‘Jump in,’ and Lucas got in and the sheriff closed the door and opened the front one and crawled grunting into it, the whole car squatting onto its springs and rims when he let himself down into the seat and turned the switch and started the engine, his uncle standing at the window now holding the rim of it in both hands as though he thought or hoped suddenly on some second thought to hold the car motionless before it could begin to move, saying what he himself had been thinking off and on for thirty or forty minutes:
‘Take somebody with you.’
‘I am,’ the sheriff said. ‘Besides I thought we settled all this three times this afternoon.’
‘That’s still just one no matter how many times you count Lucas,’ his uncle said.
‘You let me have my pistol,’ Lucas said, ‘and wont nobody have to do no counting. I’ll do it:’ and he thought how many times the sheriff had probably told Lucas by now to shut up, which may have been why the sheriff didn’t say it now: except that (suddenly) he did, turning slowly and heavily and grunting in the seat to look back at Lucas, saying in the plaintive heavily-sighing voice:
‘After all the trouble you got into Saturday standing with that pistol in your pocket in the same ten feet of air a Gowrie was standing in, you want to take it in your hand and walk around another one. Now I want you to hush and stay hushed. And when we begin to get close to Whiteleaf bridge I want you to be laying on the floor close up against the seat behind me and still hushed. You hear me?’
‘I hear you,’ Lucas said. ‘But if I just had my pistol——’ but the sheriff had already turned to his uncle:
‘No matter how many times you count Crawford Gowrie he’s still just one too:’ and then went on in the mild sighing reluctant voice which nevertheless was already answering his uncle’s thoughts before even his uncle could speak it: ‘Who would he get?’ and he thought of that too remembering the long tearing rubber-from-cement sound of the frantic cars and trucks scattering pell mell hurling themselves in aghast irrevocable repudiation in all directions toward the county’s outmost unmapped fastnesses except that little island in Beat Four known as Caledonia Church, into sanctuary: the old the used the familiar, home where the women and older girls and children could milk and chop wood for tomorrow’s breakfast while the little ones held lanterns and the men and older sons after they had fed the mules against tomorrow’s plowing would sit on the front gallery waiting for supper into the twilight: the whippoorwills: night: sleep: and this he could even see (provided that even a murderer’s infatuation could bring Crawford Gowrie ever again into the range and radius of that nub arm which—since Crawford was a Gowrie too—in agreement here with the sheriff he didn’t believe—and he knew now why Lucas had ever left Fraser’s store alive Saturday afternoon, let alone ever got out of the sheriff’s car at the jail: that the Gowries themselves had known he hadn’t done it so they were just marking time waiting for somebody else, maybe Jefferson to drag him out into the street until he remembered—a flash, something like shame—the blue shirt squatting and the stiff awkward single hand trying to brush the wet sand from the dead face and he knew that whatever the furious old man might begin to think tomorrow he held nothing against Lucas then because there was no room for anything but his son)—night, the diningroom perhaps and again seven Gowrie men in the twenty-year womanless house because Forrest had come up from Vicksburg for the funeral yesterday and was probably still there this morning when the sheriff sent word out for old Gowrie to meet him at the church, a lamp burning in the center of the table among the crusted sugarbowls and molasses jugs and ketchup and salt and pepper in the same labeled containers they had come off the store shelf in and the old man sitting at the head of it his one arm lying on the table in front of him and the big pistol under his hand pronouncing judgment sentence doom and execution too on the Gowrie who had cancelled his own Gowriehood with his brother’s blood, then the dark road the truck (not commandeered this time because Vinson had owned one new and big and powerful convertible for either logs or cattle) the same twin driving it probably and the body boomed down onto the runninggear like a log itself with the heavy logchains, fast out of Caledonia out of Beat Four into the dark silent waiting town fast still up the quiet street across the Square to the sheriff’s house and the body tumbled and flung onto the sheriff’s front gallery and perhaps the truck even waiting while the other Gowrie twin rang the doorbell. ‘Stop worrying about Crawford,’ the sheriff said. ‘He aint got anything against me. He votes for me. His trouble right now is having to kill extra folks like Jake Montgomery when all he ever wanted was just to keep Vinson from finding out he had been stealing lumber from him and Uncle Sudley Workitt. Even if he jumps onto the runningboard before I have time to keep up with what’s going on he’ll still have to waste a minute or two trying to get the door open so he can see exactly where Lucas is—provided by that time Lucas is doing good and hard what I told him to do, which I sure hope for his sake he is.’
‘I’m going to,’ Lucas said. ‘But if I just had my——’
‘Yes,’ his uncle said in the harsh voice: ‘Provided he’s there.’
The sheriff sighed. ‘You sent the message.’
‘What message I could,’ his uncle said. ‘However I could. A message making an assignation between a murderer and a policeman, that whoever finally delivers it to the murderer wont even know was intended for the murderer, that the murderer himself will not only believe he wasn’t intended to get it but that it’s true.’
‘Well,’ the sheriff said, ‘he’ll either get it or he wont get it and he’ll either believe it or he wont believe it and he’ll either be waiting for us in Whiteleaf bottom or he wont and if he aint me and Lucas will go on to the high way and come back to town.’ He raced the engine let it idle again; now he turned on the lights. ‘But he may be there. I sent a message too.’
‘All right,’ his uncle said. ‘Why is that, Mr Bones?’
‘I got the mayor to excuse Willy Ingrum so he could go out and set up with Vinson again tonight and before Willy left I told him in confidence I was going to run Lucas over to Hollymount tonight through the old Whiteleaf cutoff so Lucas can testify tomorrow at Jake Montgomery’s inquest and reminded Willy that they aint finished the Whiteleaf fill yet and cars have to cross it in low gear and told him to be sure not to mention it to anybody.’
‘Oh,’ his uncle said, not quite turning the door loose yet. ‘No matter who might have claimed Jake Montgomery alive he belongs to Yoknapatawpha County now.—But then,’ he said briskly, turning the door loose now, ‘we’re after just a murderer, not a lawyer.—All right,’ he said. ‘Why dont you get started?’
‘Yes,’ the sheriff said. ‘You go on to your office and watch out for Miss Eunice. Willy may have passed her on the street too and if he did she might still beat us to Whiteleaf bridge in that pickup.’
Then into the Square this time to cross it catacornered to
