“George Wilkins,” Lucas said.
“Sir,” George said.
“Find the pine-knot and light it again.” George did so; once more the red glare streamed and stank away in thick smoke, upward against the August stars of more than midnight. Lucas put the divining machine down and took the torch. “Grab holt of that thing,” he said. “I got to find it now.”
But when day broke they had not found it. The torch paled in the wan, dew-heavy light. The salesman was asleep on the wet ground now, drawn into a ball against the dawn’s wet chill, unshaven, the dashing city hat crumpled beneath his cheek, his necktie wrenched sideways in the collar of his soiled white shirt, his muddy trousers rolled to his knees, the brightly-polished shoes of yesterday now two shapeless lumps of caked mud. When they waked him at last he sat up cursing. But he knew at once where he was and why. “All right now,” he said. “If that mule moves one foot from that cottonhouse where we left her, I’m going to get the sheriff.”
“I just want one more night,” Lucas said. “That money is here.”
“Take one more,” the salesman said. “Take a hundred. Spend the rest of your life here if you want to. Just tell me first what about that fellow that claims he owns that mule?”
“I’ll tend to him,” Lucas said. “I’ll tend to him this morning. You dont need to worry about that. Besides, if you try to move the mule yourself today, that sheriff will take her away from you. You just leave her where she is and stop worrying yourself and me too. Let me have just one more night with this thing and I’ll fix everything.”
“All right,” the salesman said. “But do you know what one more night is going to cost you? It’s going to cost you exactly twenty-five dollars more. Now I’m going to town and go to bed.”
They returned to the salesman’s car. He put the divining machine back into the trunk of the car and locked it. He let Lucas and George out at Lucas’s gate. The car went on down the road, already going fast. George batted his eyes rapidly after it.
‘Now whut we gonter do?” he said.
‘Eat your breakfast quick as you can and get back here,” Lucas said. “You are going to town and back by noon.”
“I needs to go to bed too,” George said. “I’m bad off to sleep too.”
“You can sleep tomorrow,” Lucas said. “Maybe most of tonight.”
“I could have rid in and come back with him, if you had just said so sooner,” George said.
“Hah,” Lucas said. “But I didn’t. You eat your breakfast quick as you can. Or if you think maybe you cant catch a ride to town, maybe you better start now without waiting for breakfast. Because it will be thirty-four miles to walk, and you are going to be back here by noon.” When George reached Lucas’s gate ten minutes later, Lucas met him, the cheque already filled out in his laborious, cramped, though quite legible hand. It was for fifty dollars. “Get it in silver dollars,” Lucas said. “And be back here by noon.”
It was just dusk when the salesman’s car stopped again at Lucas’s gate, where Lucas and George waited. George carried a pick and a long-handled shovel. The salesman was freshly shaven and his face looked rested; the snap-brim hat had been brushed and his shirt was clean. But he wore now a pair of cotton khaki pants still bearing the manufacturer’s stitched label and still showing the creases where they had lain folded on the store’s shelf when it opened for business that morning. He gave Lucas a hard, jeering stare as Lucas and George approached. “I aint going to ask if my mule’s all right,” he said. “Because I dont need to. Do I?”
“It’s all right,” Lucas said. He and George got into the back seat. The divining machine now sat on the front seat beside the salesman. George stopped halfway in and blinked rapidly at it.
“I just happened to think how rich I’d be if I just knowed what hit knows,” he said. “All of us would be. We wouldn’t need to be wasting no night after night hunting buried money then, would we?” He addressed the salesman now, affable, deferential, chatty: “Then you and Mister Lucas neither wouldn’t care who owned no mule, nor even if there was ere mule to own, would you?”
“Hush, and get in the car,” Lucas said. The salesman put the car into gear, but it did not move yet. He sat half-turned, looking back at Lucas.
“Well?” he said. “Where do you want to take you walk tonight? Same place?”
“Not there,” Lucas said. “I’ll show you where. We were looking in the wrong place. I misread the paper.”
“You bet,” the salesman said. “It’s worth that extra twenty-five bucks to have found that out—” He had started the car. Now he stopped it so suddenly that Lucas and George, sitting gingerly on the edge of the seat, were flung forward against the back of the front one. “What did you say?” the salesman said. “You did what to the paper?”
“I misread it,” Lucas said.
“Misread what?”
“The paper.”
“You mean you’ve got a letter or something that tells where it was buried?”
“That’s right,” Lucas said. “I misread it yesterday.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s put away in my house.”
“Go get it.”
“Never mind,” Lucas said. “We wont need it. I read it right this time.” For a moment longer the salesman looked at Lucas over his shoulder. Then he turned his head and put his hand to the gear lever, but the car was already in gear.
“All right,” he said. “Where’s the place?”
“Drive on,” Lucas said. “I’ll show you.”
It took them almost two hours to reach it, the road not even a road but a gullied overgrown path winding through hills, the place they sought not in the bottom but on a hill overlooking the creek — a clump of ragged cedars, the ruins of old cementless chimneys, a depression which was once a well or a cistern, the old wornout brier- and sedge-choked fields spreading away and a few snaggled trees of what had been an orchard, shadowy and dim beneath the moonless sky where the fierce stars of late summer swam. “It’s in the orchard,” Lucas said. “It’s divided, buried in two separate places. One of them’s in the orchard.”
“Provided the fellow that wrote you the letter aint come back and joined them together again,” the salesman said. “What are we waiting on? Here, Jack,” he said to George, “grab that thing out of there.” George lifted the divining machine from the car.
The salesman had a flashlight now, quite new, thrust into his hip pocket, though he didn’t put it on at once. He looked around at the dark horizon of other hills, visible even in the darkness for miles. “By God, you better find it first pop this time. There probably aint a man in ten miles that can walk that wont be up here inside of an hour, watching us.”
“Dont tell me that,” Lucas said. “Tell it to this three-hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar talking box I done bought that dont seem to know how to say nothing but No.”
“You aint bought this box yet, big boy,” the salesman said. “You say one of the places is in them trees there. All right. Where?”
Lucas, carrying the shovel, entered the orchard. The others followed. The salesman watched Lucas pause, squinting at the trees and sky to orient himself, moving on again. At last he stopped. “We can start here,” he said. The salesman snapped on the flashlight, cupping the beam with his hand on to the box in George’s hands.
“All right, Jack,” he said. “Get going.”
“I better tote it,” Lucas said.
“No,” the salesman said. “You’re too old. I dont know yet that you can even keep up with us.”
“I did last night,” Lucas said.
“This aint last night,” the salesman said. “Get on, Jack!” he said sharply. They moved on, George in the middle, carrying the machine, while all three of them watched the small cryptic dials in the flashlight’s contracted beam as they worked back and forth across the orchard in parallel traverses, all three watching when the needles jerked into life and gyrated and spun for a moment, then stopped, quivering.
Then Lucas held the box and watched George spading into the light’s concentrated pool and saw the rusted can come up at last and the bright cascade of silver dollars glint and rush about the salesman’s hands and heard the salesman’s voice: “Well, by God. Well, by God.” Lucas squatted also. He and the salesman squatted opposite one another across the pit.
“Well, I done found this much of it, anyhow,” Lucas said. The salesman, one hand spread upon the scattered coins, made abashing blow with the other as if Lucas had reached for the money. Squatting, he laughed harshly and steadily at Lucas.
“You found? This machine dont belong to you, old man.”
“I bought it from you,” Lucas said.
“With what?”
“A mule,” Lucas said. The other laughed at him across the pit, harsh and steady. “I give you a billy sale for it,” Lucas said.
“Which never was worth a damn,” the salesman said. “It’s in my car yonder. Go and get it whenever you want to. It was so worthless I never even bothered to tear it up.” He scrabbled the coins back into the can. The flashlight lay on the ground where he had dropped it, flung it, still burning. He rose quickly out of the
