In fact, he hadn’t even got as far as affirming, accepting that there was a horse in it, because at that moment he saw Mr. Rafe McCallum himself coming up the alley and he crossed the street to speak to him because he and his uncle would go out to the McCallum farm fifteen miles from town to shoot quail in season, and, until they enlisted last summer, he used to go out there by himself to spend the night in the woods or the creek bottom running fox or coon with the twin McCallum nephews.
So he recognized the horse, not by seeing it, because he had never seen it, but by seeing Mr. McCallum. Because everybody in the county knew -the horse or knew about it — a stallion of first blood and pedigree hut absolutely worthless; they — the county — said that this was the only time in his life that Mr. McCallum had ever been beaten in a horse-trade, even if had bought this one with tobacco-or soap-coupons.
It had been ruined either as a colt or a young horse, probably by some owner who had tried to break its spirit by fear or violence. Only its spirit had refused to break, so that all it had got from whatever the experience had been, was a hatred for anything walking upright on two legs, something like that abhorrence and rage and desire to destroy it which some humans feel for even harmless snakes.
It was unrideable and unmanageable even for breeding. It was said to have killed two men who just happened to get on the same side of a fence with it. Though this was not very probable, or the horse would have been destroyed. But Mr. McCallum was supposed to have bought it because its owner wanted to destroy it. Or maybe he believed he could tame it. Anyway, he always denied that it had ever killed anyone, so at least he must have thought he could sell it, since no horse was ever quite as bad as the man who bought it claimed, or as good as the man who sold it contended.
But Mr. McCallum knew that it could kill a man, and the county believed that he thought it would. For although he would go into the lot where it was (though never into a stall or pen where it would be cornered), he would never let anyone else do it; and it was said that once a man had offered to buy it from him, but he had refused. Which had an apocryphal sound too, since Mr. McCallum said himself that he would sell anything which couldn’t stand up on its hind legs and call his name, because that was his business.
So here was the horse roped and chained and blanketed into a horse-box fifteen miles from its home paddock, and so he said to Mr. McCallum:
‘You finally sold it.’
‘I hope so,’ Mr. McCallum said. ‘A horse aint ever sold until the new stall door is shut behind it though. Sometimes not even then.’
‘But at least it’s on the way,’ he said.
‘At least it’s on the way,’ Mr. McCallum said.
Which didn’t mean much, didn’t mean anything in fact except that Mr. McCallum would have to hurry like billy-O just to prove he hadn’t even sold it. Which would be in the dark and a good while into it: four oclock now, and anyone who had engaged to buy that horse would have to have lived a long way off not to have heard about it.
Then he thought how anybody who bought that horse would live too far away to be reached in just one daylight even if it were the twenty-second of June, let alone the fifth of December, so maybe it didn’t matter what time Mr. McCallum started, and so he went on to his uncle’s office and that was all except the postscript and even that was not too long away; his uncle had the practice brief all laid out for him on the desk and the list of references beside it and he got to work and it seemed almost at once when the light began to fail and he switched on the desk lamp and then the telephone rang.
The girl’s voice was already talking when he lifted the receiver and it never did stop, so that it was a second or two before he could recognize it:
‘Hello! Hello! Mr. Stevens! He was here! Nobody even knew it!
He just left! They called me from the garage and I ran down and he was already in the car with the engine running and he said if you want to see him, to be on your corner in five minutes; he said he wouldn’t be able to come up to your office, for you to be on the corner in five minutes if you want to see him, otherwise you can call and maybe get an appointment with him at the Greenbury hotel tomorrow—’ and still talking when his uncle came in and took the receiver and listened for a moment, and probably still talking even after his uncle put the receiver back up.
‘Five minutes?’ his uncle said. ‘Six miles?’
‘You never saw him drive,’ he said. ‘He’s probably already crossing the Square.’
But that would be a little too fast even for that one. He and his uncle went down to the street and stood on the corner in the cold dusk for what seemed like ten minutes to him, until at last he began to believe that here was some more of the same hurrah and hokum and uproar they had been in the middle of or at least on the edge of, since last night, in which the last thing they would expect would be not only what they might have expected, but what they had been warned to look for.
But they did see him. They heard the car, the horn: the heel of the Harriss boy’s palm on the button or maybe he had simply reached inside the dash or the hood and jerked the ground connection loose, and probably if the boy was thinking about anything at all then, he was being sorry he didn’t have an old-time muffler cutout.
And he, Charles, thought of Hampton Killegrew, the night marshal, running out of the pool room or the Allnite Inn or wherever he would be at this time and already too late too, the car howling and wailing up the street toward the Square with all the lights burning, parking driving and fog, then blatting and crashing between the brick walls and the street narrowed into the Square; and afterward he remembered a cat leaping in silhouette across the rushing lights, looking ten feet long one second then the next one high and narrow as a fleeing fence post.
But luckily there wasn’t anybody else but him and his uncle at the crossing and the boy saw them then, the lights swinging down at them as if he was going to drive right up onto the curb. Then they swung away at the last second and he could have touched the boy — the face, the teeth glinting in it — as the car shot past into the Square and crossed it and slewed skidding, the tires squealing against the pavement, into the Memphis highway, the horn and the tires and the engine growing fainter and fainter, until at last he and his uncle could even hear Hampton Killegrew running toward the corner cursing and yelling.
‘Did you pull the door to?’ his uncle said.
‘Yes sir,’ he said.
‘Then let’s go home to supper,’ his uncle said. ‘You can stop at the telegraph office on the way.’
So he stopped in the telegraph office and sent the wire to Mr. Markey exactly as his uncle had worded it:
He is now Greenbury tonight use police per request Jefferson chief if necessary
and came out and overtook his uncle at the next corner.
‘Why the police now?’ he said. ‘I thought you said—’
‘To escort him on through Memphis toward wherever he is going,’ his uncle said. ‘In any direction except back here.’
‘But why is he going anywhere?’ he said. ‘You said last night that the last place he will want to be is out of sight; the last place he will want to be is where nobody can see him, until after his joke—’
‘Then I was wrong,’ his uncle said. ‘I maligned him too. Apparently I attributed to nineteen not only more ingenuity than it is capable of, but even malice too. Come along. You’re late. You’ve not only got to eat supper, you’ve got to get back to town.’
‘To the office?’ he said. ‘The telephone? Cant they call you at home? Besides, if he’s not even going to stop in Memphis, what will they have to telephone you about—’
‘No,’ his uncle said. To the picture show. And before you can ask that, the reason is, that’s the one place where nobody nineteen or twenty-one named Harriss nor going on eighteen named Mallison either, can talk to me. I’m going to work. I shall spend the evening in the company of scoundrels and felons who have not only the courage of their evil, but the competence for it too.’
He knew what that meant: the Translation. So he didn’t even go to his uncle’s sittingroom. And his uncle left the supper table first, so he didn’t see
