SHORT STORY – ESCAPE

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 161, 9 July 1940, Page 13

SHORT STORY - ESCAPE

ttpED" ROGERS, with muscles like •" ropes on his six-foot frame, had got a life sentence to serve because of his poet's heart.

He loved the sea-scent and the music lurking in sea shells, loved clean winds, and grass—the free things of life; but he forfeited the whole lot when he let the stars glistening in the pines take him off hie guard. The cops fell on him then and snapped on the bracelets. He s*t in his coll that first night, like a fettered lynx—eyes slit 'baleful with hate—phewing skin off his finger-ends so they could not take a damning print of his hand. In spite of doing so, he had "been fouad guilty at his trial and condemned. Among his fellow prisoners, Red laboured for the popularity he enjoyed. But little Buddy Bones, whom Red liked the best, turned his milky blue eyes up towards where his- eyebrows should have been when Ked talked to him of escape.

"Quit, Red," he advised, and detailed the difficulties of escaping—flat . land round the grey square prison for half a mile. Not a tuseock-to hide a rabbit. After that, h, broken-up country of peat •bogs and granite tors. No sound there except the squelch of sodden land underfoot, and the tinkle of heather bells. Good enough. But no body ever got as

far as that. The prison had. a reputation that nobody had ever escaped.

"Nope," said Buddy. "You quit." Red curled his lips back—flat, wicked, like a cobra's head.

Buddy winced under their derision. "Aw quit, Red." he repeated with lees certainty.

Red had no difficulty in talking him over.

The difficulty was in getting the others to come over, too. Unity was strength. Waiting, working, talking, Red saw the months go past. He chafed at the delay, while he soothed the gaolers, worked on his fellow prisoners.

At times he would know a desperate nausea to feel free land under his feet again, to have the hille breathing ibefore him under an opal sky, and a free west wind singing down to the dawn. That was the sort of thing a guy wanted when he was going soft. Red opened his ey«s with a curse.

He worked separately and carefully on each of his fellow prisoners, till the mutiny in his mouth was reflected on theire, until his own smouldering passion for escape had lit answering beacons in them. Even Buddy Bones had a pale flame in his milky eyes. They built a plan 'between them. Rush the gaolers. You might get shot, but you might get off. Every man for himself, counselled Red Rogers, with a savage disregard for weaklings.

By NORAH BURKE

They chose a night when eomebody's thumbed pocket calendar promised there would be. no moon. The calendar promised nothing about searchlights and guns. Red gave the signal himself. Foot out to trip up one of the gaolers. He crashed on to the stone, and they were on top of him like ravening animals. Get his gun! The quadrangle was i red chaos inside two seconds. They heard the alarm blowing. They could not stop that. If meant that there would be extra men and bars between them and their freedom, lmt that fact made tUcm only fight the fiercer. They had got some of the firearms between them, and the bark and spatter of leaden death did not come from gaolers only. Red, behind a gun, tasted of power and victory. Get away. No time to lose. He shoved his revolver barrel down the throat of the gaoler at the first gate, and when the man had opened to that command, Red blew the back of his head out.' •■'•*■. lir-the outer quadrangle, .not so easy. He had a bloody fight to the second gate. Then out—freedom.

He ran, coughing and epitting blood. He was.astonished, to see it. Blood, on his clothes, too. He discovered a wound an his chest. Behind him he could hear the row dying down, the gaolers winning. What the hell did it matter? Hβ was free. He ran.

Two swords of light stabbed out after him from the prison. Searchlights. Red flung himeelf on the ground, and they went past him. He got up again and ran—heard men coming after him. The searchlights were harking beck, too, caught him running and stuck. Shots spurted on his heels.

He reached broken country ahead of his pursuers. Now he had a chance, now that he could dodge the searchlights. And then he felt the stab and choke of his wound for the first time, taeted the blood in his mouth. They would get him now because he was wounded, he raged, unless he could hide," lie up until they had abandoned the chase.

Fighting for breath, he crawled under the shelter of a tossed-up granite tor — lay close in the tough heather. He could hear the little purple bells ringing huskily next to his face.

Men came all round him, but he knew they could not see him now.

An hour ibefore the dawn he etirred from his hide and went out into a country where the hills breathed under a s"ky like a black opal; where a thin gold line ran along the horizon and the free west wind went singing down to the dawn. Buddy Bones was the one who minded most when he heard that they had picked up Red's body in the heather, drilled through the lungs and dead as a kipper. The prison record was unbroken still. (The End.)