‘Yep,’ old Gowrie said in the high brisk carrying voice: ‘It’s that Montgomery, damned if it aint:’ and rose lean and fast as a tripped watch-spring yelling shouting at the hounds again: ‘Hi boys! Find Vinson!’ and then his uncle shouting too to make himself heard:
‘Wait, Mr Gowrie. Wait:’ then to the sheriff: ‘He was a fool then just because he didn’t have time, not because he is a fool. I just dont believe it twice——’ looking around, his eyes darting. Then he stopped them on the twins. He said sharply: ‘Where’s the quicksand?’
‘What?’ one of the twins said.
‘The quicksand,’ his uncle said. ‘The quicksand bed in the branch here. Where is it?’
‘Quicksand?’ old Gowrie said. ‘Sonabitch, Lawyer. Put a man in quicksand? my boy in quicksand?’
‘Shut up, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. Then to the twin: ‘Well? Where?’
But he answered first. He had been intending to for a second or so. Now he did: ‘It’s by the bridge:’ then—he didn’t know why: and then that didn’t matter either—‘It wasn’t Aleck Sander that time. It was Highboy.’
‘Under the highway bridge,’ the twin corrected. ‘Where it’s been all the time.’
‘Oh,’ the sheriff said. ‘Which one was Highboy?’ And he was about to answer that: then suddenly the old man seemed to have forgot about his mare too, whirling, already running before any of them moved and even before he himself moved, running for several strides against the purchaseless sand while they watched him, before he turned and with that same catlike agility he mounted the mare with, clawed himself one-handed up the steep bank and was thrashing and crashing on out of sight before anybody else except the two Negroes who had never quitted it were even up the bank.
‘Jump,’ the sheriff said to the twins: ‘Catch him.’ But they didn’t. They thrashed and crashed on after him, one of the twins in front then the rest of them and the two Negroes pell mell through the briers and brush, on back along the branch and out of the jungle into the cleared right-of-way below the road at the bridge; he saw the sliding hoof-marks where Highboy had come almost down to the water and then refused, the stream the water crowded over against the opposite concrete revetment flowing in a narrow band whose nearer edge faded without demarcation into an expanse of wet sand as smooth and innocent and markless of surface as so much milk; he stepped sprang over a long willow pole lying above the bank-edge and coated for three or four feet up its length with a thin patina of dried sand like when you thrust a stick into a bucket or vat of paint and even as the sheriff shouted to the twin in front ‘Grab him, you!’ he saw the old man jump feet first off the bank and with no splash no disturbance of any sort continue right on not through the bland surface but past it as if he had jumped not into anything but past the edge of a cliff or a window-sill and then stopping half-disappeared as suddenly with no shock, or jolt: just fixed and immobile as if his legs had been cut off at the loins by one swing of a scythe, leaving his trunk sitting upright on the bland depthless milklike sand.
‘All right, boys!’ old Gowrie cried, brisk and carrying: ‘Here he is. I’m standing on him.’
And one twin got the rope bridle from the mule and the leather one and the saddle girth from the mare and using the shovels like axes the Negroes hacked willow branches while the rest of them dragged up other brush and poles and whatever else they could reach or find or free and now both twins and the two Negroes, their empty shoes sitting on the bank, were down in the sand too and steadily there came down from the hills the ceaseless strong murmur of the pines but no other sound yet although he strained his ears listening in both directions along the road, not for the dignity of death because death has no dignity but at least for the decorum of it: some little at least of that decorum which should be every man’s helpless right until the carrion he leaves can be hidden from the ridicule and the shame, the body coming out now feet first, gallowsed up and out of the inscrutable suck to the heave of the crude tackle then free of the sand with a faint smacking plop like the sound of lips perhaps in sleep and in the bland surface nothing: a faint wimple wrinkle already fading then gone like the end of a faint secret fading smile, and then on the bank now while they stood about and over it and he was listening harder than ever now with something of the murderer’s own frantic urgency both ways along the road though there was still nothing: only hearing recognising his own voice apparently long after everyone else had, watching the old man coated to the waist with the same thin patina of sand like the pole, looking down at the body, his face wrenched and his upper lip wrenched upward from the lifeless porcelain glare and the pink bloodless gums of his false teeth:
‘Oh gee, Uncle Gavin, oh gee, Uncle Gavin, let’s get him away from the road, at least let’s get him back into the woods——’
‘Steady,’ his uncle said. ‘They’ve all passed now. They’re all in town now:’ and still watching as the old man stooped and began to brush clumsily with his one hand at the sand clogged into the eyes and nostrils and mouth, the hand looking curious and stiff at this which had been shaped so supple and quick to violence: to the buttons on the shirt and the butt and hammer of the pistol: then the hand went back and began to fumble at the hip pocket but already his uncle had produced a handkerchief and extended it but that was too late too as kneeling now the old man jerked out the tail of his shirt and bending to bring it close, wiped the or at the dead face with it then bending tried to blow the wet sand from it as though he had forgotten the sand was still damp. Then the old man stood up again and said in the high flat carrying voice in which there was still no real inflection at all:
‘Well, Shurf?’
‘It wasn’t Lucas Beauchamp, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. ‘Jake Montgomery was at Vinson’s funeral yesterday. And while Vinson was being buried Lucas Beauchamp was locked up in my jail in town.’
‘I aint talking about Jake Montgomery, Shurf,’ old Gowrie said.
‘Neither am I, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. ‘Because it wasn’t Lucas Beauchamp’s old forty-one Colt that killed Vinson either.’
And watching he thought No! No! Dont say it! Dont ask! and for a while he believed the old man would not as he stood facing the sheriff but not looking at him now because his wrinkled eyelids had come down hiding his eyes but only in the way they do when somebody looks down at something at his feet so you couldn’t really say whether the old man had closed them or was just looking down at what lay on the ground between him and the sheriff. But he was wrong; the eyelids went up again and again the old man’s hard pale eyes were looking at the sheriff; again his voice to nine hundred men out of nine hundred and one would have sounded just cheerful:
‘What was it killed Vinson, Shurf?’
‘A German Luger automatic, Mr Gowrie,’ the sheriff said. ‘Like the one Buddy McCallum brought home from France in 1919 and traded that summer for a pair of fox hounds.’
And he thought how this was where the eyelids might even should have closed again but again he was wrong: only until the old man himself turned, quick and wiry, already in motion, already speaking peremptory and loud, not brookless of opposition or argument, simply incapable of conceiving either:
‘All right, sons. Let’s load our boy on the mule and take him home.’
Chapter Nine
And two oclock that afternoon in his uncle’s car just behind the truck (it was another pickup; they—the sheriff—had commandeered it, with a slatted cattle frame on the bed which one of the Gowrie twins had known would be standing in the deserted yard of the house two miles away which had the telephone too—and he remembered how he wondered what the truck was doing there, how they had got to town themselves who had left it—and the Gowrie had turned the switch on with a table fork which by the Gowrie’s direction he had found in the unlocked kitchen when his uncle went in to telephone the coroner and the Gowrie was driving it) blinking rapidly and steadily not against glare so much as something hot and gritty inside his eyelids like a dust of ground glass (which certainly could and even should have been dust after twenty-odd miles of sand and gravel roads in one morning except that no
