“What horse?”
“The horse Gawtrey wouldn’t sell him.”
“How could he, when Gawtrey never owned no horse no more than I do, unless it’s maybe some dog still finishing last year’s Selling Plate at Pimlico? Besides, Gawtrey don’t owe Blair no horse yet.”
“Not yet?”
“She don’t like him, see. The first time he come to the house alone she wouldn’t leave him into the front door. And the next time, too, if this Burke kid hadn’t happened to left that piece out of the papers about this college boy on the breakfast tray. And the time after that when he come, she wouldn’t leave him in again; it was like he might have been a horse maybe, or even a dog, because she hated a dog worse than she did a horse even, even if she didn’t have to try to ride on no dog.
If it had have been a dog, Blair wouldn’t have never got her to even try to ride on it. So I’d have to go out and steam Callaghan up again until it got to where I wasn’t no more than one of these Russian droshkies or something.”
“A Russian what?”
“One of these fellows that can’t call their own soul. Every time I would leave the house I would have to meet Gawtrey in a dump somewheres and then go to see Callaghan and soap him down, because he is one of these boys with ideas, see?”
“What kind of ideas?”
“Just ideas. Out of the Sunday school paper. About how this wasn’t right because he liked her and felt sorry for her and so he wanted to tell Blair he had been lying and that Gawtrey hadn’t never owned no horse.
Because a fellow that won’t take a nickel when it’s throwed right in his face, he ain’t never as big a fool to nobody as he is to the man that can have some sense about religion and keep all these golden rules in the Sunday school paper where they come from. If the Lord didn’t want a man to cut his own grass, why did He put Sunday on Sunday like he did? Tell me that.”
“I guess you’re right,” the chauffeur said.
“Sure I’m right. Jees! I told Callaghan Blair would cut his throat and mine both for a Rockefeller quarter, same as any sensible man, and I ast him if he thought gals had done all give out with Blair’s wife; if she was going to be the last one they made.”
“So he don’t . . .” the chauffeur said. He ceased; then he said, “Look there.”
The other man looked. Through the gap in the trees, in the center of the segment of visible rice field, they could see a tiny pink-and-black dot. It was almost a mile away; it did not appear to be moving fast.
“What’s that?” the other said. “The fox?”
“It’s Blair,” the chauffeur said. “He’s going fast. I wonder where the others are.” They watched the pink-and-black dot go on and disappear.
“They’ve went back home if they had any sense,” the other said. “So we might as well go back too.”
“I guess so,” the chauffeur said. “So Gawtrey don’t owe Blair no horse yet.”
“Not yet. She don’t like him. She wouldn’t leave him in the house again after that day, and this Burke kid says she come back from a party one night because Gawtrey was there. And if it hadn’t been for me, Gawtrey wouldn’t a got invited down here, because she told Blair that if he come, she wouldn’t come.
So I’d have to work on Callaghan again so he would come in once a day and steam Blair up again about the horse to get Gawtrey invited, because Blair was going to make her come.”
The chauffeur got out of the car and went around to the crank. The other man lighted a cigarette. “But Blair ain’t got his horse yet. You take a woman with long hair like she’s got, long as she keeps her hair up, it’s all right. But once you catch her with her hair down, it’s just been too bad.”
The chauffeur engaged the crank. Then he paused, stooped, his head turned. “Listen,” he said.
“What?”
“That horn.” The silver sound came again, faint, distant, prolonged.
“What’s that?” the other said. “Do they have to keep soldiers here?”
“It’s the horn they blow,” the chauffeur said. “It means they have caught that fox.”
“Jees!” the other said. “Maybe we will go back to town to-morrow.”
The two men on the mules recrossed the rice field and mounted the ridge into the pines.
“Well,” the youth said, “I reckon he’s satisfied now.”
“You reckon he is?” the other said. He rode a little in front of the youth. He did not turn his head when he spoke.
“He’s run that fox three years,” the youth said. “And now he’s killed it. How come he ain’t satisfied?”
The older man did not look back. He slouched on his gaunt, shabby mule, his overalled legs dangling. He spoke in a tone of lazy and ironical contempt. “I reckon that’s something about gentle-men you won’t never know.”
“Fox is fox, to me,” the youth said. “Can’t eat it. Might as well pizen it and save them horses.”
“Sho,” the other said. “That’s something else about them you won’t never know.”
“About who?”
“Gentle-men.” They mounted the ridge and turned into the faint, sandy road. “Well,” the older man said, “gentleman or not, I reckon that’s the only fox in Cal-lina that ever got itself killed that-a-way. Maybe that’s the way they kills a fox up north.”
“Then I be durn if I ain’t glad I don’t live up there,” the youth said.
“I reckon so,” the other said. “I done got along pretty well here for some time, myself.”
“I’d like to see it once though,” the youth said.
“I don’t reckon I would,” the other said, “if living there makes a man go to all this trouble to kill a fox.”
They were riding up the ridge, among the pines, the holly bushes, the huckleberries and briers. Suddenly the older man checked his mule, extending his hand backward.
“What?” the youth said. “What is it?”
The pause was hardly a pause; again the older man rode on, though he began to whistle, the tone carrying and clear though not loud, the tune lugubrious and hymnlike; from beyond the bushes which bordered the path just ahead of them there came the snort of a horse. “Who is it?” the youth said.
The other said nothing. The two mules went on in single file. Then the youth said quietly, “She’s got her hair down. It looks like the sun on a spring branch.” The mules paced on in the light, whispering soil, their ears bobbing, the two men sitting loose, with dangling, stirrupless feet.
The woman sat the mare, her hair a bright cloud, a copper cascade in the sun, about her shoulders, her arms lifted and her hands busy in it. The man sat the bay horse a short distance away. He was lighting a cigarette. The two mules came up, tireless, shambling, with drooping heads and nodding ears.
The youth looked at the woman with a stare at once bold and covert; the older man did not cease his mellow, slow, tuneless whistling; he did not appear to look at them at all. He appeared to be about to ride past without a sign when the man on the bay spoke to him.
“They caught it, did they?” he said. “We heard the horn.”
“Yaas,” the man in overalls said, in a dry, drawling tone. “Yaas. It got caught. ‘Twarn’t nothing else it could do but get caught.”
The youth watched the woman looking at the older man, her hands arrested for an instant in her hair.
“What do you mean?” the man on the bay said.
“He rode it down on that black horse,” the man in overalls said.
“You mean, there were no dogs there?”
“I reckon not,” the other said. “Them dogs never had no black horses to ride.” The two mules had halted; the older man faced the man on the bay a little, his face hidden beneath his shapeless hat. “It crossed the old field and dropped over that ditch-bank and hid, allowing for him to jump the ditch, and then it aimed to double back, I reckon.
I reckon it wasn’t scared of the dogs. I reckon it had fooled them so much it wasn’t worried about them. I reckon he was what worried it. I reckon him and it knowed one another after these three years same as you maybe knowed your maw or your wife maybe, only you ain’t never been married none to speak of.
Anyway it was on the ditch-bank, and he knowed it was there and he cut straight across the field without giving it no spell to breathe in. I reckon maybe yawl seen him, riding straight across that field like he could see like a hawk and smell like a dog.
And the fox was there, where it had done fooled the dogs. But it never had no spell to breathe in, and when it had to run again and dropped over the ditch-bank, it dropped into the briers, I reckon, and it was too tired to get out and run. And he come up and jumped that ditch, just like that fox aimed for him to.
Only the fox was still in the briers, and while he was going through the air he looked down and seen the fox and he clumb off the horse while it was jumping and dropped feet first into the briers like the fox done. Maybe it dodged some then; I don’t know. He says it
