Vernon drew his breath quietly in like a man preparing to sleep. “It’s a fact,” he said. He spoke quietly, soberly. “It’s Flem.”
“Do you believe now?” Suratt whispered. “Do you? Do you believe now?” Between them, Henry lay cursing in a dry whisper. Beneath Vernon’s and Suratt’s arms his arms felt like wire cables vibrating faintly.
“All we got to do,” Suratt said, “is to find where it’s at tomorrow night, and then get it.”
“Tomorrow night, hell!” Henry said. “Let’s get up there now and find it. That’s what we got to do. Before he—”
They argued with him, violent, sibilant, expostulant. They held him flat on the ground between them, cursing. “We got to find where it is the first time and dig it up,” Suratt said. “We got to get Uncle Dick. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see we got to find it the first time? That we can’t be caught looking?”
“We got to get Uncle Dick,” Vernon said. “Hush, Henry. Hush, now.”
They returned the next night with Uncle Dick. When Vernon and Suratt, carrying the second shovel and the pick and half carrying Uncle Dick between them, climbed up out of the ditch at the foot of the garden, they could hear Henry already digging.
After concealing the buckboard in the branch bottom they had had to run to keep even within hearing of Henry, and so Uncle Dick could not yet stand alone. Yet they released him at once, whereupon he sank to the ground at their feet, from where his invisible breathing rose in reedy gasps, and as one Vernon and Suratt glared into the darkness toward the hushed, furious sound of Henry’s shovel.
“We got to make him quit until Uncle Dick’s ready,” Suratt said. They ran toward the sound, shoulder to shoulder in the stumbling dark. Suratt spoke to Henry. Henry did not cease to dig. Suratt grasped at the shovel. Henry whirled, the shovel raised like an ax; they glared at each other, their faces strained with sleeplessness and weariness and lust. It was Suratt’s fourth night without having removed his clothes; Vernon’s and Henry’s second.
“Touch it,” Henry whispered. “Touch it.”
“Wait, Henry,” Suratt said. “Let Uncle Dick find where it’s at.”
“Get away,” Henry said. “I warn you. Get outen my hole.”
Uncle Dick was sitting up when Suratt and Vernon returned running and plunged down beside him and began to scrabble in the dark weeds for the second shovel. Suratt found the pick and learned the blade with his hand in one motion and flung it behind him into the darkness again, and plunged down again just as Vernon found the shovel. They struggled for it, their breathing harsh, mute, repressed. “Leave go,” Suratt whispered. “Leave go.” They clutched the shovel between them. Out of the darkness came the unflagging sound of Henry’s digging.
“Wait,” Uncle Dick said. He got stiffly to his feet — a shriveled little old man in a filthy frock coat, with a long white beard. Between sunup and sundown Suratt, seventy-two hours without having removed his clothes, drove thirty miles to fetch him from where he lived alone in a mud-daubed hut in a cane swamp.
He had no other name, and he antedated all who knew him. He made and sold nostrums and charms, and they said that he ate not only frogs and snakes but bugs as well — anything that he could catch. “Wait,” he said in a reedy, quavering voice. “Ther air anger in the yearth. Ye must make that ’ere un quit a-bruisin’ hit, so the Lord kin show whar hit’s hid at.”
“That’s so,” Suratt said. “It won’t work unless the ground is quiet. I forgot.”
When they approached, Henry stood erect in his pit and threatened them with the shovel and cursed them, but Uncle Dick walked up and touched him.
“Ye kin dig and ye kin dig, young man,” he said. “Fer what’s rendered to the yearth, the yearth will keep withouten the will of the Lord air revealed.”
Henry desisted then and lowered the shovel. Uncle Dick drove them back to the ditch. From his coat he produced a forked peach branch, from the end of which, dangling on a bit of string, swung an empty brass cartridge containing a gold-filled human tooth. He held them there for five minutes, stooping now and then to lay his hand flat on the ground.
Then with the three of them at his heels — Henry rigid, silent; Suratt and Vernon speaking now and then in short, hissing whispers — he went to the fence corner and grasped the two prongs of the branch in his hands and stood there for a moment, muttering to himself.
They moved like a procession, with something at once outrageously pagan and orthodoxly funereal about them, working slowly back and forth across the garden, mounting the slope in overlapping traverses. Near the spot where they had watched the man digging last night Uncle Dick began to slow. The others clumped at his back, breathing with thick, tense breaths. “Tech my elbers,” Uncle Dick said. They did so. Inside his sleeves his arms — arms thin and frail and dead as rotten wood — were jerking a little.
Henry began to curse, pointless. Uncle Dick stopped; when they jarred into him they felt his whole thin body straining. Suratt made a sound with his mouth and touched the twig and found it curved into a rigid down-pointing bar, the string taut as wire. Uncle Dick staggered; his arms sprang free. The twig lay dead at his feet until Henry, digging furiously with his bare hands, flung it away. He was still cursing. He was cursing the ground, the earth.
They got the tools and began to dig, swiftly, hurling the dirt aside, while Uncle Dick, shapeless in his shapeless garment, appeared to muse upon them with detached interest. Suddenly the three of them became utterly still in their attitudes, then they leaped into the hole and struggled silently over something.
“Stop it!” Suratt whispered. “Stop it! Ain’t we all three pardners alike?”
But Henry clung to the object and at last Vernon and Suratt desisted and stood away. Henry was half stooped, clutching the object to his middle, glaring at them.
“Let him keep it,” Vernon said. “Don’t you know that ain’t all? Come here, Uncle Dick.”
Uncle Dick was motionless behind them. His head was turned toward the ditch, toward where they had hidden. “What?” Suratt whispered. They were all three motionless, rigid, stooped a little. “Do you see something? Is it somebody hiding yonder?”
“I feel four bloods lust-running,” Uncle Dick said. “Hit’s four sets of blood here lusting for dross.”
They crouched, rigid. “Well, ain’t it four of us right here?” Vernon said.
“Uncle Dick don’t care nothing about money,” Suratt said. “If it’s somebody hiding there—”
They were running then, the tools clutched, plunging and stumbling down the slope.
“Kill him,” Henry said. “Watch every bush and kill him.”
“No,” Suratt said, “catch him first.”
They halted at the ditch bank. They could hear Henry beating along the ditch. But they found nothing.
“Maybe Uncle Dick never seen nobody,” Vernon said.
“He’s gone, anyway,” Suratt said. “Maybe it—” He ceased. He and Vernon stared at each other; above their held breath they heard the horse. It was going at a gallop, the sound clear but faint, diminishing. Then it ceased. They stared at each other in the darkness, across their breath. “That means we got till daylight,” Suratt said. “Come on.”
Twice more Uncle Dick’s twig sprang and bent; twice more they exhumed small bulging canvas sacks solid and unmistakable even in the dark.
“Now,” Suratt said, “we got a hole apiece and till daylight to do it in. Dig, boys.”
When the east began to gray they had found nothing more. At last they made Henry see reason and quit, and they filled up the holes and removed the traces of their labor. They opened the bags in the gray light. Vernon’s and Suratt’s contained each twenty-five silver dollars. Henry wouldn’t tell what his contained. He crouched over it some distance away, his back toward them. Vernon and Suratt closed the sacks and looked at each other quietly, their blood cool now with weariness, with sleeplessness and fatigue.
“We got to buy it,” Suratt said. “We got to buy it tomorrow.”
“You mean today,” Vernon said. Beneath a tree, in the wan light, Uncle Dick lay sleeping. He slept quiet as a child, not even snoring.
“That’s right,” Suratt said. “It’s today now.”
IV
When at noon the next day Suratt drove up to the store, there was a stranger squatting among the others on the porch. His name was Eustace Grimm, from the adjoining county — a youngish man, also in overalls, with a snuff stick in his mouth. Snopes sat in the tilted chair in the doorway, whittling.
Suratt descended and tethered his team. “Morning, gentlemen,” he said.
They replied. “Be durn if you don’t look like you ain’t been to bed in a week, Suratt,” one said. “What you up to now? Lon Quick said his boy seen your team hid out in the bottom below Armstid’s two mornings ago, but I told him I didn’t reckon them horses had done nothing to hide from. I wasn’t so sho about you, I told him.”
Suratt joined the laugh readily. “I reckon not. I reckon I’m still smart enough to not be caught by nobody around here except Flem Snopes. ‘Course I take a back seat for Flem.” He mounted the steps. Snopes had not looked up. Suratt looked briefly from face to face, his gaze pausing for an instant at Eustace Grimm, then going on. “To tell the truth, I am getting pretty
