At that moment the older man turned also and, motionless, making no sound, they watched two more riders come up and pass. They were the woman on the chestnut mare and the man on the bay horse. They passed like one beast, like a double or hermaphroditic centaur with two heads and eight legs.
The woman carried her hat in her hand; in the slanting sun the fine, soft cloud of her unbobbed hair gleamed like the chestnut’s flank, like soft fire, the mass of it appearing to be too heavy for her slender neck. She was sitting the mare with a kind of delicate awkwardness, leaning forward as though she were trying to outpace it, with a quality about her of flight within flight, separate and distinct from the speed of the mare.
The man was holding the bay horse against the mare’s flank at full gallop. His hand lay on the woman’s hand which held the reins, and he was slowly but steadily drawing both horses back, slowing them.
He was leaning toward the woman; the two men on the mules could see his profile stoop past with a cold and ruthless quality like that of a stooping hawk; they could see that he was talking to the woman. They passed so, with that semblance of a thrush and a hawk in terrific immobility in mid-air, with an apparitionlike suddenness: a soft rush of hooves in the sere needles, and were gone, the man stooping, the woman leaning forward like a tableau of flight and pursuit on a lightning bolt.
Then they were gone. After a while the youth said, “That one don’t seem to need no dogs neither.” His head was still turned after the vanished riders. The other man said nothing. “Yes, sir,” the youth said. “Just like a fox.
I be durn if I see how that skinny neck of hern . . . Like you look at a fox and you wonder how a durn little critter like it can tote all that brush. And once I heard him say” — he in turn indicated, with less means than even spitting, that it was the rider of the black horse and not the bay, of whom he spoke— “something to her that a man don’t say to a woman in comp’ny, and her eyes turned red like a fox’s and then brown again like a fox.” The other did not answer. The youth looked at him.
The older man was leaning a little forward on his mule, looking down into the field. “What’s that down there?” he said. The youth looked also. From the edge of the woods beneath them came a mold-muffled rush of hooves and then a crash of undergrowth; then they saw, emerging from the woods at full gallop, Blair on the black horse.
He entered the rice field at a dead run and began to cross it with the unfaltering and undeviating speed of a crow’s flight, following a course as straight as a surveyor’s line toward the dyke which bounded the field at its other side. “What did I tell you?” the older man said. “That fox is hid yonder on that ditch-bank. Well, it ain’t the first time they ever seen one another eye to eye. He got close enough to it once two years ago to throw that ere leather riding-switch at it.”
“Sho,” the youth said. “These folks don’t need no dogs.”
In the faint, sandy road which followed the crest of the ridge, and opposite another gap in the trees through which could be seen a pie-shaped segment of the rice field, and some distance in the rear of the hunt, stood a Ford car with a light truck body. Beneath the wheel sat a uniformed chauffeur; beside him, hunched into a black overcoat, was a man in a derby hat.
He had a smooth, flaccid, indoors face and he was smoking a cigarette: a face sardonic and composed, yet at the moment a little wearily savage, like that of an indoorsbred and -inclined man subject to and helpless before some natural inclemency like cold or wet. He was talking.
“Sure. This all belongs to her, house and all. His old man owned it before they moved to New York and got rich, and Blair was born here. He bought it back and gave it to her for a wedding present. All he kept was this what-ever-it-is he’s trying to catch.”
“And he can’t catch that,” the chauffeur said.
“Sure. Coming down here every year and staying two months, without nothing to see and nowheres to go except these clay-eaters and Nigras. If he wants to live in a herd of nigras for two months every year, why don’t he go and spend a while on Lenox Avenue? You don’t have to drink the gin.
But he’s got to buy this place and give it to her for a present because she is one of these Southerns and she might get homesick or something. Well, that’s all right, I guess. But Fourteenth Street is far enough south for me. But still, if it ain’t this, it might be Europe or somewheres. I don’t know which is worse.”
“Why did he marry her, anyways?” the chauffeur said.
“You want to know why he married her? It wasn’t the jack, even if they did have a pot full of it, of this Oklahoma Indian oil. . . .”
“Indian oil?”
“Sure. The government give this Oklahoma to the Indians because nobody else would have it, and when the first Indian got there and seen it and dropped dead and they tried to bury him, when they stuck the shovel into the ground the oil blowed the shovel out of the fellow’s hand, and so the white folks come.
They would come up with a new Ford with a man from the garage driving it and they would go to an Indian and say, ‘Well, John, how much rotten-water you catchum your front yard?’ and the Indian would say three wells or thirteen wells or whatever it is and the white man would say, ‘That’s too bad. The way the White Father put the bee on you boys, it’s too bad. Well, never mind. You see this fine new car here?
Well, I’m going to give it to you so you can load up your folks and go on to where the water don’t come out of the ground rotten and where the White Father can’t put the bee on you no more.’ So the Indian would load his family into the car, and the garage man would head the car west, I guess, and show the Indian where the gasoline lever was and hop off and snag the first car back to town. See?”
“Oh,” the chauffeur said.
“Sure. So here we was in England one time, minding our own business, when here this old dame and her red-headed gal come piling over from Europe or somewheres where the gal was going to the high school, and here it ain’t a week before Blair says, ‘Well, Ernie, we’re going to get married. What the hell do you think of that?’
And him a fellow that hadn’t done nothing all his life but dodge skirts so he could drink all night and try to ride a horse to death all day, getting married in less than a week. But soon as I see this old dame, I know which one of her and her husband it was that had took them oil wells off the Indians.”
“She must have been good, to put it on Blair at all, let alone that quick,” the chauffeur said. “Tough on her, though. I’d hate for my daughter to belong to him. Not saying nothing against him, of course.”
“I’d hate for my dog to belong to him. I see him kill a dog once because it wouldn’t mind him. Killed it with a walking stick, with one lick. He says, ‘Here. Send Andrews here to haul this away.’”
“I don’t see how you put up with him,” the chauffeur said. “Driving his cars, that’s one thing. But you, in the house with him day and night. . . .”
“We settled that. He used to ride me when he was drinking. One day he put his hand on me and I told him I would kill him. ‘When?’ he says. ‘When you get back from the hospital?’ ‘Maybe before I go there,’ I says. I had my hand in my pocket. ‘I believe you would,’ he says. So we get along now. I put the rod away and he don’t ride me any more and we get along.”
“Why didn’t you quit?”
“I don’t know. It’s a good job, even if we do stay all over the place all the time. Jees! half the time I don’t know if the next train goes to Ty Juana or Italy; I don’t know half the time where I’m at or if I can read the newspaper next morning even. And I like him and he likes me.”
“Maybe he quit riding you because he had something else to ride,” the chauffeur said.
“Maybe so. Anyways, when they married, she hadn’t never been on a horse before in all her life until he bought this chestnut horse for her to match her hair. We went all the way to Kentucky for it, and he come back in the same car with it. I wouldn’t do it; I says I would do anything in reason for him but I wasn’t going to ride in no
