The Negro looked into Max's eyes.
"You don' know nothin'," he said slowly. "Years ago, when I first got here, I seen a man git a beatin' like that.
When they cut him down, he was all tore up, front an' back.
He died less'n two days after.
Ain't a man died since I took the rope. Tha's more'n twelve years now.
An' if you looked close, you would have seen they ain't a mark on the front of him, nor one lash laid over the other.
I know they's lots of things wrong about my job, but somebody's gotta do it.
An' it mought as well be me, because I don' like hurtin' folks. Not even pricks like Jim Reeves."
Max stared down at the ground, thinking about what he had just heard.
A glimmer of understanding began to lighten the sourness in his stomach.
Silently he pushed his sack of makings toward the trusty.
Without speaking, Mike took it and rolled himself a cigarette.
Quietly the two men leaned their heads back against the hut, smoking.
Jim Reeves came into the hut.
It was a month since he had been carried out of the cage, encrusted in his own filth, bent over, his eyes wild like an animal's.
Now his eyes searched the dark, then he came over to the bunk where Max lay stretched out and tapped him on the shoulder.
Max sat up.
"I got to get outa here," he said.
Max stared at him in the dark. "Don't we all?"
"Don't joke with me, Injun," Reeves said harshly. "I mean it."
"I mean it, too," Max said. "But ain't nobody made it yet."
"I got a way figured out," Reeves said. "But it takes two men to do it.
That's why I come to you."
"Why me?" Max asked. "Why not one of the men on a long stretch?"
"Because most of them are city men," Reeves said, "and we wouldn' last two days in the swamp."
Max swung into a sitting position.
"Now I know you're crazy," he said.
"Nobody can get th'ough that swamp. It's forty miles of quicksand, alligators, moccasins an' razorbacks.
The only way is north, past the village."
A bitter smile crossed Reeves's face.
"That's what I thought," he said.
"It was easy, over the fence and up the road.
Easy, I thought.
They didn' even call out the dogs. They didn' have to. Every damn Cajun in the neighborhood was out lookin' for me." He knelt by the side of Max's bunk. "The swamp," he said. "That's the only way.
I got it figured out.
We get a boat an'- "
"A boat!" Max said. "Where in hell we goin' to get a boat?"
"It'll take time," Reeves said cautiously. "But ricin' time is comin' up.
Warden leases us out to the big planters then.
Prison labor is cheap an' the warden pockets the money.
Them rice paddies is half filled with water. There's always boats around."
"I don't know," Max said doubtfully.
Reeves's eyes were glowing like an animal's.
"You want to lose two whole years of your life in this prison, boy?
You got that much time just to throw away?"
"Let me think about it," Max said hesitantly. "I’ll let you know."
Reeves slipped away in the dark as Mike came into the hut.
The trusty made his way directly to Max's bunk.
"He been at you to go th'ough the swamp with him?" he asked.
The surprise showed in Max's voice. "How'd you know?"