All that was known of him was known on hearsay, and that not his own; it was not even known what his exact relation to Varner and the store was, whether clerk, partner or what. He had been sitting in his usual chair, chewing and whittling, while Suratt was getting his information about the goats.
“He come out here last night and bought all I had,” the goat owner said.
“You mean, he come out here after dark?”
“About nine o’clock it was. I reckon he couldn’t leave the store sooner.”
“Sho,” Suratt said. “I reckon not.” The second goat owner lived four miles away. Suratt drove it in thirty-two minutes. “I come out to see if you sold your goats at ten o’clock last night, or was it half-past ten?”
“Why, yes,” the man said. “It was along about midnight when Flem got here. How did you know?”
“I knowed I had the best team,” Suratt said. “That’s how. Good-by.”
“What’s your hurry? I got a couple of shotes I might sell.”
“Sho, now,” Suratt said. “They wouldn’t do me no good. Soon as they belonged to me they would get elephant-sized overnight, and bust. This here country’s too rich for me.”
He did not call on the other goat owner at all. He returned to Jefferson without passing Varner’s store. Three miles from town, a single goat balanced with somnolent precariousness upon the roof of a barn. Beside the fence a small boy in overalls watched Suratt draw up and stop.
“What did Flem Snopes offer you for that goat, bud?” Suratt said.
“Sir?” the boy said.
Suratt drove on. Three days later Snopes gave Suratt twenty-one dollars for the contract for which Suratt had paid twenty. He put the twenty dollars away in a tobacco sack and held the other dollar in his hand. He chucked it, caught it, the squatting men along the wall watching him. Snopes had sat again, whittling.
“Well, at least I ain’t skunked.” Suratt said. The others guffawed, save Snopes. Suratt looked about at them, bleak, sardonic, humorous too. Two children, a boy and a girl, mounted the steps, carrying a basket. Suratt gave them the dollar. “Here, chillens,” he said. “Here’s something Mr. Snopes sent you.”
It was three years after that when Suratt learned that Snopes had bought the Old Frenchman place from Varner. Suratt knew the place. He knew it better than anyone suspected. Perhaps once a year he drove three or four miles out of his way to pass the place, entering from the back. Why he took that precaution he could not have said; he probably would have believed it was not to be seen doing something by which he had no expectation of gaining anything.
Once a year he halted his buckboard before the house and sat in the buckboard to contemplate the austere skeleton somnolent in the summer sunlight, a little sinister, thinking of the generations of men who had dug for gold there, contemplating the inscrutable desolation of cedar and brier and crapemyrtle and calycanthus gone lush and wild, sensing out of the sunny and sinister silence the ancient spent and hopeful lusts, the optimism, the effluvium of the defunct greed and despair, the spent and secret nocturnal sweat left upon the place by men as quiet now as the man who had unwittingly left behind him a monument more enduring than any obituary either carved or cast.
“It’s bound to be there, somewhere,” Suratt told himself. “It’s bound to.” Then he would drive on to Varner’s store two miles away or to Jefferson twelve miles away, having carried away with him something of that ancient air, that old splendor, confusing it though he did with the fleshly gratifications, the wherewith to possess them, in his peasant’s mind. “It’s bound to. Folks wouldn’t keep on digging for it if it wasn’t there somewhere. It wouldn’t be right to keep on letting them. No, sir.”
When he learned that Snopes had bought the place, Suratt was eating dinner in Jefferson in the restaurant which he and his brother-in-law owned. He sat on a backless and friction-smooth stool, his elbows on the friction-smooth counter, eating steak and potatoes. He became motionless, humped forward in the attitude of eating, the laden knife blade arrested halfway to his mouth, his eyes profoundly concentrant. “If Flem Snopes bought that place, he knows something about it that even Will Varner never knowed. Flem Snopes wouldn’t buy a nickel mousetrap withouten he knowed beforehand it would make him back a dime.”
He reached Varner’s store in mid-afternoon. Snopes was sitting in the chair, chewing, whittling minutely at a piece of soft pine. There was about him, his white shirt, his blue denim trousers braced thick and smooth, a profound inertia impervious to haste like that of a cow, to the necessity for haste like an idol. “That’s what makes me so mad about it,” Suratt told himself. “That he can set still and know what I got to work so hard to find out.
That I got to work fast to learn it and ain’t got time to work fast because I don’t know if I got time to make a mistake by working fast. And him just setting still.” But when he mounted the steps there was upon his brown, lean face its usual expression — alert, quizzical, pleasant, impenetrable and immediate. He greeted in rotation the men who squatted along the wall.
“Well, boys,” he said, “I hear Flem has done bought himself a farm. You fixing to start a goat ranch of your own, Flem? Or maybe it’s just a home for the folks you trims trading.” Then he said, getting his sober and appreciative laugh while Snopes chewed slowly and trimmed minutely at the stick with the profound impenetrability of an idol or a cow, “Well, if Flem knowed any way to make anything offen that old place, he’d be too durn close-mouthed to tell himself about it.”
III
The three men crouched in the weeds along the ditch at the foot of the garden. The shaggy slope rose before them in the darkness to the crest where the broken roof and topless chimneys of the house stood sharp against the sky. In one of the windows a single star showed, like a feeble candle set upon the ledge. They lay in the weeds, listening to the sigh and recover of an invisible shovel halfway up the garden slope.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Suratt whispered. “Didn’t I? Is there e’er a man or woman in this country that don’t know Flem Snopes wouldn’t pay a nickel for nothing if he didn’t know all the time he would make a dime back?”
“How do I know it’s Flem?” the second said. His name was Vernon Tull. He was a well-to-do bachelor.
“Ain’t I watched him?” Suratt said. “Ain’t I laid here in these weeds two nights now and watched him come out here and dig? Ain’t I waited until he left, and crawled up there and found every place where he had done filled the hole up again and smoothed the dirt back to hide it?”
“But how do I know it’s Flem?” Vernon said.
“If you knowed, would you believe it was something buried there?” Suratt whispered. The third man was Henry Armstid. He lay between them, glaring up the dark slope; they could feel him trembling like a dog. Now and then he cursed in a dry whisper. He lived on a small mortgaged farm, which he and his wife worked like two men.
During one season, having lost one of his mules, he and his wife did the plowing, working day about in the second trace beside the other mule. The land was either poor land or they were poor managers.
It made for them less than a bare living, which the wife eked out by weaving by the firelight after dark. She wove fancy objects of colored string saved from packages and of bits of cloth given her by the women in Jefferson, where, in a faded gingham wrapper and sunbonnet and tennis shoes, she peddled the objects from door to door on the market days. They had four children, all under six years of age, the youngest an infant in arms.
They lay there in the weeds, the darkness, hearing the shovel. After a while it ceased. “He’s done found it,” Henry said. He surged suddenly between them. They grasped his arms.
“Stop!” Suratt whispered. “Stop! Help hold him, Vernon.” They held him until he ceased and lay again between them, rigid, glaring, cursing. “He ain’t found it yet.” Suratt whispered.
“He knows it’s there somewhere; he’s done found the paper maybe that tells. But he’s got to hunt for it same as we will. He knows it’s in that ’ere garden, but he’s got to hunt for it same as us. Ain’t we done watched him?” They spoke in hissing whispers, rigid, panting, glaring up the starlit slope.
“How do I know it’s Flem?” Vernon said.
“Just watch, that’s all,” Suratt whispered. They crouched; the shadowy, deliberate motion of the digger mounted the slope. It was the sound made by a lazy man rather than by a cautious one. Suratt gripped Henry. “Watch, now!” he whispered. They breathed with hissing exhalations, in passionate and dying sighs.
Then the man came into sight. For a moment he came into relief against the sky upon the crest of the knoll, as though he had paused there for an instant. “There!” Suratt whispered. “Ain’t that Flem Snopes?
