‘Maybe it was a pleasant square,’ he said. ‘For the pleasure of being able to move not only two squares at once but in two directions at once.’
‘Or indecision, since he can,’ his uncle said. ‘And almost fatal for this one, because he must. At least, he’d certainly better. His threat and his charm are in his capacity for movement. This time, he forgot that his safety lay in it too.’ But that was tomorrow. Right now he couldn’t even keep up with what he was watching. He and Mr. McCallum just stood there looking and hearing while his uncle and Captain Gualdres stood facing each other, rapping out the brittle splattering syllables, until at last Captain Gualdres made a motion, not quite a shrug and not quite a salute, and his uncle turned to Mr. McCallum.
‘What about it, Rafe?’ his uncle said. Will you walk over there and open that door?’
‘I reckon so,’ Mr. McCallum said. ‘But I don’t see—’
‘I’ve made a bet with Captain Gualdres,’ his uncle said. ‘If you wont do it, I’ll have to.’
Wait,’ Captain Gualdres said. ‘I think it is for me to—’
‘You wait yourself, Mister Captain,’ Mr. McCallum said. He shifted the heavy stick to the other hand and stood looking across the white fence into the empty moon-filled lot, at the silent white wall of the stable with its single black square of half-door, for almost a half minute. Then he shifted the cudgel back to the other hand and climbed up onto the fence and put one leg over it and turned his head and looked back down at Captain Gualdres. ‘I just found out what all this is about,’ he said. ‘And so will you in a minute.’
Then they watched him climb, still without haste, down into the paddock: a compact light-poised deliberate man with about him something of the same aura, sense of horses which Captain Gualdres had, walking steadily on in the moonlight, toward the blank white stable and the single black square of emptiness, of utter of absolute silence, in the center of it, reaching the stable at last and lifting the heavy wrought-iron latch and opening the closed lower half of the door; only then moving with unbelievable speed, jerking the half-door quickly back and out on its hinges and already moving with it, swinging it all the way back to the wall until he stood slightly behind it, between it and the wall, the heavy cudgel clutched in his other hand; swinging the door back barely an instant before the stallion, itself the same color as the inky blackness of the inside, exploded out into the moonlight as if it had been tied to the door itself with a rope no longer than a watch-chain.
It came out screaming. It looked tremendous, airborne even: a furious mass the color of doom or midnight in a moonward swirling of mane and tail like black flames, looking not merely like death because death is stasis, but demoniac: the lost brute forever unregenerate, bursting out into the moonlight, screaming, galloping in a short rushing circle while it flung its head this way and that, searching for the man until it saw Mr. McCallum at last and quit screaming and rushed toward him, not recognising him until he stepped out from the wall and shouted at it.
Then it stopped, its fore feet bunched and planted, its body bunching against them, until Mr. McCallum, again with that unbelievable quickness, walked to it and swung the cudgel with all his strength across its face, and it screamed again and whirled, spun, already galloping, and Mr. McCallum turned and walked toward the fence. He didn’t run: he walked, and although the horse galloped two complete circles around him before he reached the fence and climbed it, it never quite threatened him again.
And during another time Captain Gualdres didn’t move, metal-hard, inviolable, not even pale. Then Captain Gualdres turned to his uncle; it was in Spanish still, but now he could follow it.
‘I have lost,’ Captain Gualdres said.
‘Not lost,’ his uncle said.
‘Truth,’ Captain Gualdres said. ‘Not lost.’ Then Captain Gualdres said, ‘Thanks.’
IV.
Then Saturday, no school: the whole unchallengeable day in which to have sat around the office and attended the little rest of it, the cleaning up; the what little rest of it remained, or so he thought, who even at that late hour of December afternoon had not yet known his own capacity to be astonished and amazed.
He hadn’t even really believed that Max Harriss would come back from Memphis. Mr. Markey, in Memphis, hadn’t believed it either apparently.
‘Memphis city police cant transport a prisoner back to Mississippi,’ Mr. Markey said. ‘You know that. Your sheriff will have to send someone—’
‘He’s not a prisoner,’ his uncle said. ‘Tell him that. Tell him I just want him to come back here and talk to me.’
Then for almost half a minute there was nothing on the telephone at all except the faint hum of the distant power which kept the line alive, which was costing somebody money whether voices went over it or not. Then Mr. Markey said:
‘If I gave him that message and told him he could go, would you really expect to see him again?’
‘Give him the message,’ his uncle said. ‘Tell him I want him to come back here and talk to me.’
And Max Harriss came back. He arrived just ahead of the others, just far enough ahead of them to have got through the anteroom and into the office while the other two were still mounting the stairs; and he, Charles, shut the anteroom door and Max stood in front of it, watching his uncle, delicate and young and expensive-looking still and a little tired and strained-looking too as if he hadn’t slept much last night, except for his eyes.
They didn’t look young or tired either, watching his uncle exactly as they had looked at him night before last; looking anything but all right by a good long shot. But at least there wasn’t anything cringing in them, whatever else there might he.
‘Sit down,’ his uncle said.
‘Thanks,’ Max said, immediate and harsh, not contemptuous: just final, immediate, negative. But he moved in the next second. He approached the desk and began to peer this way and that about the office in burlesque exaggeration. ‘I’m looking for Hamp Killegrew,’ he said. ‘Or maybe it’s even the sheriff himself. Where’ve you got him hidden? in the water-cooler? If that’s where you put either one of them, they are dead of shock by now.’
But still his uncle didn’t answer, until he, Charles, looked at his uncle too. His uncle wasn’t even looking at Max. He had even turned the swivel chair sideways and was looking out the window, motionless except for the almost infinitesimal stroking of the thumb of the hand which held it, on the bowl of the cold cob pipe.
Then Max stopped that too and stood looking down at his uncle’s profile with the hard flat eyes in which there was little of youth or peace or anything else that should have been in them.
‘All right,’ Max said. ‘You couldn’t prove an intention, design. All that you can prove, you wont even have to.
I already admit it. I affirm it. I bought a horse and turned it into a private stable on my mother’s property. I know a little law too, you see. I probably know just exactly the minor and incorrect amount of it to make a first-class small-town Mississippi lawyer. Maybe even a state legislator, though probably a little too much ever to be elected governor.’
Still his uncle didn’t move, except for the thumb. ‘I’d sit down, if I were you,’ he said.
‘You’d do more than that right now if you were me,’ Max said. ‘Well?’
Now his uncle moved. He swung the chair around with the pressure of his knee against the desk, until he faced Max.
‘I don’t need to prove it,’ his uncle said. ‘Because you are not going to deny it.’
‘No,’ Max said. He said it immediately, contemptuously. It wasn’t even violent. ‘I don’t deny it. So what? Where’s your sheriff?’
His uncle watched Max. Then he put the stem of the cold pipe into his mouth and drew at it as if it had fire and tobacco in it; he spoke in a voice mild and even almost inconsequential:
‘I suppose that when Mr. McCallum brought the horse out and you had him put it into Captain Gualdres’ private stable, you told the grooms and the other Negroes that Captain Gualdres had bought it himself and wanted it let alone. Which wasn’t hard for them to believe, since Captain Gualdres had already bought one horse which he wouldn’t let anyone else touch.’
But Max no more answered that than he had answered the other night when his uncle asked him about not being registered for draft. There was not even contempt in his face while he waited for his uncle to go on.
‘All right,’ his uncle said. When are Captain Gualdres and your sister to be married?’
And that was when he, Charles, found out what else it was in the flat hard eyes. It was despair and grief. Because he watched the rage blaze up and burn, scour, sear them out until there was nothing left in them but the rage and the hatred, and he thought how maybe his uncle was right and there are more ignoble things than hatred and how if you do hate anyone, it must surely be the man you have failed to kill even if he doesn’t know it.
‘I’ve been doing some
