One evening when Sam brought the horses and mules up to stable them for the night, the colt was missing and it was all he could do to get the frantic mare into the lot. He had thought at first to let the mare lead him back to where she had become separated from the foal. But she would not do it. She would not even feint toward any particular part of the woods or even in any particular direction.
She merely ran, as if she couldn’t see, still frantic with terror. She whirled and ran at Sam once, as if to attack him in some ultimate desperation, as if she could not for the moment realise that he was a man and a long-familiar one. He got her into the lot at last. It was too dark by that time to back-track her, to unravel the erratic course she had doubtless pursued.
He came to the house and told Major de Spain. It was an animal, of course, a big one, and the colt was dead now, wherever it was. They all knew that. “It’s a panther,” General Compson said at once. “The same one. That doe and fawn last March.” Sam had sent Major de Spain word of it when Boon Hogganbeck came to the camp on a routine visit to see how the stock had wintered — the doe’s throat torn out, and the beast had run down the helpless fawn and killed it too.
“Sam never did say that was a panther,” Major de Spain said. Sam said nothing now, standing behind Major de Spain where they sat at supper, inscrutable, as if he were just waiting for them to stop talking so he could go home. He didn’t even seem to be looking at anything. “A panther might jump a doe, and he wouldn’t have much trouble catching the fawn afterward. But no panther would have jumped that colt with the dam right there with it.
It was Old Ben,” Major de Spain said. “I’m disappointed in him. He has broken the rules. I didn’t think he would have done that. He has killed mine and McCaslin’s dogs, but that was all right. We gambled the dogs against him; we gave each other warning. But now he has come into my house and destroyed my property, out of season too. He broke the rules. It was Old Ben, Sam.” Still Sam said nothing, standing there until Major de Spain should stop talking. “We’ll back-track her tomorrow and see,” Major de Spain said.
Sam departed. He would not live in the camp; he had built himself a little hut something like Joe Baker’s, only stouter, tighter, on the bayou a quarter-mile away, and a stout log crib where he stored a little corn for the shoat he raised each year.
The next morning he was waiting when they waked. He had already found the colt. They did not even wait for breakfast. It was not far, not five hundred yards from the stable — the three-months colt lying on its side, its throat torn out and the entrails and one ham partly eaten. It lay not as if it had been dropped but as if it had been struck and hurled, and no cat-mark, no claw-mark where a panther would have gripped it while finding its throat.
They read the tracks where the frantic mare had circled and at last rushed in with that same ultimate desperation with which she had whirled on Sam Fathers yesterday evening, and the long tracks of dead and terrified running and those of the beast which had not even rushed at her when she advanced but had merely walked three or four paces toward her until she broke, and General Compson said, “Good God, what a wolf!”
Still Sam said nothing. The boy watched him while the men knelt, measuring the tracks. There was something in Sam’s face now. It was neither exultation nor joy nor hope. Later, a man, the boy realised what it had been, and that Sam had known all the time what had made the tracks and what had torn the throat out of the doe in the spring and killed the fawn. It had been foreknowledge in Sam’s face that morning. And he was glad, he told himself. He was old.
He had no children, no people, none of his blood anywhere above earth that he would ever meet again. And even if he were to, he could not have touched it, spoken to it, because for seventy years now he had had to be a negro. It was almost over now and he was glad.
They returned to camp and had breakfast and came back with guns and the hounds. Afterward the boy realised that they also should have known then what killed the colt as well as Sam Fathers did. But that was neither the first nor the last time he had seen men rationalise from and even act upon their misconceptions.
After Boon, standing astride the colt, had whipped the dogs away from it with his belt, they snuffed at the tracks. One of them, a young dog hound without judgment yet, bayed once, and then ran for a few feet on what seemed to be a trail. Then they stopped, looking back at the men, eager enough, not baffled, merely questioning, as if they were asking. “Now what?” Then they rushed back to the colt, where Boon, still astride it, slashed at them with the belt.
“I never knew a trail to get cold that quick,” General Compson said.
“Maybe a single wolf big enough to kill a colt with the dam right there beside it dont leave scent,” Major de Spain said.
“Maybe it was a hant,” Walter Ewell said. He looked at Tennie’s Jim. “Hah, Jim?”
Because the hounds would not run it, Major de Spain had Sam hunt out and find the tracks a hundred yards farther on and they put the dogs on it again and again the young one bayed and not one of them realised then that the hound was not baying like a dog striking game but was merely bellowing like a country dog whose yard has been invaded.
General Compson spoke to the boy and Boon and Tennie’s Jim: to the squirrel hunters. “You boys keep the dogs with you this morning. He’s probably hanging around somewhere, waiting to get his breakfast off the colt. You might strike him.”
But they did not. The boy remembered how Sam stood watching them as they went into the woods with the leashed hounds — the Indian face in which he had never seen anything until it smiled, except that faint arching of the nostrils on that first morning when the hounds had found Old Ben. They took the hounds with them on the next day, though when they reached the place where they hoped to strike a fresh trail, the carcass of the colt was gone.
Then on the third morning Sam was waiting again, this time until they had finished breakfast. He said, “Come.” He led them to his house, his little hut, to the corn-crib beyond it. He had removed the corn and had made a dead-fall of the door, baiting it with the colt’s carcass; peering between the logs, they saw an animal almost the colour of a gun or pistol barrel, what little time they had to examine its colour or shape. It was not crouched nor even standing.
It was in motion, in the air, coming toward them — a heavy body crashing with tremendous force against the door so that the thick door jumped and clattered in its frame, the animal, whatever it was, hurling itself against the door again seemingly before it could have touched the floor and got a new purchase to spring from.
“Come away,” Sam said, “fore he break his neck.” Even when they retreated the heavy and measured crashes continued, the stout door jumping and clattering each time, and still no sound from the beast itself — no snarl, no cry.
“What in hell’s name is it?” Major de Spain said.
“It’s a dog,” Sam said, his nostrils arching and collapsing faintly and steadily and that faint, fierce milkiness in his eyes again as on that first morning when the hounds had struck the old bear. “It’s the dog.”
“The dog?” Major de Spain said.
“That’s gonter hold Old Ben.”
“Dog the devil,” Major de Spain said. “I’d rather have Old Ben himself in my pack than that brute. Shoot him.”
“No,” Sam said.
“You’ll never tame him. How do you ever expect to make an animal like that afraid of you?”
“I dont want him tame,” Sam said; again the boy watched his nostrils and the fierce milky light in his eyes. “But I almost rather he be tame than scared, of me or any man or any thing. But he wont be neither, of nothing.”
“Then what are you going to do with it?”
“You can watch,” Sam said.
Each morning through the second week they would go to Sam’s crib. He had removed a few shingles from the roof and had put a rope on the colt’s carcass and had drawn it out when the trap fell. Each morning they would watch him lower a pail of water into the crib while the dog hurled itself tirelessly against the door and dropped back and leaped again.
It never made any sound and there was nothing frenzied in the act but only a cold and grim indomitable determination. Toward the end of the week it stopped jumping at the door.
Yet it had not
