And the next place where they were within even three days of the horse was at Willow Springs, Iowa, and next to that, Bucyrus, Ohio, and the next time they were almost two weeks behind — an inaccessible valley in the east Tennessee mountains three months later, so remote not only from railroads but even telegraphs and telephones too, that the horse had been running and winning races for ten days before the pursuit ever heard of it; this was indubitably where he joined, was received into, the order of Masons: since this was the first time they had stopped for longer than one afternoon, the horse able now to run for ten undisturbed days before the pursuit even heard about it, so that, when the pursuers left the valley, they were twice ten days behind the horse, since after two weeks of patient asking and listening up and down that thirty-mile-long mountain-cradled saucer, again, as at the scene of the original disappearance, they had not found one human being who had ever heard of the three-legged horse and the two men and the child, let alone seen them.
So when they heard of the horse next in central Alabama, it was already gone from there, moving west again, the pursuers still a month behind across Mississippi: across the Mississippi River into Arkansas, pausing only as a bird pauses: not alighting, though the last thing the pause could have been called was hovering since the horse would be running, once more at that incredible, that unbelievable, speed (and at the incredible and unbelievable odds too; by report and rumor the two men — the aged Negro man of God, and the foul-mouthed white one to whom to grant the status of man was merely to accept Darkness’ emissary in the stead of its actual prince and master — had won tens of thousands of dollars) as if their mundane progress across America were too slow to register on the eye, and only during those incredible moments against a white rail did the horse and the three adjunctive human beings become visible.
Whereupon the Federal deputy, the titular-by-protocol leader of the pursuit, found that, suddenly and with no warning, something had happened to him which was to happen five years later in Paris to a British soldier even whose name he would never hear.
He — the deputy — was a poet, not the writing kind, or anyway not yet, but rather still one of Homer’s mere mute orphan godchildren sired by blind chance into a wealthy and political New Orleans family and who, by that family’s standards, had failed at Harvard and then wasted two years at Oxford before the family found out about it and fetched him home where, after some months under the threat of the full marshalate, he compromised with his father on the simple deputyship.
And so that night — it was in Arkansas, in a new paint-rank hotel room in a little booming logging town, itself less old than last year — he realised what it was about the whole business that he refused to accept ever since Weatherford, Texas, and then in the next second dismissed it forever because what remained had not only to be the answer but the truth too; or not even the truth, but truth, because truth was truth: it didn’t have to be anything; it didn’t even care whether it was so or not even, looking (the deputy) at it not even in triumph but in humility, because an old Negro minister had already seen it with one glance going on two years ago now — a minister, a man of God, sworn and dedicated enemy of man’s lusts and follies, yet who from that first moment had not only abetted theft and gambling, but had given to the same cause the tender virgin years of his own child as ever of old had Samuel’s father or Abraham his Isaac; and not even with pride because at last he had finally seen the truth even if it did take him a year, but at least pride in the fact that from the very first, as he knew now, he had performed his part in the pursuit with passion and regret. So ten minutes later he waked his second-in-command, and two days later in the New York office he said, ‘Give it up. You’ll never catch him.’
‘Meaning you wont,’ the owner of the horse said.
‘If you like it that way,’ the deputy said. ‘I’ve resigned.’
‘You should have done that eight months ago when you quit.’
‘Touché then,’ the deputy said. ‘If that makes you feel better too. Maybe what I’m trying to do now is apologise because I didn’t know it eight months ago too.’ He said: ‘I know about what you have spent so far. You know what the horse is now. I’ll give you my check for that amount. I’ll buy your ruined horse from you.
Call it off.’ The owner told him what he had actually paid for the horse. It was almost as much as the public believed. ‘All right,’ the deputy said. ‘I cant give you a check for that much, but I’ll sign a note for it. Even my father wont live forever.’ The owner pressed a button. A secretary entered.
The owner spoke briefly to the secretary, who went out and returned and laid a check on the desk before the owner, who signed the check and pushed it across to the deputy. It was for a sum still larger than the difference between the horse’s cost and that of the pursuit to date. It was made out to the deputy.
‘That’s your fee for catching my horse and deporting that Englishman and bringing my nigger back in handcuffs,’ the owner said. The deputy folded the check twice and tore it across twice, the owner’s thumb already on the buzzer as the deputy dropped the fragments carefully into an ashtray and was already standing to leave when the secretary opened the door again. ‘Another check,’ the owner said without even turning his head. ‘Add to it the reward for the capture of the men who stole my horse.’
But he didn’t even wait for that one, and it was Oklahoma before he (ex now) overtook the pursuit, joining it now as the private young man with money in his pocket — or who had had it once and lost or spent it — had used to join Marlborough’s Continental Tours (and indeed meeting among them who a week ago had been his companions in endeavor the same cold-fronted unanimity of half-contempt which the private young men would meet among Marlborough’s professionals).
Then the little bleak railway stations between a cattle-chute and a water-tank, the men in broad hats and heeled boots already clumped about the placard offering for a stolen horse a reward such as even Americans had never seen before — the reproduction of a newspaper photograph made in Buenos Aires of the man and the horse together, with a printed description of both — a face as familiar and recognisable now to the central part of the United States (Canada and Mexico too) as that of a president or a female murderer, but above all, the sum, the amount of the reward — the black, succinct evocation of that golden dream, that shining and incredible heap of dollars to be had by any man for the simple turn of a tongue, always ahead of them (of the pursuit certainly, and, the deputy now believed, of the pursued too), disseminating the poison faster than they advanced, faster even than the meteor-course of love and sacrifice, until already the whole Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio watershed must be corrupt and befouled and at last the deputy knew that the end was in sight: thinking how it was no wonder that man had never been able to solve the problems of his span upon earth, since he has taken no steps whatever to educate himself, not in how to manage his lusts and follies; they harm him only in sporadic, almost individual instances; but in
