“They come down here,” Harker said, “two of them, in glasses. They went over the books and they poked around everywhere, counting everything in sight and writing it down. Then they went back to the office and they was still there at six o’clock when I come on. It seems that there was something wrong; it seems like there was some old brass parts wrote down in the books, only the brass seemed to be missing or something.
It was on the books all right, and the new valves and things it had been replaced with was there. But be durn if they could find a one of them old pieces except one busted bib that had got mislaid under the work-bench someway or other. It was right strange.
So I went back with them and held the light while they looked again in all the corners, getting a right smart of soot and grease on them, but that brass just naturally seemed to be plumb missing. So they went away.
“And the next morning early they come back. They had the city clerk with them this time and they beat Mr. Snopes down here and so they had to wait till he come in in his check cap and his chew, chewing and looking at them while they told him.
They was right sorry; they hemmed and hawed a right smart, being sorry. But it wasn’t nothing else they could do except to come back on him, long as he was the superintendent; and did he want me and Turl and Tom-Tom arrested right now, or would tomorrow do? And him standing there, chewing, with them eyes like two gobs of cup grease on a hunk of raw dough, and them still telling him how sorry they was.
“‘How much does it come to?’ he says.
“‘Three hundred and four dollars and fifty-two cents, Mr. Snopes.’
“‘Is that the full amount?’
“‘We checked our figures twice, Mr. Snopes.’
“‘All right,’ he says. And he reaches down and hauls out the money and pays them the three hundred and four dollars and fifty-two cents in cash, and asks for a receipt.”
III
Then the next Summer came, with Harker still laughing at and enjoying what he saw, and seeing so little, thinking how they were all fooling one another while he looked on, when it was him who was being fooled. For in that Summer the thing ripened, came to a head. Or maybe Snopes just decided to cut his first hay crop; clean the meadow for reseeding. Because he could never have believed that on the day when he sent for Turl, he had set the capital on his monument and had started to tear the scaffolding down.
It was in the evening; he returned to the plant after supper and sent for Turl; again two of them, white man and Negro, faced one another in the office.
“What’s this about you and Tom-Tom?” Snopes said.
“‘Bout me and which?” Turl said. “If Tom-Tom depending on me for his trouble, he sho’ done quit being a fireman and turned waiter. It take two folks to have trouble, and Tom-Tom ain’t but one, I don’t care how big he is.”
Snopes watched Turl. “Tom-Tom thinks you want to fire the day shift.”
Turl looked down. He looked briefly at Snopes’s face; at the still eyes, the slow unceasing jaw, and down again. “I can handle as much coal as Tom-Tom,” he said.
Snopes watched him: the smooth, brown, aside-looking face. “Tom-Tom knows that, too. He knows he’s getting old. But he knows there ain’t nobody else can crowd him but you.” Then, watching Turl’s face, Snopes told him how for two years Tom-Tom had been stealing brass from the plant, in order to lay it on Turl and get him fired; how only that day Tom-Tom had told him that Turl was the thief.
Turl looked up. “That’s a lie,” he said. “Can’t no nigger accuse me of stealing when I ain’t, I don’t care how big he is.”
“Sho’,” Snopes said. “So the thing to do is to get that brass back.”
“If Tom-Tom got it, I reckon Mr. Buck Conner the man to get it back,” Turl said. Buck Conner was the city marshal.
“Then you’ll go to jail, sure enough. Tom-Tom’ll say he didn’t know it was there. You’ll be the only one that knew it was there. So what you reckon Buck Conner’ll think? You’ll be the one that knew where it was hid at, and Buck Conner’ll know that even a fool has got more sense than to steal something and hide it in his corn-crib.
The only thing you can do is to get that brass back. Go out there in the daytime, while Tom-Tom is at work, and get it and bring it to me and I’ll put it away somewhere to use as evidence on Tom-Tom. Unless maybe you don’t want that day shift. Just say so, if you don’t. I reckon I can find somebody else that does.”
And Turl agreed to do that. He hadn’t fired any boilers for forty years. He hadn’t done anything at all for as long as forty years, since he was just past thirty. But even if he were a hundred, no man could ever accuse him of having done anything that would aggregate forty years net.
“Unless Turl’s night prowling might add up that much,” Harker said. “If Turl ever gets married, he wan’t need no front door a-tall; he wouldn’t know what it was for. If he couldn’t come tom-catting in through the back window, he wouldn’t know what he come after. Would you, Turl?”
So from here on it is simple enough, since a man’s mistakes, like his successes, usually are simple. Particularly the success. Perhaps that’s why it is so often missed: it was just over-looked.
“His mistake was in picking out Turl to pull his chestnuts,” Harker said. “But even Turl wasn’t as bad as the second mistake he made at the same time without knowing it. And that was, when he forgot about that high yellow wife of Tom-Tom’s.
When I found out how he had picked out Turl, out of all the niggers in Jefferson, that’s prowled at least once (or tried to) every gal within ten miles of town, to go out to Tom-Tom’s house knowing all the time how Tom-Tom would be down here wrastling coal until seven o’clock and then have two miles to walk home, and expect Turl to spend his time out there hunting for anything that ain’t hid in Tom-Tom’s bed, and when I would think about Tom-Tom down here, wrastling them boilers with this same amical cuckoldry like the fellow said about Mr. Snopes and Colonel Hoxey, stealing brass so he can keep Turl from getting his job away from him, and Turl out yonder tending to Tom-Tom’s home business at the same time, sometimes I think I will die.
“It was bound to not last. The question was, which would happen first: if Tom-Tom would catch Turl, or if Mr. Snopes would catch Turl, or if I would bust a blood vessel laughing some night. Well, it was Turl. He seemed to be having too much trouble locating that brass; he had been hunting it for three weeks already, coming in a little late almost every night now, with Tom-Tom having to wait until Turl come before he could start home.
Maybe that was it. Or maybe Mr. Snopes was out there himself one day, hid in the bushes too, waiting for it to get along toward dark (it was already April then); him on one side of Tom-Tom’s house and Turl creeping up through the corn patch on the other. Anyway, he come back down here one night and he was waiting when Turl come in about a half hour late, as usual, and Tom-Tom all ready to go home soon as Turl got here. Mr. Snopes sent for Turl and asked him if he had found it.
“‘Find it when?’ Turl says.
“‘While you was out there hunting for it about dusk tonight,’ Mr. Snopes says. And there’s Turl, wondering just how much Mr. Snopes knows, and if he can risk saying how he has been at home in bed since six-thirty this morning, or maybe up to Mottstown on business. ‘Maybe you are still looking for it in the wrong place,’ Mr. Snopes says, watching Turl, and Turl not looking at Mr. Snopes except maybe now and then. ‘If Tom-Tom had hid that iron in his bed, you ought to done found it three weeks ago,’ Mr. Snopes says. ‘So suppose you look in that corn-crib where I told you to look.’
“So Turl went out to look one more time. But he couldn’t seem to find it in the corn-crib neither. Leastways, that’s what he told Mr. Snopes when Mr. Snopes finally run him down back here about nine o’clock one night.
Turl was on a kind of a spot, you might say. He would have to wait until along toward dark to go up to the house, and already Tom-Tom had been grumbling some about how Turl was getting later and later about coming to work every night. And once he found that brass, he would have to begin getting back to the plant at seven o’clock, and the days getting longer all the time.
“So Turl goes back to give one more go-round for that brass evidence. But still he can’t find it. He must have looked under every shuck and thread in Tom-Tom’s bed tick, but without no more success than them two audits had. He just couldn’t seem to find that evidence nohow.
So
