BOOK ONE

Flem

CHAPTER ONE

miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without

Frenchman's Bend was a section of rich river-bottom country lying twenty
miles southeast of Jefferson. Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without
boundaries, straddling into two counties and owning allegiance to neither, it
had been the original grant and site of a tremendous pre-Civil War plantation,
the ruins of which--the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen sta-
bles and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and prome-
nades--were still known as the Old Frenchman's place, although the original
boundaries now existed only on old faded records in the Chancery Clerk's office
in the county courthouse in Jefferson, and even some of the once-fertile fields
had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first
master had hewed them.

He had quite possibly been a foreigner, though not necessarily French, since to
the people who had come after him and had almost obliterated all trace of his
sojourn, anyone speaking the tongue with a foreign flavor or whose appearance
or even occupation was strange, would have been a Frenchman regardless of what
nationality he might affirm, just as to their more urban coevals (if he had elected
to settle in Jefferson itself, say) he would have been called a Dutchman. But now
nobody knew what he had actually been, not even Will Varner, who was sixty years
old and now owned a good deal of his original grant, including the site of his ruined
mansion. Because he was gone now, the foreigner, the Frenchman, with his family
and his slaves and his magnificence. His dream, his broad acres were parcelled out
now into small shiftless mortgaged farms for the directors of Jefferson banks to
squabble over before selling finally to Will Varner, and all that remained of him was
the river bed which his slaves had straighten-ed for almost ten miles to keep his
land from flooding and the skeleton of the tremendous house which his heirs-at-
large had been pulling down and chopping up--walnut newel posts and stair spindles,
oak floors which fifty years later would have been almost priceless, the very clap-
boards themselves--for thirty years now for firewood. Even his nam was forgotten,
his pride but a legend about the land he had wrested from the jungle and tamed as
a monument to that appellation which those who came after him in battered wagons
and on muleback and even on foot, with flintlock rifles and dogs and children and
home-made whiskey stills and Protestant psalm-books, could not even read, let alone
pronounce, and which now had nothing to do with any once-living man at all--his
dream and his pride now dust with the lost dust of his anonymous bones, his legend
but the stubborn tale of the money he buried somewhere about the place when Grant
overran the country on his way to Vicksburg.

The people who inherited from him came from the northeast, through the Tennessee
mountains by stages marked by the bearing and raising of a generation of children.
They came from the Atlantic seaboard and before that, from England and the Scottish
and Welsh Marches, as some of the names would indicate--Turpin and Haley and Whit-
tington, McCallum and Murray and Leon-ard and Littlejohn, and other names like Riddup
and Armstid and Doshey which could have come from nowhere since certainly no man
would deliberately select one of them for his own. They brought no slaves and no Phyfe
and Chippendale highboys; indeed, what they did bring most of them could (and did) carry
in their hands. They took up land and built one- and two-room cabins and never painted
them, and married one another and produced children and added other rooms one by one
to the original cabins and did not paint them either, but that was all. Their descendants
still planted cotton in the bottom land and corn along the edge of the hills and in the se-
cret coves in the hills made whiskey of the corn and sold what they did not drink. Federal
officers went into the country and vanished. Some garment which the missing man had
worn might be seen--a felt hat, a broadcloth coat, a pair of city shoes or even his pistol--
on a child or an old man or woman. County officers did not bother them at all save in
the heel of election years. They supported their own churches and schools, they married
and committed infrequent adulteries and more frequent homicides among themselves and
were their own courts judges and executioners. They were Protestants and Democrats
and prolific; there was not one Negro landowner in the entire section. Strange Negroes
would absolutely refuse to pass through it after dark.

Will Varner, the present owner of the Old Frenchman place, was the chief man of the
country. He was the largest landholder and beat supervisor in one county and Justice
of the Peace in the next and election commissioner in both, and hence the fountainhead
if not of law at least of advice and suggestion to a countryside which would have repud-
iated the term constituency if they had ever heard it, which came to him, not in the at-
titude of What must I do but What do you think you think you would like for me to do if
you was able to make me do it. He was a farmer, a usurer, a veterinarian; Judge Benbow
of Jefferson once said of him that a milder-mannered man never bled a mule or stuffed
a ballot box. He owned most of the good land in the country and held mortgages on most
of the rest. He owned the store and the cotton gin and the combined grist mill and black-
smith shop in the village proper and it was considered, to put it mildly, bad luck for a man
of the neighborhood to do his trading or gin his cotton or grind his meal or shoe his
stock anywhere else. He was thin as a fence rail and almost as long, with reddish-gray
hair and moustaches and little hard bright innocently blue eyes; he looked like a Metho-
dist Sunday School superintendent who on week days conducted a railroad passenger train
or vice versa and who owned the church or perhaps the railroad or perhaps both. He was
shrewd secret and merry, of a Rabelaisian turn of mind and very probably still sexually lusty
(he had fathered sixteen children to his wife, though only two of them remained at home,
the others scattered, married and buried, from El Paso to the
Alabama line) as the spring of his hair which even at sixty was still more red than gray, would
indicate. He was at once active and lazy; he did nothing at all (his son managed all the family
business) and spent all his time at it, out of the house and gone before the son had come down to
breakfast even, nobody knew where save that he and the old fat white horse which he rode might be
seen anywhere within the surrounding ten miles at any time, and at least once every month during
the spring and summer and early fall, the old white horse tethered to an adjacent fence post, he
would be seen by someone sitting in a home-made chair on the jungle-choked lawn of the Old French-
man's homesite. His blacksmith had made the chair for him by sawing an empty flour barrel half
through the middle and trimming out the sides and nailing a seat into it, and Varner would sit
there chewing his tobacco or smoking his cob pipe, with a brusque word for passers cheerful enough
but inviting no company, against his background of fallen baronial splendor. The people (those who
saw him sitting there and those who were told about it) all believed that he sat there planning
his next mortgage foreclosure in private, since it was only to an itinerant sewing-machine agent
named Ratliff--a man less than half his age--that he ever gave a reason: "I like to sit here. I'm
trying to find out what it must have felt like to be the fool that would need all this"--he did
not move, he did not so much as indicate with his head the rise of old brick and tangled walks top-
ped by the columned ruin behind him--"just to eat and sleep in." Then he said--and he gave Ratliff
no further clue to which might have been the truth--"For a while it looked like I was going to get
shut of it, get it cleared up. But by God folks have got so lazy they wont even climb a ladder to
pull off the rest of the boards. It looks like they will go into the woods and even chop up a tree
before they will reach above eyelevel for a scantling of pine kindling. But after all, I reckon
I'll just keep what there is left of it, just to remind me of my one mistake. This is the only
thing I ever bought in my life I couldn't sell to nobody."

The son, Jody, was about thirty, a prime bulging man, slightly thyroidic, who was not only unmar-
ried but who emanated a quality of invincible and inviolable bachelordom as some people are said
to breathe out the odor of sanctity or spirituality. He was a big man, already promising a consid-
erable belly in ten or twelve years, though as yet he still managed to postulate something of the
trig and unattached cavalier. He wore, winter and summer (save that in the warm season he dispensed
with the coat) and Sundays and week days, a glazed collarless white shirt fastened at the neck with
a heavy gold collar-button beneath a suit of good blac broadcloth. He put on the suit the day it ar-
rived from the Jefferson tailor and wore it every day and in all weathers thereafter until he sold
it to one of the family's Negro retainers, so that on almost any Sunday night one whole one or some
part of one of his old suits could be met--and promptly recognised--walking the summer roads, and
replaced it with the new succeeding one. In contrast to the unvarying overalls of the men he lived
among he had an air not funereal exactly but ceremonial--this because of that quality of invincible
bachelorhood which he possessed: so that, looking at him you saw, beyond the flabbiness and the ob-
scuring bulk, the perennial and immortal Best Man, the apotheosis of the masculine Singular, just
as you discern beneath the dropsical tissue of the '09 halfback the lean hard ghost which once car-
ried a ball. He was the ninth of his parents' sixteen children. He managed the store of which his
father was still titular owner and in which they dealt mostly in foreclosed mortgages, and the gin,
and oversaw the scattered farm holdings which his father at first and later the two of them together
had been acquiring during the last forty years.

One afternoon he was in the store, cutting lengths of plow-line from a spool of new cotton rope and
looping them in neat seamanlike bights onto a row of nails in the wall, when at a sound behind him
he turned and saw, silhouetted by the open door, a man smaller than common, in a wide hat and a frock
coat too large for him, standing with a curious planted stiffness. "You Varner?" the man said, in a
voice not harsh exactly, or not deliberately harsh so much as rusty from infrequent use.

"I'm one Varner," Jody said, in his bland hard quite pleasant voice. "What can I do for you?"

"My name is Snopes. I heard you got a farm to rent."

"That so?" Varner said, already moving so as to bring the other's face into the light. "Just where
did you hear that?" Because the farm was a new one, which he and his father had acquired through a
foreclosure sale not a week ago, and the man was a complete stranger. He had never even heard the name
before.

The other did not answer. Now Varner could see his face--a pair of eyes of a cold opaque gray between
shaggy graying irascible brows and a short scrabble of iron-gray beard as tight and knotted as a
sheep's coat. "Where you been farming?" Varner said.

"West." He did not speak shortly. He merely pronounced the one word with a complete inflectionless
finality, as if he had closed a door behind himself.

"You mean Texas?"

"No."

"I see. Just west of here. How much family you got?"

"Six." Now there was no perceptible pause, nor was there any hurrying on into the next word. But
there was something. Varner sensed it even before the lifeless voice seemed deliberately to compound
the inconsistency: "Boy and two girls. Wife and her sister."

"That's just five."

"Myself," the dead voice said.

"A man dont usually count himself among his own field hands," Varner said. "Is it five or is it sev-
en?"

"I can put six hands into the field."

Now Varner's voice did not change either, still pleasant, still hard: "I dont know as I will take
on a tenant this year. It's already almost first of May. I figure I might work it myself, with day
labor. If I work it at all this year."

"I'll work that way," the other said. Varner looked at him.

"Little anxious to get settled, aint you?" The other said nothing. Varner could not tell whether
the man was looking at him or not. "What rent were you aiming to pay?"

"What do you rent for?"

"Third and fourth," Varner said. "Furnish out of the store here. No cash."

"I see. Furnish in six-bit dollars."

"That's right," Varner said pleasantly. Now he could not tell if the man were looking at anything at
all or not.

"I'll take it," he said.

Standing on the gallery of the store, above the half dozen overalled men sitting or squatting about
it with pocket knives and slivers of wood, Varner watched his caller limp stiffly across the porch,
looking neither right nor left, and descend and from among the tethered teams and saddled animals be-
low the gallery choose a gaunt saddleless mule in a worn plow bridle with rope reins and lead it to
the steps and mount awkwardly and stiffly and ride away, still without once looking to either side.
"To hear that ere foot, you'd think he weighed two hundred pounds," one of them said. "Who's he,
Jody?"

Varner sucked his teeth and spat into the road. "Name's Snopes," he said.

"Snopes?" a second man said. "Sho now. So that's him." Now not only Varner but all the others look-
ed at the speaker--a gaunt man in absolutely clean though faded and patched overalls and even fresh-
ly shaven, with a gentle, almost sad face until you unravelled what were actually two separate ex-
pressions--a temporary one of static peace and quiet overlaying a constant one of definite even
though faint harried-ness, and a sensitive mouth which had a quality of adolescent freshness and
bloom until you realised that this could just as well be the result of a lifelong abstinence from
tobacco--the face of the breathing archetype and protagonist of all men who marry young and father
only daughters and are themselves but the eldest daughter of their own wives. His name was Toll.
"He's the fellow that wintered his family in a old cottonhouse on Ike McCaslin's place. The one
that was mixed up in that burnt barn of a fellow named Harris over in Gren-ier County two years ago."

"Huh?" Varner said. "What's that? Burnt barn?"

"I never said he done it," Tull said. "I just said he was kind of involved in it after a fashion
you might say."

"How much involved in it?"

"Harris had him arrested into court."

"I see," Varner said. "Just a pure case of mistaken identity. He just hired it done."

"It wasn't proved," Tull said. "Leastways, if Harris ever found any proof afterward, it was too
late then. Because he had done left the country. Then he turned up at McCaslin's last September.
Him and his family worked by the day, gathering for McCaslin, and McCaslin let them winter in a
old cottonhouse he wasn't using. That's all I know. I aint repeating nothing."

"I wouldn't," Varner said. "A man dont want to get the name of a idle gossip." He stood above them
with his broad bland face, in his dingy formal black-and-white--the glazed soiled white shin and
the bagging and uncared-for trousers--a costume at once ceremonial and negligee. He sucked his
teeth briefly and noisily. "Well well well," he said. "A barn burner. Well well well."

That night he told his father about it at the supper table. With the exception of the rambling half-
log half-sawn plank edifice known as Littlejohn's hotel, Will Varner's was the only house in the
country with more than one storey. They had a cook too, not only the only Negro servant but the on-
ly servant of any sort in the whole district. They had had her for years yet Mrs Varner still said
and apparently believed that she could not be trusted even to boil water unsupervised. He told it
that evening while his mother, a plump cheery bustling woman who had borne sixteen children and al-
ready outlived five of them and who still won prizes for preserved fruits and vegetables at the an-
nual County Fair, bustled back and forth between dining room and kitchen, and his sister, a soft
ample girl with definite breasts even at thirteen and eyes like cloudy hothouse grapes and a full
damp mouth always slightly open, sat at her place in a kind of sullen bemusement of rife young fe-
male flesh, apparently not even having to make any effort not to listen.

"You already contracted with him?" Will Varner said.

"I hadn't aimed to at all till Vernon Tull told me what he did. Now I figure I'll take the paper up
there tomorrow and let him sign."

"Then you can point out to him which house to burn too. Or are you going to leave that to him?"

"Sho," Jody said. "We'll discuss that too." Then he said--and now all levity was gone from his voice,
all poste and riposte of humor's light whimsy, tierce quarto and prime: "All I got to do is find out
for sho about that barn. But then it will be the same thing, whether he actually did it or not. All
he'll need will be to find out all of a sudden at gathering time that I think he did it. Listen. Take
a case like this." He leaned forward now, over the table, bulging, protuberant, intense. The mother
had bustled out, to the kitchen, where her brisk voice could be heard scolding cheerfully at the
Negro cook. The daughter was not listening at all. "Here's a piece of land that the folks that own
it hadn't actually figured on getting nothing out of this late in the season. And here comes a man
and rents it on shares that the last place he rented on a barn got burnt up. It dont matter whether
he actually burnt that barn or not, though it will simplify matters if I can find out for sho he
did. The main thing is, it burnt while he was there and the evidence was such that he felt called
on to leave the country. So here he comes and rents this land we hadn't figured on nothing out of
this year nohow and we furnish him outen the store all regular and proper. And he makes his crop
and the landlord sells it all regular and has the cash waiting and the fellow comes in to get his
share and the landlord says, 'What's this I heard about you and that barn?' That's all. 'What's
this I just heard about you and that barn?' " They stared at one another--the slightly protuberant
opaque eyes and the little hard blue ones. "What will he say? What can he say except 'All right.
What do you aim to do?'"

"You'll lose his furnish bill at the store."

"Sho. There aint no way of getting around that. But after all, a man that's making you a crop free
gratis for nothing, at least you can afford to feed him while he's doing it.--Wait," he said. "Hell
fire, we wont even need to do that; I'll just let him find a couple of rotten shingles with a match
laid across them on his doorstep the morning after he finishes laying-by and he'll know it's all up
then and aint nothing left for him but to move on. That'll cut two months off the furnish bill and
all we'll be out is hiring his crop gathered." They stared at one another. To one of them it was
already done, accomplished: he could actually see it; when he spoke it was out of a time still six
months in the future yet: "Hell fire, he'll have to! He cant fight it! He dont dare!"

"Hmph," Will said. From the pocket of his unbuttoned vest he took a stained cob pipe and
began to fill it. "You better stay clear of them folks."

"Sho now," Jody said. He took a toothpick from the china receptacle on the table and sat
back. "Burning barns aint right. And a man that's got habits that way will just have to
suffer the disadvantages of them."

He did not go the next day nor the one after that either. But early in the afternoon of
the third day, his roan saddle horse hitched and waiting at one of the gallery posts, he
sat at the roll-top desk in the rear of the store, hunched, the black hat on the back of
his head and one broad black-haired hand motionless and heavy as a ham of meat on the
paper and the pen in the other tracing the words of the contract in his heavy deliberate
sprawling script. An hour after that and five miles from the village, the contract blott-
ed and folded neatly into his hip pocket, he was sitting the horse beside a halted buck-
board in the road. It was battered with rough usage and caked with last winter's dried
mud, it was drawn by a pair of shaggy ponies as wild and active-looking as mountain goats
and almost as small. To the rear of it was attached a sheet-iron box the size and shape
of a dog kennel and painted to resemble a house, in each painted window of which a paint-
ed woman's face simpered above a painted sewing machine, and Varner sat his horse and
glared in shocked and outraged consternation at its occupant, who had just said pleasant-
ly, "Well, Jody, I hear you got a new tenant."

"Hell fire!" Varner cried. "Do you mean he set fire to another one? even after they caught
him, he set fire to another one?"

"Well," the man in the buckboard said, "I dont know as I would go on record as saying he
set ere a one of them afire. I would put it that they both taken fire while he was more or
less associated with them. You might say that fire seems to follow him around, like dogs
follows some folks." He spoke in a pleasant, lazy, equable voice which you did not discern
at once to be even more shrewd than humorous. This was Ratliff, the sewing-machine agent.
He lived in Jefferson and he travelled the better part of four counties with his sturdy
team and the painted dog kennel into which an actual machine neatly fitted. On successive
days and two counties apart the splashed and battered buckboard and the strong mismatched
team might be seen tethered in the nearest shade and Ratliffs bland affable ready face and
his neat tieless blue shirt one of the squatting group at a crossroads store, or--and still
squatting and still doing the talking apparently though actually doing a good deal more
listening than anybody believed until afterward--among the women surrounded by laden clothes-
lines and tubs and blackened wash pots beside springs and wells, or decorous in a splint
chair on cabin galleries, pleasant, affable, courteous, anecdotal and impenetrable. He sold
perhaps three machines a year, the rest of the time trading in land and livestock and second
-hand farming tools and musical instruments or anything else which the owner did not want
badly enough, retailing from house to house the news of his four counties with the ubiquity
of a newspaper and carrying personal messages from mouth to mouth about weddings and funer-
als and the preserving of vegetables and fruit with the reliability of a postal service.
He never forgot a name and he knew everyone, man mule and dog, within fifty miles. "Just
say it was following along behind the wagon when Snopes druv up to the house De Spain had
give him, with the furniture piled into the wagon bed like he had druv up to the house they
had been living in at Harris's or wherever it was and said 'Get in here' and the cookstove
and beds and chairs come out and got in by their selves. Careless and yet good too, tight,
like they was used to moving and not having no big help at it. And Ab and that big one, Flem
they call him--there was another one too, a little one; I remember seeing him once somewhere.
He wasn't with them. Leastways he aint now. Maybe they forgot to tell him when to get outen
the barn.--setting on the seat and them two hulking gals in the two chairs in the wagon bed
and Miz Snopes and her sister, the widow, setting on the stuff in back like nobody cared
much whether they come along or not either, including the furniture. And the wagon stops in
front of the house and Ab looks at it and says, 'Likely it aint fitten for hawgs.' "

Sitting the horse, Varner glared down at Rattliffe in protuberant and speechless horror. "All
right," Ratliff said. "Soon as the wagon stopped Miz Snopes and the widow got out and com-
menced to unload. Them two gals aint moved yet, just setting there in them two chairs, in
their Sunday clothes, chewing sweet gum, till Ab turned round and cussed them outen the wa-
gon to where Miz Snopes and the widow was wrastling with the stove. He druv them out like
a pair of heifers just a little too valuable to hit hard with a stick, and then him and
Flem set there and watched them two strapping gals take a wore-out broom and a lantern
outen the wagon and stand there again till Ab leant out and snicked the nigh one across
the stern with the end of the reins. 'And then you come back and help your maw with that
stove,' he hollers after them. Then him and Flem got outen the wagon and went up to call
on De Spain."

"To the barn?" Varner cried. "You mean they went right straight and------"

"No no. That was later. The barn come later. Likely they never knowed just where it was yet.
The barn burnt all regular and in due course; you'll have to say that for him. This here was
just a call, just pure friendship, because Snopes knowed where his fields was and all he had
to do was to start scratching them, and it already the middle of May. Just like now," he add-
ed in a tone of absolutely creamlike innocence. "But then I hear tell he always makes his
rent contracts later than most." But he was not laughing. The shrewd brown face was as bland
and smooth as ever beneath the shrewd impenetrable eyes.

"Well?" Varner said violently. "If he sets his fires like you tell about it, I reckon I dont
need to worry until Christmas. Get on with it. What does he have to do before he starts light-
ing matches? Maybe I can recognise at least some of the symptoms in time."

"All right," Ratliff said. "So they went up the road, leaving Miz Snopes and the widow wrast-
ling at the cookstove and them two gals standing there now holding a wire rat-trap and a cham-
ber pot, and went up to Major de Spain's and walked up the private road where that pile of
fresh horse manure was and the nigger said Ab stepped in it on deliberate purpose. Maybe the
nigger was watching them through the front window. Anyway Ab tracked it right across the front
porch and knocked and when the nigger told him to wipe it offen his feet, Ab shoved right past
the nigger and the nigger said he wiped the rest of it off right on that ere hundred-dollar
rug and stood there hollering 'Hello. Hello, De Spain' until Miz de Spain come and looked at
the rug and at Ab and told him to please go away. And then De Spain come home at dinner time
and I reckon maybe Miz de Spain got in behind him because about middle of the afternoon he
rides up to Ab's house with a nigger holding the rolled-up rug on a mule behind him and Ab set-
ting in a chair against the door jamb and De Spain hollers 'Why in hell aint you in the field?'
and Ab says, he dont get up or nothing, 'I figger I'll start tomorrow. I dont never move and
start to work the same day,' only that aint neither here nor there; I reckon Miz de Spain had
done got in behind him good because he just set on the horse a while saying 'Confound you Snopes,
confound you Snopes' and Ab setting there saying 'If I had thought that much of a rug I dont know
as I would keep it where folks coming in would have to tromp on it.' " Still he was not laughing.
He just sat there in the buckboard, easy and relaxed, with his shrewd intelligent eyes in his
smooth brown face, well-shaved and clean in his perfectly clean faded shirt, his voice pleasant
and drawling and anecdotal, while Varner's suffused swollen face glared down at him.

"So after a while Ab hollers back into the house and one of them strapping gals comes out and
Ab says, 'Take that ere rug and wash it.' And so next morning the nigger found the rolled-up
rug throwed onto the front porch against the door and there was some more tracks across the
porch too only it was just mud this time and it was said how when Miz de Spain unrolled the
rug this time it must have been hotter for De Spain than before even--the nigger said it look-
ed like they had used brickbats instead of soap on it--because he was at Ab's house before
breakfast even, in the lot where Ab and Flem was hitching up to go to the field sho enough,
setting on the mare mad as a hornet and cussing a blue streak, not at Ab exactly but just
sort of at all rugs and all horse manure in general and Ab not saying nothing, just buckling
hames and choke strops until at last De Spain says how the rug cost him a hundred dollars
in France and he is going to charge Ab twenty bushels of corn for it against his crop that
Ab aint even planted yet. And so De Spain went back home.

And maybe he felt it was all neither here nor there now. Maybe he felt that long as he had
done something about it Miz de Spain would ease up on him and maybe come gathering time he
would a even forgot about that twenty bushels of corn. Only that never suited Ab. So here,
it's the next evening I reckon, and Major laying with his shoes off in the barrel-stave
hammock in his yard and here comes the bailiff hemming and hawing and finally gets it out
how Ab has done sued "Hell fire," Varner murmured. "Hell fire."

"Sho," Ratliff said. "That's just about what De Spain his-self said when he finally got it
into his mind that it was so. So it come Sat-dy and the wagon druv up to the store and Ab
got out in that preacher's hat and coat and tromps up to the table on that clubfoot where
Uncle Buck McCaslin said Colonel John Sartoris his-self shot Ab for trying to steal his
clay-bank riding stallion during the war, and the Judge said, 'I done reviewed your suit,
Mr Snopes, but I aint been able to find nothing nowhere in the law bearing on rugs, let
alone horse manure. But I'm going to accept it because twenty bushels is too much for you
to have to pay because a man as busy as you seem to stay aint going to have time to make
twenty bushels of corn. So I am going to charge you ten bushels of corn for ruining that
rug.' "

"And so he burnt it," Varner said. "Well well well."

"I dont know as I would put it just that way," Ratliff said, repeated. "I would just put
it that that same night Major de Spain's barn taken fire and was a total loss. Only some-
how or other De Spain got there on his mare about the same tune., because somebody heard
him passing in the road. I dont mean he got there in time to put it out but he got there
in time to find something else already there that he felt entitled to consider enough of
a foreign element to justify shooting at it, setting there on the mare and blasting away
at it or them three or four times until it run into a ditch on him where he couldn't fol-
low on the mare. And he couldn't say neither who it was because any animal can limp if
it wants to and any man is liable to have a white shirt, with the exception that when he
got to Ab's house (and that couldn't a been long, according to the gait the fellow heard
him passing in the road) Ab and Flem wasn't there, wasn't nobody there but the four women
and De Spain never had time to look under no beds and such because there was a cypress-
roofed corn crib right next to that barn. So he rid back to where his niggers had done
fetched up the water barrels and was soaking tow-sacks to lay on the crib, and the first
person he see was Flem standing there in a white-colored shirt, watching it with his hands
in his pockets, chewing tobacco. 'Evening,' Flem says. 'That ere hay goes fast' and De
Spain setting on the horse hollering 'Where's your paw? Where's that--' and Flem says,
'If he aint here somewhere he's done went back home. Me and him left at the same time
when we see the blaze.' And De Spain knowed where they had left from too and he knowed
why too. Only that wasn't neither here nor there neither because, as it was just main-
tained, any two fellows anywhere might have a limp and a white shirt between them and
it was likely the coal oil can he seen one of them fling into the fire when he shot the
first tune. And so here the next morning he's setting at breakfast with a right smart of
his eyebrows and hair both swinged off when the nigger comes in and says it's a fellow
to see him and he goes to the office and it's Ab, already in the preacher hat and coat
and the wagon done already loaded again too, only Ab aint brought that into the house
where it could be seen. 'It looks like me and you aint going to get along together,' Ab
says, 'so I reckon we better quit trying before we have a misunderstanding over something.
I'm moving this morning.' And De Spain says, 'What about your contract?' And Ab says,
'I done cancelled it.' and De Spain setting there saying 'Cancelled. Cancelled' and then
he says, 'I would cancel it and a hundred more like it and throw in that barn too just
to know for sho if it was you I was shooting at last night.' And Ab says, 'You might sue
me and find out. Justices of the Peace in this country seems to be in the habit of find-
ing for plaintiffs.' "

"Hell fire," Varner said quietly again. "Hell fire."

"So Ab turned and went stomping out on that stiff foot and went back------"

"And burnt the tenant house," Varner said.

"No no. I aint saying he might not a looked back at it with a certain regret, as the fel-
low says, when he druv off. But never nothing else taken all of a sudden on fire. Not
right then, that is. I dont--"

"That's so," Varner said. "I recollect you did say he had to throw the balance of the
coal oil into the fire when De Spain started shooting at him. Well well well," he said,
bulging, slightly apoplectic. "And now, out of all the men in this country, I got to pick
him to make a rent contract with." He began to laugh. That is, he began to say "Ha. Ha.
Ha." rapidly, but just from the teeth, the lungs: no higher, nothing of it in the eyes.
Then he stopped. "Well, I cant be setting here, no matter how pleasant it is. Maybe I can
get there in time to get him to cancel with me for just a old cottonhouse."

"Or at least maybe for a empty barn," Ratlin: called after him.

An hour later Varner was sitting the halted horse again, this time before a gate, or a
gap that is, in a fence of sagging and rusted wire. The gate itself or what remained of
it lay unhinged to one side, the interstices of the rotted palings choked with grass and
weeds like the ribs of a forgotten skeleton. He was breathing hard but not because he had
been galloping. On the contrary, since he had approached near enough to his destination
to believe he could have seen smoke if there had been smoke, he had ridden slower and
slower. Nevertheless he now sat the horse before the gap in the fence, breathing hard
through his nose and even sweating a little, looking at the sagging broken-backed cabin
set in its inevitable treeless and grassless plot and weathered to the color of an old
beehive, with that expression of tense and rapid speculation of a man approaching a dud
howitzer shell. "Hell fire," he said again quietly. "Hell fire. He's been here three days
now and he aint even set the gate up. And I dont even dare to mention it to him. I dont
even dare to act like I knowed there was even a fence to hang it to," He twitched the
reins savagely. "Come up!" he said to the horse. "You hang around here very long stand-
ing still and you'll be a-fire too."

The path (it was neither road nor lane: just two parallel barely discernible tracks where
wagon wheels had run, almost obliterated by this year's grass and weeds) went up to the
sagging and stepless porch of the perfectly blank house which he now watched with wire-
taut wariness, as if he were approaching an ambush. He was watching it with such intens-
ity as to be oblivious to detail. He saw suddenly in one of the sashless windows and with-
out knowing when it had come there, a face beneath a gray cloth cap, the lower jaw moving
steadily and rhythmically with a curious sidewise thrust, which even as he shouted "Hello!"
vanished again. He was about to shout again when he saw beyond the house the stiff figure
which he recognised even though the frock coat was missing now, doing something at the
gate to the lot. He had already begun to hear the mournful measured plaint of a rusted
well-pulley, and now he began to hear two flat meaningless loud female voices. When he
passed beyond the house he saw it--the narrow high frame like an epicene gallows, two big
absolutely static young women beside it, who even in that first glance postulated that im-
mobile dreamy solidarity of statuary (this only emphasised by the fact that they both
seemed to be talking at once and to some listener--or perhaps just circumambience--at a
considerable distance and neither listening to the other at all) even though one of them
had hold of the well-rope, her arms extended at full reach, her body bent for the down
pull like a figure in a charade, a carved piece symbolising some terrific physical effort
which had died with its inception, though a moment later the pulley began again its rusty
plaint but stopped again almost immediately, as did the voices also when the second one
saw him, the first one paused now in the obverse of the first attitude, her arms stretched
downward on the rope and the two broad expressionless faces turning slowly in unison as he
rode past.

He crossed the barren yard littered with the rubbish--the ashes, the shards of pottery
and tin cans--of its last tenants. There were two women working beside the fence too and
they were all three aware of his presence now because he had seen one of the women look
around. But the man himself (Durn little chibfooted murderer, Varner thought with that
furious helpless outrage) had not looked up nor even paused in whatever it was he was
doing until Varner rode directly up behind him. The two women were watching him now. One
wore a faded sunbonnet, the other a shapeless hat which at one time must have belonged
to the man and holding in her hand a rusted can half full of bent and rusted nails.
"Evening," Varner said, realising too late that he was almost shouting. "Evening, ladies."
The man turned, deliberately, holding a hammer--a rusted head from which both claws had
been broken, fitted onto an untrimmed stick of stove wood--and once more Varner looked
down into the cold impenetrable agate eyes beneath the writhen overhang of brows.

"Howdy," Snopes said.

"Just thought I'd ride up and see what your plans'were," Varner said, too loud still;
he could not seem to help it. I got too much to think about to have time to watch it,
he thought, beginning at once to think, Hell fire. Hell fire, again, as though proving
to himself what even a second's laxity of attention might bring him to.

"I figure I'll stay," the other said. "The house aint fitten for hogs. But I reckon I
can make out with it."

"But look here!" Varner said. Now he was shouting; he didn't care. Then he stopped
shouting. He stopped shouting because he stopped speaking because there was nothing
else to say, though it was going through his mind fast enough: Hell fire. Hell fire.
Hell fire. I dont dare say Leave here, and I aint got anywhere to say Go there. I dont
even dare to have him arrested for barn-burning for fear he'll set my barn a-fire. The
other had begun to turn back to the fence when Varner spoke. Now he stood half-turned,
looking up at Varner not courteously and not exactly patiently, but just waiting. "All
right," Varner said. "We can discuss the house. Because we'll get along all right.
We'll get along. Anything that comes up, all you got to do is come down to the store.
No, you dont even need to do that: just send me word and I'll ride right up here as
quick as I can get here. You understand? Anything, just anything you dont like------"
"I can get along with anybody," the other said. "I been getting along with fifteen or
twenty different landlords since I started farming. When I cant get along with them,
I leave. That all you wanted?"

All, Varner thought. All. He rode back across the yard, the littered grassless deso-
lation scarred with the ashes and charred stick-ends and blackened bricks where pots
for washing clothes and scalding hogs had sat. I just wish I never had to have but
just the little I do want now, he thought. He had been hearing the well-pulley again.
This time it did not cease when he passed, the two broad faces, the one motionless,
the other pumping up and down with metronome-like regularity to the wheel's not-quite-
musical complaint, turning slowly again as though riveted and synchronised to one a-
nother by a mechanical arm as he went on beyond the house and into the imperceptible
lane which led to the broken gate which he knew would still be lying there in the
weeds when he saw it next. He still had the contract in his pocket, which he had writ-
ten out with that steady and deliberate satisfaction which, it now seemed to him, must
have occurred in another time, or more likely, to another person altogether. It was
still unsigned. I could put a fire-clause in it, he thought. But he did not even check
the horse. Sho, he thought. And then I could use it to start shingling the new barn.
So he went on. It was late, and he eased the horse into a rack which it would be able
to hold nearly all the way home, with a little breathing on the hills, and he was
travelling at a fair gait when he saw suddenly, leaning against a tree beside the
road, the man whose face he had seen in the window of the house. One moment the road
had been empty, the next moment the man stood there beside it, at the edge of a small
copse--the same cloth cap, the same rhythmically chewing jaw materialised apparently
out of nothing and almost abreast of the horse, with an air of the complete and pure-
ly accidental which Varner was to remember and speculate about only later. He had al-
most passed the other before he pulled the horse up. He did not shout now and now his
big face was merely bland and extremely alert. "Howdy," he said. "You're Flem, aint
you? I'm Varner,"

"That so?" the other said. He spat. He had a broad flat face. His eyes were the color
of stagnant water. He was soft in appearance like Varner himself, though a head short-
er, in a soiled white shirt and cheap gray trousers.

"I was hoping to see you," Varner said. "I hear your father has had a little trouble
once or twice with landlords. Trouble that might have been serious." The other chewed.
"Maybe they never treated him right; I dont know about that and I dont care. What I'm
talking about is a mistake, any mistake, can be straightened out so that a man can
still stay friends with the fellow he aint satisfied with. Dont you agree to that?"
The other chewed steadily. His face was as blank as a pan of uncooked dough. "So he
wont have to feel that the only thing that can prove his rights is something that
will make him have to pick up and leave the country next day," Varner said. "So that
there wont come a time some day when he will look around and find out he has run out
of new country to move to." Varner ceased. He waited so long this time that the other
finally spoke, though Varner was never certain whether this was the reason or not:

"There's a right smart of country."

"Sho," Varner said pleasantly, bulging, bland. "But a man dont want to wear it out
just moving through it. Especially because of a matter that if it had just been took
in hand and straightened out to begin with, wouldn't have amounted to nothing. That
could have been straightened out in five minutes if there had just been some other
fellow handy to take a hold of a fellow that was maybe a little high-tempered to be-
gin with say, and say to him, 'Hold up here, now; that fellow dont aim to put nothing
on you. All you got to do is consult with him peaceable and it will be fixed up. I
know that to be a fact because I got his promise to that effect.' " He paused again.
"Especially if this here fellow we are speaking of, that could take a hold of him and
tell him that, was going to get a benefit out of keeping him quiet and peaceable."
Varner stopped again. After a while the other spoke again:

"What benefit?"

"Why, a good farm to work. Store credit. More land if he felt he could handle it."

"Aint no benefit in farming. I figure on getting out of it soon as I can."

"All right,' Varner said. "Say he wanted to take up some other line, this fellow
we're speaking of. He will need the good will of the folks he aims to make his money
off of to do it. And what better way------"

"You run a store, dont you?" the other said.

"--better way--" Varner said. Then he stopped. "What?" he said.

"I hear you run a store."

Varner stared at him. Now Varner's face was not bland. It was just completely still
and completely intent. He reached to his shirt pocket and produced a cigar. He nei-
ther smoked nor drank himself, being by nature so happily metabolised that, as he
might have put it himself, he could not possibly have felt better than he naturally
did. But he always carried two or three. "Have a cigar," he said.

"I dont use them," the other said.

"Just chew, hah?" Varner said.

"I chew up a nickel now and then until the suption is out of it. But I aint never
lit a match to one yet."

"Sho now," Varner said. He looked at the cigar; he said quietly: "And I just hope
to God you and nobody you know ever will." He put the cigar back into his pocket.
He expelled a loud hiss of breath. "All right," he said. "Next fall. When he has
made his crop." He had never been certain just when the other had been looking at
him and when not, but now he watched the other raise his arm and with his other
hand pick something infinitesimal from the sleeve with infinitesimal care. Once
more Varner expelled his breath through his nose. This time it was a sigh. "All
right," he said. "Next week then. You'll give me that long, wont you? But you got
to guarantee it." The other spat.

"Guarantee what?" he said.

Two miles further on dusk overtook him, the shortening twilight of late April, in
which the blanched dogwoods stood among the darker trees with spread raised palms
like praying nuns; there was the evening star and already the whippoor-wills.' The
horse, travelling supperward, was going well in the evening's cool, when Varner
pulled it to a stop and held it for a full moment. "Hell fire," he said. "He was
standing just exactly where couldn't nobody see him from the house."

CHAPTER TWO

Part 1

Ratliff, the sewing-machine agent, again approaching the village, with a used mu-
sic box and a set of brand-new harrow teeth still fastened together by the factory
shipping wire in the dog-kennel box in place of the sewing machine, saw the old
white horse dozing on three legs at a fence post and, an instant later, Will Var-
ner himself sitting in the home-made chair against the rise of shaggy lawns and
overgrown gardens of the Old Frenchman place.

"Evening, Uncle Will," he said in his pleasant, courteous, even deferent voice.
"I hear you and Jody got a new clerk in the store." Varner looked at him sharply,
the reddish eyebrows beetling a little above the hard little eyes.

"So that's done spread," he said. "How far you been since yesterday?"

"Seven-eight miles," Ratliff said.

"Hah," Varner said. "We been needing a clerk." That was true. All they needed was
someone to come and unlock the store in the morning and lock it again at night--
this just to keep stray dogs out, since even tramps, like stray Negroes, did not
stay in Frenchman's Bend after nightfall. In fact, at times Jody Varner himself
(Will was never there anyhow) would be absent from the store all day. Customers
would enter and serve themselves and each other, putting the price of the arti-
cles, which they knew to a penny as well as Jody himself did, into a cigar box
inside the circular wire cage which protected the cheese, as though it--the cigar
box, the worn bills and thumb-polished coins--were actually baited.

"At least you can get the store swept out every day," Ratliff said. "Aint every-
body can get that included into a fire insurance policy."

"Hah," Varner said again. He rose from the chair. He was chewing tobacco. He re-
moved from his mouth the chewed-out wad which resembled a clot of damp hay, and
threw it away and wiped his palm on his flank. He approached the fence, where at
his direction the blacksmith had contrived a clever passage which (neither the
blacksmith nor Varner had ever seen one before or even imagined one) operated
exactly like a modern turnstile, by the raising of a chained pin instead of in-
serting a coin. "Ride my horse on back to the store," Varner said. "I'll drive
your rig .1 want to sit down and ride."

"We can tie the horse behind the buckboard and both ride in it," Ratliff said.
"You ride the horse," Varner said. "That's close as I want you right now. Some-
times you are a little too smart to suit me."

"Why, sho, Uncle Will," Ratliff said. So he cramped the buckboard's
wheel for Varner to get in, and himself mounted the horse. They went on,
Ratliff a little behind the buckboard, so that Varner talked to him over his
shoulder, not looking back:

"This here fire-fighter--"

"It wasn't proved," Ratliff said mildly. "Of course, that's the trouble.
If afellow's got to choose between a man that is a murderer and one he just
thinks maybe is, he'll choose the murderer. At least then he will know
exactly where he's at. His attention aint going to wander then."

"All right, all right," Varner said. "This here victim of libel and
misstatement then. What do you know about him?"

"Nothing to mention," Ratliff said. "Just what I hear about him. I aint
seen him in eight years. There was another boy then, besides Flem. A little
one. He would be about ten or twelve now if he was there. He must a been
mislaid in one of them movings."

"Has what you have heard about him since them eight years ago caused
you to think he might have changed his habits any?"

"Sho now," Ratliff said. What dust the three horses raised blew lightly aside
on the faint breeze, among the dogfennel and bitter-weed just beginning to
bloom in the roadside ditches. "Eight years. And before that it was fifteen
more pretty near I never saw him. I growed up next to where he was living.
I mean, he lived for about two years on the same place where I growed up.
Him and my pap was both renting from Old Man Anse Holland. Ab was a
horse-trader then. In fact, I was there the same time the horse-trading give
out on him and left him just a farmer. He aint naturally mean. He's just
soured."

"Soured," Varner said. He spat. His voice was now sardonic, almost
contemptuous: "Jody came in last night, late. I knowed it soon as I saw him.
It was exactly like when he was a boy and had done something he knowed I
was going to find out about tomorrow and so he would figure he better tell
me first himself. 'I done hired a clerk,' he says. 'What for?' I says. 'Dont
Sam shine your shoes on Sunday no more to suit you?' and he hollers, 'I
had to! I had to hire him! I had to, I tell you!' And he went to bed without
eating no supper. I dont know how he slept; I never listened to see. But this
morning he seemed to feel a little better about it. He seemed to feel
considerable better about it. 'He might even be useful,' he says. 'I dont
doubt it,' I says. 'But there's a law against it. Besides, why not just tear
them down instead? You could even sell the lumber then.' And he looked at
me a while longer. Only he was just waiting for me to stop; he had done
figured it all out last night. 'Take a man like that,' he says. 'A man that's
independent about protecting his-self, his own rights and interests. Say the
advantages of his own rights and interests is another fellow's advantage and
interest too. Say his benefits is the same benefits as the fellow that's paying
some of his kinfolks a salary to protect his business; say it's a business
where now and then (and you know it as well as I do,' Jody says) '--say
benefits is always coming up that the fellow that's going to get the benefits
just as lief not be actively mixed up in himself, why, a fellow that
independent--' "
"He could have said 'dangerous' with the same amount of breath," Ratliff
said.
"Yes," Varner said. "Well?"
Ratliff didn't answer. Instead, he said: "That store aint in Jody's name, is
it?" Only he answered this himself, before the other could have spoken:
"Sho now. Why did I need to ask that? Besides, it's just Flem that Jody's
mixed up with. Long as Jody keeps him, maybe old Ab will--"

"Out with it," Varner said. "What do you think about it?"

"You mean what I really think?"

"What in damnation do you think I am talking about?"

"I think the same as you do," Ratliff said quietly. "That there aint but
twomen I know can risk fooling with them folks. And just one of them is
named Varner and his front name aint Jody."

"And who's the other one?" Varner said.

"That aint been proved yet neither," Ratliff said pleasantly.

2

Besides Varner's store and cotton gin and the combined grist mill and
blacksmith shop which they rented to the actual smith, and the schoolhouse
and the church and the perhaps three dozen dwellings within sound of both
bells, the village consisted of a livery barn and lot and a contiguous shady
though grassless yard in which sat a sprawling rambling edifice partly of
sawn boards and partly of logs, unpainted and of two storeys in places and
known as Littlejohn's hotel, where behind a weathered plank nailed to one
of the trees and lettered ROOM AND BORD drummers and livestocktraders
were fed and lodged. It had a long veranda lined with chairs. That
night after supper, the buckboard and team in the stable, Ratliff was sitting
here with five or six other men who had drifted in from the adjacent homes
within walking distance. They would have been there on any other night,
but this evening they were gathered even before the sun was completely
gone, looking now and then toward the dark front of Varner's store as
people will gather to look quietly at the cold embers of a lynching or at the
propped ladder and open window of an elopement, since the presence of a
hired white clerk in the store of a man still able to walk and with intellect
still sound enough to make money mistakes at least in his own favor, was as
unheard of as the presence of a hired white woman in one of their own
kitchens. "Well," one said, "I dont know nothing about that one Varner
hired. But blood's thick. And a man that's got kinfolks that stays mad
enough all the time to set fire to a man's barn--"

"Sho now," Ratliff said. "Old man Ab aint naturally mean. He's just
soured."

For a moment nobody spoke. They sat or squatted along the veranda,
invisible to one another. It was almost full dark, the departed sun a pale
greenish stain in the northwestern sky. The whippoor-wills had begun and
fireflies winked and drifted among the trees beyond the road.

"How soured?" one said after a while.

"Why, just soured," Ratliff said pleasantly, easily, readily. "There was
that business during the War. When he wasn't bothering nobody, not
harming or helping either side, just tending to his own business, which
wasprofit and horses--things which never even heard of such a thing as
a political conviction--when here comes somebody that never even owned
the horses even and shot him in the heel. And that soured him. And then
that business of Colonel Sartoris's main-law, Miss Rosa Millard, that Ab
had done went and formed a horse- and mule-partnership with in good faith
and honor, not aiming to harm nobody blue or gray but just keeping his
mind fixed on profit and horses, until Miz Millard had to go and get herself
shot by that fellow that called his-self Major Grumby, and then Colonel's
boy Bayard and Uncle Buck McCaslin and a nigger caught Ab in the woods
and something else happened, tied up to a tree or something and maybe
even a double bridle rein or maybe even a heated ramrod in it too though
that's just hearsay. Anyhow, Ab had to withdraw his allegiance to the
Sartorises, and I hear tell he skulked for a considerable back in the hills
until Colonel Sartoris got busy enough building his railroad for it to be
safe to come out. And thatd him some more. But at least he still had horse-
trading left to fall back on. Then he run into Pat Stamper. And Pat
eliminated him from horse-trading. And so he just went plumb curdled."
"You mean he locked horns with Pat Stamper and even had the bridle left
to take back home?" one said. Because they all knew Stamper. He was a
legend, even though still alive, not only in that country but in all North
Mississippi and West Tennessee--a heavy man with a stomach and a broad
pale expensive Stetson hat and eyes the color of a new axe blade, who
travelled about the country with a wagon carrying camping equipment and
played horses against horses as a gambler plays cards against cards, for the
pleasure of beating a worthy opponent as much as for gain, assisted by a
Negro hostler who was an artist as a sculptor is an artist, who could take
any piece of horseflesh which still had life in it and retire to whatever
closed building or shed was empty and handy and then, with a quality of
actual legerdemain, reappear with something which the beast's own dam
would not recognise, let alone its recent owner; the two of them, Stamper
and the Negro, working in a kind of outrageous rapport like a single
intelligence possessing the terrific advantage over common mortals of being
able to be in two places at once and directing two separate sets of hands
and fingers at the same time.

"He done better than that," Ratliff said. "He come out exactly even.
Because if it was anybody that Stamper beat, it was Miz Snopes. And even
she never considered it so. All she was out was just having to make the trip
to Jefferson herself to finally get the separator and maybe she knowed all
the time that sooner or later she would have to do that. It wasn't Ab that
bought one horse and sold two to Pat Stamper. It was Miz Snopes. Her and
Pat just used Ab to trade through."

Once more for a moment no one spoke. Then the first speaker said:

"How did you find all this out? I reckon you was there too."

"I was," Ratliff said. "I went with him that day to get the separator. We
lived about a mile from them. My pap and Ab were both renting from Old
Man Anse Holland then, and I used to hang around Ab's barn with him.
Because I was a fool about a horse too, same as he was. And he wasn't
curdled then. He was married to his first wife then, the one he got from
Jefferson, that one day her pa druv up in a wagon and loaded her and the
furniture into it and told Ab that if he ever crossed Whiteleaf Bridge again
he would shoot him. They never had no children and I was just turning
eight and I would go down to his house almost every morning and stay all
day with him, setting on the lot fence with him while the neighbors would
come up and look through the fence at whatever it was he had done swapped
some more of Old Man Anse's bob-wire or busted farm tools for this time,
and Ab lying to just exactly the right amount about how old it was
and how much he give for it. He was a fool about a horse; he admitted it,
but he wasn't the kind of a fool about a horse Miz Snopes claimed he was
that day when we brought Beasley Kemp's horse home and turned it into
the lot and come up to the house and Ab taken his shoes off on the gallery
to cool his feet for dinner and Miz Snopes standing in the door shaking the
skillet at him and Ab saying, 'Now Vynie, now Vynie. I always was a fool
about a good horse and you know it and aint a bit of use in you jawing
about it. You better thank the Lord that when He give me a eye for
horseflesh He give me a little judgment and gumption with it.'

"It was fate. It was like the Lord Himself had decided to buy a horse with
Miz Snopes's separator money. Though I will admit that when He chose Ab
He picked out a good quick willing hand to do His trading for Him. The
morning we started, Ab hadn't planned to use Beasley's horse a-tall because
he knowed it probably couldn't make that twenty-eight-mile trip to
Jefferson and back in one day. He aimed to go up to Old Man Anse's lot
and borrow a mule to work with hisn and he would a done it except for Miz
Snopes. She kept on taunting him about swapping for a yard ornament,
about how if he could just git it to town somehow maybe he could swap it
to the livery stable to prop up in front for a sign. So in a way it was Miz
Snopes herself that put the idea in Ab's head of taking Beasley's horse to
town. So when I got there that morning we hitched Beasley's horse into the
wagon with the mule. We had done been feeding it for two-three days now
by forced draft, getting it ready to make the trip, and it looked some better
now than when we had brung it home. But even yet it didn't look so good.
So Ab decided it was the mule that showed it up, that when it was the only
horse or mule in sight it looked pretty good and that it was standing by
something else on four legs that done the damage. 'If it was just some way
to hitch the mule under the wagon, so it wouldn't show but could still pull,
and just leave the horse in sight,' Ab says. B he wasn't soured then. But we
had done the best we could with it. Ab thought about mixing a right smart
of salt in some corn so it would drink a lot of water so some of the ribs
wouldn't show so bad at least, only we knowed it wouldn't never get to
Jefferson then, let alone back home, besides having to stop at every creek
and branch to blow it up again. So we done the best we could. That is, we
hoped for the best. Ab went to the house and come back in his preacher's
coat (it's the same one he's still got; it was Colonel Sartoris's that Miss
Rosa Millard give him, it would be thirty years ago) and that twenty-four
dollars and sixty-eight cents Miz Snopes had been saving on for four years
now, tied up in a rag, and we started out.

"We wasn't even thinking about horse-trading. We was thinking about
horse all right, because we was wondering if maybe we wasn't fixing to
come back home that night with Beasley's horse in the wagon and Ab in the
traces with the mule. Yes sir, Ab eased that team outen the lot and on down
the road easy and careful as ere a horse and mule ever moved in this world,
with me and Ab walking up every hill that tilted enough to run water offen
it, and we was aiming to do that right in to Jefferson. It was the weather,
the hot day; it was the middle of July. Because here we was about a mile from
Whiteleaf store, with Beasley's horse kind of half walking and half riding
on the double tree and Ab's face looking worrieder and worrieder every
time it failed to lift its feet high enough to step, when all of a sudden that
horse popped into a sweat. It flung its head up like it had been touched with
a hot poker and stepped up into the collar, touching the collar for the first
time since the mule had taken the weight of it when Ab shaken out the whip
in the lot, and so we come down the hill and up to Whiteleaf store with that
horse of Beasley's eyes rolling white as darning eggs and its mane and tail
swirling like a grass fire. And I be dog if it hadn't not only sweated itself
into as pretty a dark blood bay as you ever saw, but even its ribs didn't seem
to show so much. And Ab that had been talking about taking the back road
so we wouldn't have to pass the store at all, setting there on the wagon seat
like he would set on the lot fence back home where he knowed he was safe
from Pat Stamper, telling Hugh Mitchell and the other fellows on the
gallery that that horse come from Kentucky. Hugh Mitchell never even
laughed. 'Sho now,' he says. 'I wondered what had become of it. I reckon
that's what taken it so long; Kentucky's a long walk. Herman Short
swapped Pat Stamper a mule and buggy for that horse five years ago and
Beasley Kemp give Herman eight dollars for it last summer. What did you
give Beasley? Fifty cents?'

"That's what did it. It wasn't what the horse had cost Ab because you might
say all it had cost Ab was the straight stock, since in the first place
the sorghum mill was wore out and in the second place it wasn't Ab's
sorghum mill nohow. And it wasn't the mule and buggy of Herman's. It was
them eight cash dollars of Beasley's, and not that Ab held them eight
dollars against Herman, because Herman had done already invested a mule
and buggy in it. And besides, the eight dollars was still in the country and
so it didn't actually matter whether it was Herman or Beasley that had them.
It was the fact that Pat Stamper, a stranger, had come in and got actual
Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars to rattling around loose that way.
When a man swaps horse for horse, that's one thing and let the devil protect
him if the devil can. But when cash money starts changing hands, that's
something else. And for a stranger to d start that cash money to changing
and jumping from one fellow to another, it's like when a burglar breaks into
your house and flings your things ever which way even if he dont take
nothing. It makes you twice as mad. So it was not just to unload Beasley
Kemp's horse back onto Pat Stamper. It was to get Beasley Kemp's eight
dollars back outen Pat someway. And that's what I meant about it was pure
fate that had Pat Stamper camped outside Jefferson right by the road we
would have to pass on that day we went to get Miz Snopes's milk separator;
camped right there by the road with that nigger magician on the very day
when Ab was coming to town with twenty-four dollars and sixty-eight cents
in his pocket and the entire honor and pride of the science and pastime of
horse-trading in Yoknapatawpha County depending on him to vindicate it.

"I dont recollect just when and where we found out Pat was in Jefferson
that day. It might have been at Whiteleaf store. Or it might have just been
that in Ab's state it was not only right and natural that Ab would have to
pass Stamper to get to Jefferson, but it was foreordained and fated that he
would have to. So here we come, easing them eight dollars of Beasley
Kemp's up them long hills with Ab and me walking and Beasley's horse
laying into the collar the best it could but with the mule doing most of the
pulling and Ab walking on his side of the wagon and cussing Pat Stamper
and Herman Short and Beasley Kemp and Hugh Mitchell; and we went
down the hills with Ab holding the wagon braked with a sapling pole so it
wouldn't shove Beasley's horse through the collar and turn it wrong-sideout
like a sock, and Ab still cussing Pat Stamper and Herman and Beasley
and Mitchell, until we come to the Three Mile Bridge and Ab turned the
team outen the road and druv into the bushes and taken the mule out and
knotted up one rein so I could ride and give me the quarter and told me to
ride for town and get a dime's worth of saltpeter and a nickel's worth of
tar and a number ten fish hook and hurry back.

"So we didn't get into town until after dinner time. We went straight to
Pat's camp and druv in with that horse of Beasley's laying into the collar
now sho enough, with its eyes looking nigh as wild as Ab's and foaming a
little at the mouth where Ab had rubbed the saltpeter into its gums and a
couple of as pretty tarred bob-wire cuts on its chest as you could want, and
another one where Ab had worked that fish hook under its hide where he
could touch it by drooping one rein a little, and Pat's nigger running up to
catch the head-stall before the horse run right into the tent where Pat slept
and Pat hisself coming out with that ere cream-colored Stetson cocked over
one eye and them eyes the color of a new plow point and just about as
warm and his thumbs hooked into his waist band. 'That's a pretty lively
horse you got there,' he says.

"'You damn right,' Ab says. 'That's why I got to get shut of it. Just
consider you done already trimmed me and give me something in place of it
I can get back home without killing me and this boy both.' Because that
was the right system: to rush right up and say he had to trade instead of
hanging back for Pat to persuade him. It had been five years since Pat had
seen the horse, so Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be
about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get
caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago. And Ab wasn't trying
to beat Pat bad. He just wanted to recover that eight dollars' worth of the
honor and pride of Yoknapatawpha County horse-trading, doing it not for
profit but for honor. And I believe it worked. I still believe that Ab fooled
Pat, and that it was because of what Pat aimed to trade Ab and not because
Pat recognised Beasley's horse, that Pat refused to trade any way except
team for team. Or I dont know: maybe Ab was so busy fooling Pat that Pat
never had to fool Ab at all. So the nigger led the span of mules out and Pat
standing there with his thumbs in his pants-top, watching Ab and chewing
tobacco slow and gentle, and Ab standing there with that look on his face
that was desperate but not scared yet, because he was realising now he had
got in deeper than he aimed to and that he would either have to shut his
eyes and bust on through, or back out and quit, get back in the wagon and
go on before Beasley's horse even give up to the fish hook. And then Pat
Stamper showed how come he was Pat Stamper. If he had just started in to
show Ab what a bargain he was getting, I reckon Ab would have backed
out. But Pat didn't. He fooled Ab just exactly as one first-class burglar
would fool another first-class burglar by purely and simply refusing to tell
him where the safe was at.

"'I already got a good mule,' Ab says. 'It's just the horse I dont want.
Trade me a mule for the horse.'

"'I dont want no wild horse neither,' Pat says. 'Not that I wont trade for
anything that walks, provided I can trade my way. But I aint going to trade
for that horse alone because I dont want it no more than you do. What I am
trading for is that mule. And this here team of mine is matched. I aim to get
about three times as much for them as a span as I would selling them
single.'

"'But you would still have a team to trade with,' Ab says.

"'No,' Pat says. 'I aim to get more for them from you than I would if the
pair was broken. If it's a single mule you want, you better try somewhere
else.'

"So Ab looked at the mules again. They looked just exactly right. They
didn't look extra good and they didn't look extra bad. Neither one of them
looked quite as good as Ab's mule, but the two of them together looked just
a little mite better than just one mule of anybody's. And so he was doomed.
He was doomed from the very minute Hugh Mitchell told him about that
eight dollars. I reckon Pat Stamper knowed he was doomed the very
moment he looked up and seen that nigger holding Beasley's horse back
from running into the tent. I reckon he knowed right then he wouldn't even
have to try to trade Ab: all he would have to do would be just to say No
long enough. Because that's what he done, leaning there against our wagon
bed with his thumbs hooked into his pants, chewing his tobacco and
watching Ab go through the motions of examining them mules again. And
even I knowed that Ab had done traded, that he had done walked out into
what he thought was a spring branch and then found out it was quicksand,
and that now he knowed he couldn't even stop long enough to turn back.
'All right,' he says. "I'll take them.'

"So the nigger put the new team into the harness and we went on to town.
And them mules still looked all right. I be dog if I didn't begin to think
that Ab had walked into that Stamper quicksand and then got out again, and
when we had got back into the road and beyond sight of Stamper's tent,
Ab's face begun to look like it would while he would set on the lot fence
at home and tolks how he was a fool about a horse but not a durn fool. It
wasn't easy yet, it was just watchful, setting there and feeling out the
new team. We was right at town now and he wouldn't have much time to feel
them out in, but we would have a good chance on the road back home. 'By
God,' Ab says. 'If they can walk home at all, I have got that eight dollars
back, damn him.'

"But that nigger was a artist. Because I swear to God them mules looked
all right. They looked exactly like two ordinary, not extra good mules you
might see in a hundred wagons on the road. I had done realised how they
had a kind of jerky way of starting off, first one jerking into the collar and
then jerking back and then the other jerking into the collar and then jerking
back, and even after we was in the road and the wagon rolling good one of
them taken a spell of some sort and snatched his-self crossways in the traces
like he aimed to turn around and go back, maybe crawling right across the
wagon to do it, but then Stamper had just told us they was a matched team;
he never said they had ever worked together as a matched team, and they
was a matched team in the sense that neither one of them seemed to have
any idea as to just when the other one aimed to start moving. But Ab got
them straightened out and we went on, and we was just starting up that big
hill onto the Square when they popped into a sweat too, just like Beasley's
horse had done just beyond Whiteleaf. But that was all right, it was hot
enough; that was when I first noticed that that rain was coming up; I mind
how I was watching a big hot-looking bright cloud over to the southwest
and thinking how it was going to rain on us before we got home or to
Whiteleaf either, when all of a sudden I realised that the wagon had done
stopped going up the hill and was starting down it backwards and I looked