” Matt said. “I’ve got something better for you.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver dollar. Sweat eyed it with interest; it must have come from the box of coins tucked away in a hole in the ceiling that he had come across earlier that day.
“Why are you keeping all of the change?” he asked. “It’s just added weight.”
“It’s still money and I’m going to buy you a Pepsi out of a soda machine with it! You wait and see.”
Sweat grinned. In that moment, his friend reminded him of the man who sings the melody of “Midnight Rider”: a guy on the run with nothing more to his name than a silver dollar.
“A Pepsi!? Just want what I've always wanted.”
The last twelve hours had been normal, as life on the road went. They had begun with a morning wash in a nearby creek, where they had also collected water to boil for their breakfast (oatmeal and coffee), lunch (baked beans and macaroni elbows with fried pepperoni, hot sauce, and seasoning), and dinner (more macaroni elbows). A few notable things differentiated this day from the rest: Matt had fallen through the floorboards of the back deck, which were all but rotted out. He had also discovered a twenty-gauge shotgun under one of the mattresses. (Sweat had found it first and had hoped Matt would not see it. There was not much he could do, Sweat thought, other than to let him have it.) But on the whole, the day was more or less uneventful—just how they wanted it to be.
Rain now tapped on the roof of Twisted Horn (Sweat would later find out the cabin’s name). As the day waned, he rolled a joint with some weed he had found, and poured himself a glass of black cherry moonshine. Across from him, Matt twirled his recently claimed Bowie knife between his fingers.
He held up the blade, brandishing the eagle on its handle for Sweat to see.
“You know who gave me this?” he asked. “My friend gave me this.”
Sweat smiled. He knew Matt was sloshed, but the remark meant something to him all the same. As they smoked and drank, he thought back to something he heard that morning on his transistor radio. A DJ announced that he would dedicate a song to the escapees. A moment later Paul McCartney began to croon to “Band on the Run” as members of the Wings strummed in the background.