The sugarcane-cutters blinded to the threat of death, or the hatchet-thief who met a strange death in a sugarcane field is a Scary Story found near Chattanooga, TN. It is classified under Justice or The Tower.
Dialogue Tree[ | ]
| A sign in town says a farmer is hiring for the sugarcane harvest. A bag-eyed man drives you and ten hungry strangers out into the cane... where he leaves you. Everyone gets a hatchet, but no instruction. The foreman is missing, for some reason. Nobody is sure what to do. | |
| OH, GREAT | |
|---|---|
| A young man in a red jacket all the hatchets in his pack. "This is stupid," he says. "I'm leaving. You can get five bucks for a nice axe like this." He marches off into the cane, and others follow. "Don't," a young woman shouts after them. "It's not right!" | |
| YOU DON'T OWE THE FARMER SHIT (THE TOWER) | SHE'S RIGHT (JUSTICE) |
| You trot after the thief. For some reason, though, the path back out to the road is narrower and darker than you remember, and the sun is lower in the sky, and the muds sucks harder at your boots than it did a minute ago. Soon you've lost track of the others. | The thief left some hatchets behind, so you and the three chumps left start chopping cane. It's brutal work. None of you know what you're doing. "Keep going," the girl calls. Her hands are bleeding and her face is bright with sweat. Soon her cane is piled high. |
| HEY! ANYBODY? | CHOP, CHOP, CHOP |
| You're pushing through the cane, coated to your thighs in mud. The sun is missing. You hear voices ahead, but you can't see anyone. | (Money gain) Sometime after noon, the truck rolls up with a boozy foreman riding shotgun. "Good work," he creaks. The girl wipes her blood-pinked hands on her apron to take her pay—but doesn't notice the crumpled body in the back of the truck, or the hatchets heaped beside it. |
| HEY! HELP! | |
| You stumble out onto the bank of a pit. At the hottom, sugarcane stalks push up twisted and crazy through a mat of bones, rusted hatchets, and ripped scraps of red jacket. Shit! You turn and bolt through the cane—and suddenly burst out onto the dry road and the hot sun. | |
| MOVE ON | |
Progression[ | ]
- First Progression: The sugarcane farmer who took criminals from the jails and worked them in his fields until they died