Threepersons Hunt Read Free Page B

and inevitably overcrowded. Its administration was as enlightened as could be expected—the state’s penal budget was insanely low—and conditions inside were “average” by national comparisons. It was the state’s Maximum Security Prison but at frequent intervals it had provided assurances that it was not escape-proof.
    Only three highways led out of Florence and these were susceptible to rapid interdiction by cars of the Pinal County Sheriff and the Arizona Highway Patrol. Once a man broke out of Florence prison he had little choice but to strike out on foot into barren country where summer heat clung to the ground like melted tar and the pursuit was an amalgam of helicopters, Jeeps, packs of hounds, horsemen and Indian trackers. Yet prisoners kept breaking out and usually one or two fugitives got shot to death by overzealous manhunters but that was regarded as being part of the game because it was a country in which Westerns were very popular and it was no disgrace to die with your boots on.
    Most of those who attempted to escape were chronic losers, the ones serving terms of twenty-to-life whose chances at early parole had been destroyed by circumstance, luck or their own behavior.
    Fully half the population of the cells spoke no English or next to none. Some were Chicanos: Mexican-Americans who spoke Spanish. Others were Indians who spoke minimal Spanish, no English, and bits and pieces of native American dialects understood by no one outside their own villages. Unable to communicate with their lawyers they had been convicted and sentenced.
    Language did not end the problem. The regulations of Anglo law made little sense to Indians whose own laws were based on logic instead of statute, reason instead of prejudice, and compensation of victims instead of punishment of criminals. An Indian who caused another Indian an injury that laid him up was required by tribal law to take upon himself the victim’s job and support of his family until the victim was ready to do his own work again. An Indian did not understand laws that sent him to prison while his victim’s family starved because there was no one to harvest the crops or care for the animals.
    The Indian in Florence prison came to understand that he could not expect sanity or reasonable justice in an Anglo judicial-penal system. It was therefore sensible to get out of the place and run into the desert where a man could make his own justice with the earth.
    Five prisoners were involved in the July 5 escape. Three were Chicanos and two were Indians: one Papago and one White Mountain Apache.
    The break had taken place late in the afternoon. It was the day after the holiday and by their own later admission the two guards were hung over. Evidently the prisoners had taken this into account in planning the time of their break.
    The five were not close friends or comrades-in-crime; it was just that they happened to be the five individuals who had been assigned to that particular work detail on that particular afternoon.
    The Weather Bureau’s recorded high-temperature for the day, reached just after two in the afternoon, was 104 degrees Fahrenheit. By half-past-four the temperature had not dropped more than two or three degrees and the two horseback guards had posted themselves under the spindly trees that threw a bit of shade alongside the employees’ houses, just within the high fence.
    The five prisoners were weeding. The rows were planted in sweet corn but the stalks were not yet two feet high; there was no problem of visibility and the horseback guards were reputed to be expert marksmen.
    The five prisoners worked five adjacent parallel rows so that the guards could watch them without distraction. Each prisoner dragged a large burlap sack into which the pulled weeds were stuffed. Ordinarily the guards walked their horses around close to the prisoners but it had been a very hot week and these were not especially troublesome prisoners.