So again he had only five more years and he would be free. And this time he had learned the lesson which the fool young lawyer had tried to teach him thirty-five years ago. There were eleven of them. They worked and ate and slept as a gang, a unit, living in a detached wire-canvas-and-plank hut (it was summer); shackled to the same chain they went to the mess hall to eat, then to the field to work and, chained again, back to the hut to sleep again. So when the escape was planned, the other ten had to take him into their plot to prevent his giving it away by simple accident. They didn’t want to take him in; two of them were never converted to the idea. Because ever since his own abortive attempt eighteen or twenty years ago he had been known as a sort of self-ordained priest of the doctrine of non-escape.
So when they finally told him simply because he would have to be in the secret to protect it, whether he joined them or not, the moment he said, cried, “No! Here now, wait! Wait! Don’t you see, if any of us tries to get out they’ll come down on all of us and won’t none of us ever get free even when our forty years is up,” he knew he had already talked too much. So when he said to himself, “Now I got to get out of this chain and get away from them,” he did not mean Because if dark catches me alone in this room with them and no guard handy, I’ll never see light again but simply I got to get to the Warden in time, before they try it maybe tonight even and wreck ever body.
And even he would have to wait for the very darkness he feared, until the lights were out and they were all supposed to have settled down for sleep, so that his murderers would make their move, since only during or because of the uproar of the attack on him could he hope to get the warning, his message, to a guard and be believed.
Which meant he would have to match guile with guile: to lie rigid on his cot until they set up the mock snoring which was to lull him off guard, himself tense and motionless and holding his own breath to distinguish in time through the snoring whatever sound would herald the plunging knife (or stick or whatever it would be) in time to roll, fling himself off the cot and in one more convulsive roll underneath it, as the men — he could not tell how many since the spurious loud snoring had if anything increased — hurled themselves on to the vacancy where a split second before he had been lying.
“Grab him,” one hissed, panted.
“Who’s got the knife?” Then another:
“I’ve got the knife. Where in hell is he?” Because he — Mink — had not even paused; another convulsive roll and he was out from under the cot, on all-fours among the thrashing legs, scrabbling, scuttling to get as far away from the cot as he could. The whole room was now in a sort of sotto-voce uproar. “We got to have a light,” a voice muttered. “Just a second of light.”
Suddenly he was free, clear; he could stand up. He screamed, shouted: no word, cry: just a loud human sound; at once the voice muttered, panted: “There. Grab him,” but he had already sprung, leaped, to carom from invisible body to body, shouting, bellowing steadily even after he realised he could see, the air beyond the canvas walls not only full of searchlights but the siren too, himself surrounded, enclosed by the furious silent faces which seemed to dart like fish in then out of the shoulder-high light which came in over the plank half-walls, through the wire mesh; he even saw the knife gleam once above him as he plunged, hurling himself among the surging legs, trying to get back under a cot, any cot, anything to intervene before the knife.
But it was too late, they could also see him now. He vanished beneath them all. But it was too late for them too: the glaring and probing of all the searchlights, the noise of the siren itself, seemed to concentrate downward upon, into the flimsy ramshackle cubicle filled with cursing men. Then the guards were among them, clubbing at heads with pistols and shotgun barrels, dragging them off until he lay exposed, once more battered and bleeding but this time still conscious. He had even managed one last convulsive wrench and twist so that the knife which should have pinned him to it merely quivered in the floor beside his throat.
“Hit was close,” he told the guard. “But looks like we made hit.”
But not quite. He was in the infirmary again and didn’t hear until afterward how on the very next night two of them — Stillwell, a gambler who had cut the throat of a Vicksburg prostitute (he had owned the knife), and another, who had been the two who had held out against taking him into the plot at all but advocated instead killing him at once — made the attempt anyway though only Stillwell escaped, the other having most of his head blown off by a guard’s shotgun blast.
Then he was in the Warden’s office again. This time he had needed little bandaging and no stitches at all; they had not had time enough, and no weapons save their feet and fists except Stillwell’s knife. “It was Stillwell that had the knife, wasn’t it?” the Warden said.
He couldn’t have said why he didn’t tell. “I never seen who had it,” he answered. “I reckon hit all happened too quick.”
“That’s what Stillwell seems to think,” the Warden said. He took from his desk a slitted envelope and a sheet of cheap ruled paper, folded once or twice. “This came this morning. But that’s right: you can’t read writing, can you?”
“No,” he said. The Warden unfolded the sheet.
“It was mailed yesterday in Texarkana. It says, ‘He’s going to have to explain Jake Barron’ ” (he was the other convict, whom the guard had killed) “ ’to somebody someday so take good care of him. Maybe you better take good care of him anyway since there are some of us still inside.’ ” The Warden folded the letter back into the envelope and put it back into the drawer and closed the drawer. “So there you are. I can’t let you go around loose inside here, where any of them can get at you. You’ve only got five more years; even though you didn’t stop all of them, probably on a recommendation from me, the Governor would let you out tomorrow. But I can’t do that because Stillwell will kill you.”
“If Cap’m Jabbo” (the guard who shot) “had jest killed Stillwell too, I could go home tomorrow?” he said. “Couldn’t you trace out where he’s at by the letter, and send Cap’m Jabbo wherever that is?”
“You want the same man to kill Stillwell that kept Stillwell from killing you two nights ago?”
“Send somebody else then. It don’t seem fair for him to get away when I got to stay here five more years.” Then he said, “But hit’s all right. Maybe we did have at least one champion here, after all.”
“Champion?” the Warden said. “One what here?” But he didn’t answer that. And now for the first time he began to count off the days and months. He had never done this before, not with that original twenty years they had given him at the start back there in Jefferson, nor even with the second twenty years they had added on to it after he let Montgomery Ward persuade him into that woman’s mother hubbard and sunbonnet. Because nobody was to blame for that but himself; when he thought of Flem in connection with it, it was with a grudging admiration, almost pride that they were of the same blood; he would think, say aloud, without envy even: “That Flem Snopes. You can’t beat him. There ain’t a man in Missippi nor the U.S. and A. both put together that can beat Flem Snopes.”
But this was different. He had tried himself to escape and had failed and had accepted the added twenty years of penalty without protest; he had spent fifteen of them not only never trying to escape again himself, but he had risked his life to foil ten others who planned to: as his reward for which he would have been freed the next day, only a trained guard with a shotgun in his hands let one of the ten plotters get free. So these last five years did not belong to him at all. He had discharged his forty years in good faith; it was not his fault that they actually added up to only thirty-five, and these five extra ones had been compounded on to him by a vicious, even a horseplayish, gratuitor.
That Christmas his (now: for the first time) slowly diminishing sentence began to be marked off for him. It was a Christmas card, postmarked in Mexico, addressed to him in care of the
