had instigated and in a way led and anyway accompanied the stroke which not one of the responsible elders but had failed even to recognise its value, let alone its need, and something of caution too remembering how his uncle had said almost nothing was enough to put a mob in motion so perhaps even a child running toward the jail would have been enough: then he remembered again the faces myriad yet curiously identical in their lack of individual identity, their complete relinquishment of individual identity into one We not even impatient, not even hurryable, almost gala in its complete obliviousness of its own menace, not to be stampeded by a hundred running children: and then in the same flash the obverse: not to be halted or deflected by a hundred times a hundred of them, and having realised its sheer hopelessness when it was still only an intention and then its physical imponderability when it entered accomplishment he now recognised the enormity of what he had blindly meddled with and that his first instinctive impulse—to run home and fling saddle and bridle on the horse and ride as the crow flies into the last stagger of exhaustion and then sleep and then return after it was all over—had been the right one (who now simply because he happened not to be an orphan had not even that escape) because it seemed to him now that he was responsible for having brought into the light and glare of day something shocking and shameful out of the whole white foundation of the county which he himself must partake of too since he too was bred of it, which otherwise might have flared and blazed merely out of Beat Four and then vanished back into its darkness or at least invisibility with the fading embers of Lucas’ crucifixion.

But it was too late now, he couldn’t even repudiate, relinquish, run: the jail door still open and opposite it now he could see Miss Habersham sitting in the chair Legate had sat in, the cardboard box on the floor at her feet and a garment of some sort across her lap; she was still wearing the hat and he could see the steady motion of her hand and elbow and it seemed to him he could even see the flash and flick of the needle in her hand though he knew he could not at this distance; but his uncle was in the way so he had to move further along the walk but at that moment his uncle turned and came out the door and recrossed the veranda and then he could see her too in the second chair beside Miss Habersham; a car drew up to the curb behind him and stopped and now without haste she chose a sock from the basket and slipped the darningegg into it; she even had the needle already threaded stuck in the front of her dress and now he could distinguish the flash and glint of it and maybe that was because he knew so well the motion, the narrow familiar suppleness of the hand which he had watched all his life but at least no man could have disputed him that it was his sock.

‘Who’s that?’ the sheriff said behind him. He turned. The sheriff sat behind the wheel of his car, his neck and shoulders bowed and hunched so he could peer out below the top of the window-frame. The engine was still running and he saw in the back of the car the handles of two shovels and the pick too which they would not need and on the back seat quiet and motionless save for the steady glint and blink of their eyewhites, two Negroes in blue jumpers and the soiled black-ringed convict pants which the street gangs wore.

‘Who would it be?’ his uncle said behind him too but he didn’t turn this time nor did he even listen further because three men came suddenly out of the street and stopped beside the car and as he watched five or six more came up and in another moment the whole crowd would begin to flow across the street; already a passing car had braked suddenly (and then the following one behind it) at first to keep from running over them and then for its occupants to lean out looking at the sheriff’s car where the first man to reach it had already stooped to peer into it, his brown farmer’s hands grasping the edge of the open window, his brown weathered face thrust into the car curious divinant and abashless while behind him his massed duplicates in their felt hats and sweat-stained panamas listened.

‘What you up to, Hope?’ the man said. ‘Dont you know the Grand Jury’ll get you, wasting county money this way? Aint you heard about that new lynch law the Yankees passed? the folks that lynches the nigger is supposed to dig the grave?’

‘Maybe he’s taking them shovels out there for Nub Gowrie and them boys of his to practice with,’ the second said.

‘Then it’s a good thing Hope’s taking shovel hands too,’ the third said. ‘If he’s depending on anybody named Gowrie to dig a hole or do anything else that might bring up a sweat, he’ll sure need them.’

‘Or maybe they aint shovel hands,’ the fourth said. ‘Maybe it’s them the Gowries are going to practice on.’ Yet even though one guffawed they were not laughing, more than a dozen now crowded around the car to take one quick allcomprehensive glance into the back of it where the two Negroes sat immobile as carved wood staring straight ahead at nothing and no movement even of breathing other than an infinitesimal widening and closing of the whites around their eyeballs, then looking at the sheriff again with almost exactly the expression he had seen on the faces waiting for the spinning tapes behind a slotmachine’s glass to stop.

‘I reckon that’ll do,’ the sheriff said. He thrust his head and one vast arm out the window and with the arm pushed the nearest ones back and away from the car as effortlessly as he would have opened a curtain, raising his voice but not much: ‘Willy.’ The marshal came up; he could already hear him:

‘Gangway, boys. Lemme see what the high sheriff’s got on his mind this morning.’

‘Why dont you get these folks out of the street so them cars can get to town?’ the sheriff said. ‘Maybe they want to stand around and look at the jail too.’

‘You bet,’ the marshal said. He turned, shoving his hands at the nearest ones, not touching them, as if he were putting into motion a herd of cattle. ‘Now boys,’ he said.

They didn’t move, looking past the marshal still at the sheriff, not at all defiant, not really daring anyone: just tolerant, goodhumored, debonair almost.

‘Why, Sheriff,’ a voice said, then another:

‘It’s a free street, aint it, Sheriff? You town folks wont mind us just standing on it long as we spend our money with you, will you?’

‘But not to block off the other folks trying to get to town to spend a little,’ the sheriff said. ‘Move on now. Get them out of the street, Willy.’

‘Come on, boys,’ the marshal said. ‘There’s other folks besides you wants to get up where they can watch them bricks.’ They moved then but still without haste, the marshal herding them back across the street like a woman driving a flock of hens across a pen, she to control merely the direction not the speed and not too much of that, the fowls moving ahead of her flapping apron not recalcitrant, just unpredictable, fearless of her and not yet even alarmed; the halted car and the ones behind it moved too, slowly, dragging at creeping pace their loads of craned faces; he could hear the marshal shouting at the drivers: ‘Get on. Get on. There’s cars behind you——’

The sheriff was looking at his uncle again. ‘Where’s the other one?’

‘The other what?’ his uncle said.

‘The other detective. The one that can see in the dark.’

‘Aleck Sander,’ his uncle said. ‘You want him too?’

‘No,’ the sheriff said. ‘I just missed him. I was just surprised to find one human in this county with taste and judgment enough to stay at home today. You ready? Let’s get started.’

‘Right,’ his uncle said. The sheriff was notorious as a driver who used up a car a year as a heavyhanded sweeper wears out brooms: not by speed but by simple friction; now the car actually shot away from the curb and almost before he could watch it, was gone. His uncle went to theirs and opened the door. ‘Jump in,’ his uncle said.

Then he said it; at least this much was simple: ‘I’m not going.’

His uncle paused and now he saw watching him the quizzical saturnine face, the quizzical eyes which given a little time didn’t miss much; had in fact as long as he had known them never missed anything until last night.

‘Ah,’ his uncle said. ‘Miss Habersham is of course a lady but this other female is yours.’

‘Look at them,’ he said, not moving, barely moving his lips even. ‘Across the street. On the Square too and nobody but Willy Ingrum and that damn cap——’

‘Didn’t you hear them talking to Hampton?’ his uncle said.

‘I heard them,’ he said. ‘They were not even laughing at their own jokes. They were laughing at him.’

‘They were not even taunting him,’ his uncle said. ‘They were not even jeering at him. They were just watching him. Watching him and Beat