“Do you own the mule?”
“How could I swap it to you if I didn’t?” Lucas said.
“Let’s go see it,” the salesman said.
“George Wilkins,” Lucas said.
“Sir,” George said.
“Go to my stable and get my halter.”
II
Edmonds found the mule was missing as soon as the lotmen, Dan and Oscar, brought the drove in from pasture that evening. She was a three-year-old, eleven-hundred-pound mare mule named Alice Bent Bolt, and he had refused three hundred dollars for her in the spring. He didn’t even curse.
He merely surrendered the mare to Dan and waited beside the lot fence while the rapid beat of the mare’s feet died away in the dusk and then returned and Dan sprang down and handed him his flashlight and pistol. Then, himself on the mare and the two negroes on saddleless mules, they went back across the pasture, fording the creek, to the gap in the fence through which the mule had been led.
From there they followed the tracks of the mule and the man in the soft earth along the edge of a cotton field, to the road. And here too they could follow them, Dan walking now and carrying the flashlight, where the man had led the unshod mule in the soft dirt which bordered the gravel. “That’s Alice’s foot,” Dan said. “I’d know it anywhere.”
Later Edmonds would realise that both the negroes had recognised the man’s footprints too. But at the time his very fury and concern had short-circuited his normal sensitivity to negro behaviour.
They would not have told him who made the tracks even if he had demanded to know, but the realisation that they knew would have enabled him to make the correct divination and so save himself the four or five hours of mental turmoil and physical effort which he was about to enter.
They lost the tracks. He expected to find the marks where the mule had been loaded into a waiting truck; whereupon he would return home and telephone to the sheriff in Jefferson and to the Memphis police to watch the horse-and-mule markets tomorrow.
There were no such marks. It took them almost an hour to find where the tracks had disappeared on to the gravel, crossing it, descending through the opposite roadside weeds, to reappear in another field three hundred yards away. Supperless, raging, the mare which had been under saddle all day unfed too, he followed the two shadowy mules, cursing Alice and the darkness and the single puny light on which they were forced to depend.
Two hours later they were in the creek bottom four miles from the house. He was walking too now, lest he dash his brains out against a limb, stumbling and thrashing among briers and undergrowth and rotting logs and tree-tops, leading the mare with one hand and fending his face with the other arm and trying to watch his feet, so that he walked into one of the mules, instinctively leaping in the right direction as it lashed viciously back at him with one hoof, before he discovered that the negroes had stopped.
Then, cursing aloud now and leaping quickly again to avoid the invisible second mule which would be somewhere on that side, he realised that the flashlight was off now and he too saw the faint, smoky glare of a lightwood torch among the trees ahead. It was moving. “That’s right,” he said quickly.
“Keep the light off.” He called Oscar’s name. “Give the mules to Dan and come back here and take the mare.” He waited, watching the light, until the negro’s hand fumbled at his. He relinquished the reins and moved around the mules, drawing the pistol and still watching the moving light. “Hand me the flashlight,” he said. “You and Oscar wait here.”
“I better come with you,” Dan said.
“All right,” Edmonds said, watching the light. “Let Oscar hold the mules.” He went on without waiting, though he presently heard the negro close behind him, both of them moving as rapidly as they dared. The rage was not cold now. It was hot, and there was an eagerness upon him, a kind of vindictive exultation as he plunged on, heedless of underbrush or log, the flashlight in his left hand and the pistol in his right, gaining rapidly on the torch.
“It’s the Old Injun’s mound,” Dan murmured behind him. “That’s how come that light looked so high up. Him and George Wilkins ought to be pretty nigh through it by now.”
“Him and George Wilkins?” Edmonds said. He stopped dead in his tracks. He whirled. He was not only about to perceive the whole situation in its complete and instantaneous entirety, as when the photographer’s bulb explodes, but he knew now that he had seen it all the while and had refused to believe it purely and simply because he knew that when he did accept it, his brain would burst. “Lucas and George?”
“Digging down that mound,” Dan said. “They been at it every night since Uncle Lucas found that thousand-dollar gold piece in it last spring.”
“And you knew about it?”
“We all knowed about it. We been watching them. A thousand-dollar gold piece Uncle Lucas found that night when he was trying to hide his—” The voice died away. Edmonds couldn’t hear it any more, drowned by a rushing in his skull which, had he been a few years older, would have been apoplexy. He could neither breathe nor see for a moment. Then he whirled again.
He said something in a hoarse strangled voice and sprang on, crashing at last from the undergrowth into the glade where the squat mound lifted the gaping yawn of its gutted flank like a photographer’s backdrop before which the two arrested figures gaped at him — the one carrying before him what Edmonds might have taken for a receptacle containing feed except that he now knew neither of these had taken time to feed Alice or any other mule since darkness fell, the other holding the smoking pine-knot high above the ruined rake of the panama hat.
“You, Lucas!” he shouted. George flung the torch away, but Edmonds’s flashlight already held them spitted. Then he saw the white man, the salesman, for the first time, snap-brim hat, necktie and all, just rising from beside a tree, his trousers rolled to his knees and his feet invisible in caked mud.
“That’s right,” Edmonds said. “Go on, George. Run. I believe I can hit that hat without even touching you.” He approached, the flashlight’s beam contracting on to the metal box which Lucas held, gleaming and glinting among the knobs and dials. “So that’s it,” he said. “Three hundred dollars.
I wish somebody would come into this country with a seed that had to be worked every day from New Year’s right on through Christmas. As soon as you niggers are laid by, trouble starts. But never mind that. Because I aint going to worry about Alice tonight.
And if you and George want to spend the rest of it walking around with that damn machine, that’s your business. But that mule is going to be in her stall in my stable at sunup. Do you hear?” Now the salesman appeared suddenly at Lucas’s elbow. Edmonds had forgotten about him.
“What mule is that?” he said. Edmonds turned the light on him for a moment.
“My mule, sir,” he said.
“Is that so?” the other said. “I’ve got a bill of sale for that mule. Signed by Lucas here.”
“Have you now?” Edmonds said. “You can make pipe lighters out of it when you get home.”
“Is that so? Look here, Mister What’s-your-name—” But Edmonds had already turned the light back to Lucas, who still held the divining machine before him as if it were some object symbolical and sanctified for a ceremony, a ritual.
“On second thought,” Edmonds said, “I aint going to worry about that mule at all. I told you this morning what I thought about this business. But you are a grown man; if you want to fool with it, I cant stop you. By God, I dont even want to. But if that mule aint in her stall by sunup tomorrow, I’m going to telephone the sheriff. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Lucas said sullenly. Now the salesman spoke again.
“All right, big boy,” he said. “If that mule is moved from where she’s at until I’m ready to load her up and move out of here, I’m going to telephone the sheriff. Do you hear that too?” This time Edmonds jumped, flung, the light beam at the salesman’s face.
“Were you talking to me, sir?” he said.
“No,” the salesman said. “I’m talking to him. And he heard me.” For a moment longer Edmonds held the beam on the other. Then he dropped it, so that only their legs and feet showed, planted in the pool and its refraction as if they stood in water. He put the pistol back into his pocket.
“Well, you and Lucas have got till daylight to settle that. Because that mule is going to be back in my stable at sunup.” He turned. Lucas watched him go back to where Dan waited at the edge of the glade. Then the two of them went on, the light swinging and
