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.
Chapter 15
Running for Life
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.
Trouble on the Tombigbee Page 12