I knew he knew I had seen him when he softly said, “If you try to sic dem dogs on me, I’ll be mo dan happy to introduce ’em to one of dese rifles.”
Suddenly I took a quick glance over behind me and I saw the dogs were silently observing the proceedings, so I left that situation as it was for the time being and turned my attention back to Cudjoe.
He was still speaking low and softly, when he said, “What I want you to do is put some wood on dat fire so we can see. Den I want you to wake everybody else up, real gentle like, and gather ’em around.”
“We thought you left,” I said as Poudlum began rousing himself up on his own.
“Well, y’all thought wrong. Good morning, Poudlum. You go crawl in dat tent and get my auntie and Sister Gal out here. You hear me, boy!”
Poudlum wasn’t quite awake yet, and all he could manage was, “Huh?”
I reached over and grasped his shoulder, and said, “Cudjoe done come back and he’s got our rifles. Go wake up Miss Lucretia and Sister Gal.”
Poudlum rubbed the sleep out of his eyes with his fists before he went over and parted the flaps of the tent and asked the ladies to please wake up and come out by the fire.
When they came out, the fire was burning brightly, and I could tell by the look on their faces they were as shocked as Poudlum and I to be in the company of Cudjoe once again.
“Y’all gather round de fire so I can keep my eyes on you,” Cudjoe told everybody. “First thing I want is one of y’all to get me some of dat food I knows you got. I’m ’bout hungry as a bear. Sister Gal, go back in dat tent and bring me something out here.”
After she had dumped everything we had left into a pile at his feet, he produced a pocket knife and opened a can of sausage and drank the juice from the can before he gulped down the contents.
“What you want wid us, Cudjoe?” Sister Gal asked him.
“I’m de one what gonna be asking de questions,” he replied.
Sister Gal persisted, and said, “You done got yo’ snakeskins. How come you ain’t done gone?”
“I wuz till I spotted you sneaking in toward auntie’s cabin as I was leaving. At first I kept going; then I told myself you wuz probably up to no good so I turned around. And I was right ’cause you done helped dese two rascals out of de panther pit, and now you’re helping to take Auntie away from her home.
“I didn’t catch up wid you till I found y’all digging around in de ground. Instead of making myself known I just held back in de woods to see what y’all wuz up to. And lo and behold, I watched y’all dig up de gold dat folks down toward Mobile been looking for ’bout thirty years. And all de time it was buried right outside Auntie’s goat pen!”
“Why didn’t you stop us before now?” I asked him.
“Cause y’all had de guns, but now I got ’em. I eased in here ’bout an hour ago, quieter dan a rattlesnake, so quiet dem dogs didn’t even wake up. My plan was to make sure y’all left my auntie be, but when I seen dat gold, I forgot about dat. I don’t care where she goes now. I just wants dat gold, and I won’t never have to come back in dese woods again.”
He glanced toward Poudlum and snapped, “You, Poudlum! I want you to go in dat tent and fetch me dat sack of gold!”
“I ain’t gonna do no such thing!” Poudlum responded.
I heard the metallic clicks as Cudjoe chambered a round in one of the rifles. Then he brought the stock to his shoulder and leveled the barrel with it pointing straight at Rip, and said, “If you want to see yo’ dog go on living, you best do like you told.”
A collective gasp came from everyone around the fire when Cudjoe made his despicable threat.
Miss Lucretia was the first to speak, when she said to Poudlum, “Go, child, go in de tent and fetch de pouch wid de gold fo’ dis sorry nephew of mine makes me even mo’ shamed dan I already is to be his kin.”
Her words brought only a smirk to the face of Cudjoe as he lowered the rifle and watched Poudlum enter the tent, and then exit it with the bag of gold.
“Just drop it there at my feet,” Cudjoe said as he raised the weapon again.
After Poudlum had obeyed the order he turned and came back to join us beside the fire where we watched Cudjoe untie the drawstring on the pouch.
“Go ahead,” Miss Lucretia said. “Reach in and satisfy yo’ self de gold is in it.”
Cudjoe started to do just that, but at the last moment a flicker of doubt crossed his face, and he hesitated. Instead of reaching in the pouch, he spread the opening and tentatively leaned over to peek inside. That’s when the rattlesnake struck.
Fortunately for Cudjoe, he jerked his head back in the nick of time to avoid what could have been a fatal bite to the face. He yelled out and kicked the bag away from him as the snake slithered out of it and crawled toward the woods.
Old Bill started after it with a low growl in his throat, but I called him back.
“You crazy old voodoo woman!” Cudjoe screamed at Miss Lucretia. “What kind of person puts a rattlesnake in a bag of gold?”
She didn’t respond and Cudjoe poked at the pouch with a rifle barrel until he was satisfied it was safe to check the gold.
He poured it all out on the ground and while he was counting them, Sister Gal said, “What you counting it fo? Ain’t nobody took none of ’em. None of us is a thief like you!”
“You watch yo’ mouth, Sister Gal,” Cudjoe said as he satisfied himself that all the coins were there, dropping the last one into the pouch.
“You better not ever show yo’ sorry self again in Africatown,” Sister Gal said to him as he stood up and slipped the slings of both rifles over his shoulders and slung the pouch containing Miss Lucretia’s fortune over his back. Then with his pack in his hand and his back to the woods, he began backing toward them.
When he reached the edge of the woods, he said, “My advice to all of y’all is to forget you ever seen me, or dis gold.” Then he turned and melted into the woods with our weapons and Miss Lucretia’s chance to live a comfortable life.
We all sat there stunned for a few moments, before Poudlum said, “Ain’t had them rifles but a week and we done lost ’em twice.”
“What we gonna do?” Sister Gal said in a trembling voice.
“Nothing to do, ’cept walk on out of dese woods,” Miss Lucretia said.
I knew something was up when Poudlum suddenly said, “Sister Gal, could you make it back to Mister Autrey’s place without me and Ted if you had to?”
“Shore I could,” she replied. “I remember de rest of de way. It won’t take more dan two hours.”
“Good. If me and Ted ain’t back a couple of hours before dark, you take Miss Lucretia and do that. Right now we going after Cudjoe!”
“We are?” I said.
“Yeah, I got a plan,” he said. Then he turned back toward Sister Gal, and said, “If we don’t get back just leave the tent and everything here and we’ll come back for it later. And I want you to keep the dogs here with you.”
“Come on,” he said to me, as he darted off toward the woods looking for Cudjoe’s trail.
We had barely gone fifty yards when Poudlum came to a halt, and said, “We got to figure out the direction we need to go in.”
“Why? What’s your plan?” I asked.
“The plan is to not let Cudjoe get away with Miss Lucretia’s gold. Them coins will make a big difference in her life when she starts it over.”
“I feel the same way, Poudlum, but what’s your plan? We can’t just run him down. He’s got the guns, and besides, he’s a big strong man.”
“Remember, he didn’t come by way of Mister Autrey’s. He said he parked his truck down the road a ways from there. All we got to do is beat him to it and disable it.”
“That sounds good, but to do that we gonna have to circle around him, which means we will have to cover more ground in l
ess time than he does.”
“Exactly! And after we get to the highway we’ll have to find his truck before he gets to it.”
“If we manage to do all that, what then?”
“I don’t know, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
After we figured out the direction to take that would bring us out approximately a half mile south of Mister Autrey’s place, we took off running at about three-quarter speed, and knew we had to stick to it all the way if we expected to beat him to where he had parked.
We kept up our pace for about a quarter of an hour before we slowed to a fast walk to catch our breath.
“We’ll walk for five minutes and then run some more,” Poudlum said. “If we can keep up that for an hour or so we ought to come out on the highway. When we get there we may have to split up. One of us go up the road and one of us go down it till we find whatever kind of vehicle he’s driving.”
“He probably won’t have it parked right beside the road so it can be seen by anybody that’s passing by,” I surmised.
“That’s true,” Poudlum agreed. “It’ll probably be a little ways off the road so we’ll have to stay in the edge of the woods while we’re searching for it.”
Poudlum’s assumption of the time it would take turned out to be correct, and in about an hour the highway appeared through the foliage.
“All right,” Poudlum said through ragged breaths. “you go back toward Mister Autrey’s place, and I’ll head south toward Coffeeville. When either one of us spots it, we’ll use our secret signal to let the other one know, and then wait for him.”
Our secret signal was a very shrill whistle we had learned by constant practice, whereby we placed our left and right little fingers in the corners of our mouth to suppress the bottom lip and then blow down hard to produce the sound. The whistle was like a lifeline we developed to locate each other in the event we got separated, or just needed to locate each other. No one knew about it, or its purpose, except the two of us.
I had only gone about three hundred yards when I came across an old logging road. It was overgrown with weeds, but as I bent down to examine the ground I saw two rows of crushed weeds and the slight outline of tire tracks.
I started jogging down the old road, and around the first curve, there it was, an old blue Dodge pickup truck. Without getting any closer to it I executed the whistle. A moment later, I heard Poudlum’s faint response. I counted the seconds up to sixty and whistled again. After the fifth time of doing this I spotted Poudlum rushing down the old road toward me.
He jogged up next to me, breathing hard as he appraised the situation. “We probably ain’t got much time before Cudjoe show up. We simply can’t let him get away, or it’ll be the last anyone ever sees of that gold.”
“What you think we ought to do?” I asked.
“I ain’t sure, but we got to do something, and do it quick. You got any ideas?”
“We could use our knives and flatten his tires.”
“Yeah, but he could still drive on ’em flat if he took a mind to.”
“We could open the hood and pull the wires off the spark plugs.”
“That would be the first thing he would check,” Poudlum said. “And he could fix that real quick.”
“Well, if we done both, it would slow him down some.
“We can’t just slow him down. We got to stop him, and keep him here till we can somehow get the upper hand on him.”
“Then you better put your thinking cap on,” I told Poudlum. “I done run out of ideas.”
“Come on, let’s take a closer look at that truck,” Poudlum said.
When we got up close to the truck we saw that it was pretty ragged and the windows on the driver and passenger were both gone.
“Guess when it rains he just gets wet,” Poudlum observed.
“Look at this,” I said as I inspected the door on the driver’s side. “The latch is broken and the door is held closed with this piece of wire.”
“That don’t matter,” Poudlum said from up in front of the hood where he was bent over looking underneath the front end of the truck. “Come up here and look at this.”
When I got there and leaned over he pointed out a block of wood jammed up against the left front tire.
“Look at that,” he said. “He’s got a scotch under that wheel, which means this truck probably ain’t got no brakes on it.”
I didn’t understand the significance of that and I told him so. His response enlightened me when he said, “What if we got in the cab and knocked the truck out of gear, and then kicked that scotch out from under the tire?”
I thought on his proposition, considered the lay of the land, and understood the consequences of his proposal, but suggested we reverse the two actions.
Chapter 17
Saved by the Rain
Cudjoe’s truck was parked on a slight incline, and down below that incline was a deep gully where the timber had been cut, but since that time the underbrush had grown up to what looked like higher than my head.
“We gonna make this truck disappear,” Poudlum said as he kicked the block of wood out from under the front tire.
I unwound the wire holding the driver’s side door and opened it so that Poudlum could slide inside and seat himself under the wheel. As soon as he did this, he said, “I’m gonna knock it out of gear.”
“You better jump out real quick as soon as you do,” I told him.
“I will,” he said as he depressed the clutch and shifted the gear into neutral, and then immediately jumped clear of the truck.
We stood there expecting it to go crashing down into the gully, but it didn’t move.
“We got to give it a little push,” I said.
We went behind the truck and got our hands underneath the bumper, leaned into it, pushed hard, and felt it begin to slowly move. Then it pulled away from us on its own as gravity took over.
It was an awesome sight as the truck gathered speed and rumbled down the incline, and then crashed into the bottom of the gully where it was swallowed up by bushes and saplings. When it came to rest the only thing visible was the very top of the cab.
“Quick!” Poudlum said. “We got to break the top out of some bushes, cover up these tracks and then throw them on top of the cab so it can’t be seen.”
When we finished, it was as if the truck had truly disappeared. The tire tracks ended abruptly, and the truck was just gone.
“What now?” I asked.
“We got to hide and wait on him,” Poudlum answered.
“What you think he’ll do?”
“He’s gonna be bumfuzzled, that’s for sure. He’ll probably think Miss Lucretia done used some voodoo to make his truck disappear, but I ain’t got no idea what he’ll do. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“You think he’ll try to get away on foot?”
“I ’spect he will, and if he does, we just gonna have to follow him. Come on, let’s get outta sight. He ought to be showing up anytime!”
We concealed ourselves behind a big fallen pine tree that looked like maybe a storm had blown it down. It was directly across the logging road from where the truck had been parked and was resting on some broken limbs so that we could lay on our bellies and peek from underneath it.
We didn’t have to wait long before we saw Cudjoe emerge from the woods.
“This is gonna be good!” Poudlum whispered to me.
As we observed, he stopped a few feet from where the truck had been with a dazed and confused look on his face. After a moment or two he took off his pack, unslung our rifles, and also, to our relief, the pouch of gold, and rested them all on the ground.
He wiped the sweat from his face with his shirt sleeve; then he put his hands on his hips and turned in a complete circle real slow like he was attempting to get his bearings.
; From underneath the fallen tree, we heard his words as he began to speak to himself, saying, “I know I left my truck here. I knows for sure I parked it right here.”
I could hear the desperation and the disbelief in his voice, when he said, “I shore does hope dey ain’t no voodoo going on here!”
“I told you he believed in it,” Poudlum whispered as Cudjoe finally went over to where his tire tracks ended. As he bent over to examine them, he said, “Uh huh, dey is definitely some voodoo involved wid dis situation! Auntie Lucretia done had some demon swallow up my truck and now I ain’t never gonna get outta here wid dis big sack of gold!
“Oh, Lawd, what to do, what to do?” he moaned as he sat down on the ground and held his head in his hands.
I almost felt sorry for him, but then I remembered how he had abandoned us in the panther pit, and that feeling quickly dissipated.
“Should have tied ’em all up,” Cudjoe continued to himself. “Dey probably done got to Mister Autrey’s place by now, and folks will be trying to run me down soon. What I gots to do is hightail it outta here, but I can’t do dat carrying all dis stuff. Ain’t worried ’bout dese,” he said as he tossed his pack containing the skins, and then our rifles, back into the edge of the woods.
“I can’t run wid dis heavy sack of gold, neither. Got to find somewhere to hide it and come back for it later.”
Then he picked up the pouch with the gold inside of it and looked around in desperation for a safe hiding place.
We watched as his eyes settled on the gulley which had swallowed up his truck. He made a decision, swung the pouch back, pushed off with his back foot and slung the bag with all his might.
The pouch arched high into the air and began to descend toward the center of the gully.
Cudjoe had turned to begin his escape an instant before the bag ripped through the foliage and landed directly on the cab of the truck with a loud metallic clank.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
“Uh oh,” Poudlum whispered.
Cudjoe turned slowly and his gaze descended into the gully to the spot where the heavy pouch had ripped through the foliage to reveal a bright spot of blue—-the top of the cab of his truck.
Salvation of Miss Lucretia Page 13