“Ask your finding machine,” Lucas said. “Aint it supposed to know? Aint that why you want three hundred dollars for it?” They faced one another in the darkness, two shadows, faceless. Lucas moved. “Then I reckon we can go home,” he said. “George Wilkins.”
“Sir,” George said.
“Wait,” the salesman said. Lucas paused. They faced one another again, invisible. “There wasn’t over a hundred here,” the salesman said. “Most of it is in the other place. I’ll give you ten per cent.”
“It was my letter,” Lucas said. “That aint enough.”
“Twenty,” the salesman said. “And that’s all.”
“I want half,” Lucas said.
“Half?”
“And that mule paper back, and another paper saying that that machine is mine.”
“Ha, ha,” the salesman said. “And ha, ha, ha. You say that letter said in the orchard. The orchard aint very big. And most of the night left, not to mention tomor — —”
“I said it said some of it was in the orchard,” Lucas said. They faced one another in the darkness.
“Tomorrow,” the salesman said.
“Now,” Lucas said.
“Tomorrow.”
“Now,” Lucas said. The invisible face stared at his own invisible face. Both he and George seemed to feel the windless summer air moving to the white man’s trembling.
“Jack,” the salesman said, “how much did you say them other fellows found?” But Lucas answered before George could speak.
“Twenty-two thousand dollars.”
“Hit mought er been more than twenty-two thousand,” George said. “Hit was a big — —”
“All right,” the salesman said. “I’ll give you a bill of sale for it as soon as we finish.”
“I want it now,” Lucas said. They returned to the car. Lucas held the flashlight. They watched the salesman rip open his patent brief case and jerk out of it and fling toward Lucas the bill of sale for the mule. Then they watched his jerking hand fill in the long printed form with its carbon duplicates and sign it and rip out one of the duplicates.
“You get possession tomorrow morning,” he said. “It belongs to me until then.” He sprang out of the car. “Come on.”
“And half it finds is mine,” Lucas said.
“How in hell is it going to be any half or any nothing, with you standing there running your mouth?” the salesman said. “Come on.” But Lucas didn’t move.
“What about them fifty dollars we done already found then?” he said. “Dont I get half of them?” This time the salesman merely stood laughing at him, harsh and steady and without mirth. Then he was gone. He hadn’t even closed the brief case. He snatched the machine from George and the flashlight from Lucas and ran back toward the orchard, the light jerking and leaping as he ran. “George Wilkins,” Lucas said.
“Sir,” George said.
“Take that mule back where you got it. Then go tell Roth Edmonds he can quit worrying folks about it,”
III
He mounted the gnawed steps beside which the bright mare stood under the wide saddle, and entered the long room with its ranked shelves of tinned food, the hooks from which hung collars and traces and hames and ploughlines, its smell of molasses and cheese and leather and kerosene. Edmonds swivelled the chair around from the desk. “Where’ve you been?” he said. “I sent word to you two days ago I wanted to see you. Why didn’t you come?”
“I was in bed, I reckon,” Lucas said. “I been up all night long for the last three nights. I cant stand it any more like when I was a young man. You wont neither when you are my age.”
“And I’ve got better sense at half your age than to try it. And maybe when you get twice mine, you’ll have too. But that’s not what I wanted. I want to know about that damn Saint Louis drummer. Dan says he’s still here. What’s he doing?”
“Hunting buried money,” Lucas said.
For a moment Edmonds didn’t speak. Then he said, “What? Hunting what? What did you say?”
“Hunting buried money,” Lucas said. He let himself go easily back against the edge of the counter. He took from his vest pocket a small tin of snuff and uncapped it and filled the cap carefully and exactly with snuff and drew his lower lip outward between thumb and finger and tilted the snuff into it and capped the tin and put it back in his vest pocket. “Using my finding box. He rents it from me by the night. That’s why I’ve been having to stay up all night, to see I got the box back. But last night he never turned up, so I got a good night’s sleep for a change. So I reckon he’s done gone back wherever it was he come from.”
Edmonds sat in the swivel chair and stared at Lucas. “Rents it from you? The same machine you stole my — that you — the same machine — —”
“For twenty-five dollars a night,” Lucas said. “That’s what he charged me to use it one night. So I reckon that’s the regular rent on them. He sells them; he ought to know. Leastways, that’s what I charges.” Edmonds put his hands on the chair arms, but he didn’t move yet.
He sat perfectly still, leaning forward a little, staring at the negro leaning against the counter, in whom only the slight shrinkage of the jaws revealed the old man, in threadbare mohair trousers such as Grover Cleveland or President Taft might have worn in the summertime, a white stiff-bosomed collarless shirt beneath a pique vest yellow with age and looped across by a heavy gold watchchain, and the sixty-dollar hand-made beaver hat which Edmonds’s grandfather had given him fifty years ago above the face which was not sober and not grave but wore no expression at all.
“Because he was looking in the wrong place,” he said. “He was hunting up there on that hill. That money is buried down yonder by the creek somewhere. Them two white men that slipped in here that night four years ago and got clean away with twenty-two thousand dollars—” Now Edmonds got himself out of the chair and on to his feet.
He drew a long deep breath and began to walk steadily toward Lucas. “And now we done got shut of him, me and George Wilkins—” Walking steadily toward him, Edmonds expelled his breath. He had believed it would be a shout but it was not much more than a whisper.
“Get out of here,” he said. “Go home. And dont come back. Dont ever come back. When you need supplies, send Aunt Molly after them.”
Chapter Three
I
WHEN EDMONDS GLANCED up from the ledger and saw the old woman coming up the road, he did not recognise her. He returned to the ledger and it was not until he heard her toiling up the steps and saw her enter the commissary itself, that he knew who it was. Because for something like four or five years now he had never seen her outside her own gate.
He would pass the house on his mare while riding his crops and see her sitting on the gallery, her shrunken face collapsed about the reed stem of a clay pipe, or moving about the washing-pot and clothes-line in the back yard, moving slowly and painfully, as the very old move, appearing to be much older even to Edmonds, when he thought about it at all, than Edmonds certainly knew her to be.
And regularly once a month he would get down and tie the mare to the fence and enter the house with a tin of tobacco and a small sack of the soft cheap candy which she loved, and visit with her for a half hour.
He called it a libation to his luck, as the centurion spilled first a little of the wine he drank, though actually it was to his ancestors and to the conscience which he would have probably affirmed he did not possess, in the form, the person, of the negro woman who had been the only mother he ever knew, who had not only delivered him on that night of rain and flood when her husband had very nearly lost his life fetching the doctor who arrived too late, but moved into the very house, bringing her own child, the white child and the black one sleeping in the same room with her so she could suckle them both until he was weaned, and never out of the house very long at a time until he went off to school at twelve — a small woman, almost tiny, who in the succeeding forty years seemed to have grown even smaller, in the same clean white headcloth and aprons which he first remembered, whom he knew to be actually younger than Lucas but who looked much older, incredibly old, who during the last few years had begun to call him by his father’s name, or even by the title which the older negroes referred to his grandfather.
“Good Lord,” he said. “What are you doing away over here? Why didn’t you send Lucas? He ought to know better than to let you — —”
“He’s in bed asleep now,” she said. She was panting a little from the walk. “That’s how I had a chance to come. I dont want nothing. I come to talk to you.” She turned a little toward the window. Then he saw the myriad-wrinkled face.
“Why, what
