“I cant. He wants to go home too. I must get him home too.” He stooped; with his single hand he spread the cloak awkwardly, covering the Negro closer with it. He heard the boy creep away, but he did not look. After a while he shook the Negro. “Jubal,” he said.
The Negro groaned; he turned heavily, sleeping again. Weddel squatted above him as the boy had done. “I thought that I had lost it for good,” he said. “ — The peace and the quiet; the power to be afraid again.”
XI
The cabin was gaunt and bleak in the thick cold dawn when the two horses passed out the sagging gate and into the churned road, the Negro on the Thoroughbred, Weddel on the sorrel. The Negro was shivering. He sat hunched and high, with updrawn knees, his face almost invisible in the oilcloth hood.
“I tole you dey wuz fixing to pizen us wid dat stuff,” he said. “I tole you. Hillbilly rednecks. En you not only let um pizen me, you fotch me de pizen wid yo own hand. O Lawd, O Lawd! If we ever does git home.”
Weddel looked back at the cabin, at the weathered, blank house where there was no sign of any life, not even smoke. “She has a young man, I suppose — a beau.” He spoke aloud, musing, quizzical. “And that boy. Hule.
He said to come within sight of a laurel copse where the road disappears, and take a path to the left. He said we must not pass that copse.”
“Who says which?” the Negro said. “I aint going nowhere. I going back to dat loft en lay down.”
“All right,” Weddel said. “Get down.”
“Git down?”
“I’ll need both horses. You can walk on when you are through sleeping.”
“I ghy tell yo maw,” the Negro said. “I ghy tell um. Ghy tell how after four years you aint got no more sense than to not know a Yankee when you seed um. To stay de night wid Yankees en let um pizen one of Mistis’ niggers. I ghy tell um.”
“I thought you were going to stay here,” Weddel said. He was shivering too. “Yet I am not cold,” he said. “I am not cold.”
“Stay here? Me? How in de world you ever git home widout me? Whut I tell Mistis when I come in widout you en she ax me whar you is?”
“Come,” Weddel said. He lifted the sorrel into motion. He looked quietly back at the house, then rode on. Behind him on the Thoroughbred the Negro muttered and mumbled to himself in woebegone singsong. The road, the long hill which yesterday they had toiled up, descended now. It was muddy, rockchurned, scarred across the barren and rocky land beneath the dissolving sky, jolting downward to where the pines and laurel began. After a while the cabin had disappeared.
“And so I am running away,” Weddel said. “When I get home I shall not be very proud of this. Yes, I will. It means that I am still alive. Still alive, since I still know fear and desire. Since life is an affirmation of the past and a promise to the future. So I am still alive — Ah.” It was the laurel copse.
About three hundred yards ahead it seemed to have sprung motionless and darkly secret in the air which of itself was mostly water. He drew rein sharply, the Negro, hunched, moaning, his face completely hidden, overriding him unawares until the Thoroughbred stopped of its own accord.
“But I dont see any path—” Weddel said; then a figure emerged from the copse, running toward them. Weddel thrust the reins beneath his groin and withdrew his hand inside his cloak. Then he saw that it was the boy. He came up trotting. His face was white, strained, his eyes quite grave.
“It’s right yonder,” he said.
“Thank you,” Weddel said. “It was kind of you to come and show us, though we could have found it, I imagine.”
“Yes,” the boy said as though he had not heard. He had already taken the sorrel’s bridle. “Right tother of the brush. You cant see hit until you are in hit.”
“In whut?” the Negro said. “I ghy tell um. After four years you aint got no more sense. . . .”
“Hush,” Weddel said. He said to the boy, “I am obliged to you. You’ll have to take that in lieu of anything better. And now you get on back home. We can find the path. We will be all right now.”
“They know the path too,” the boy said. He drew the sorrel forward. “Come on.”
“Wait,” Weddel said, drawing the sorrel up. The boy still tugged at the bridle, looking on ahead toward the copse. “So we have one guess and they have one guess. Is that it?”
“Damn you to hell, come on!” the boy said, in a kind of thin frenzy. “I am sick of hit. Sick of hit.”
“Well,” Weddel said. He looked about, quizzical, sardonic, with his gaunt, weary, wasted face. “But I must move. I cant stay here, not even if I had a house, a roof to live under. So I have to choose between three things. That’s what throws a man off — that extra alternative. Just when he has come to realize that living consists in choosing wrongly between two alternatives, to have to choose among three. You go back home.”
The boy turned and looked up at him. “We’d work. We could go back to the house now, since paw and Vatch are . . . We could ride down the mou-tin, two on one horse and two on tother. We could go back to the valley and get married at Mayesfield. We would not shame you.”
“But she has a young man, hasn’t she? Somebody that waits for her at church on Sunday and walks home and takes Sunday dinner, and maybe fights the other young men because of her?”
“You wont take us, then?”
“No. You go back home.”
For a while the boy stood, holding the bridle, his face lowered. Then he turned; he said quietly: “Come on, then. We got to hurry.”
“Wait,” Weddel said; “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going a piece with you. Come on.” He dragged the sorrel forward, toward the roadside.
“Here,” Weddel said, “you go on back home. The war is over now. Vatch knows that.”
The boy did not answer. He led the sorrel into the underbrush. The Thoroughbred hung back. “Whoa, you Caesar!” the Negro said. “Wait, Marse Soshay. I aint gwine ride down no. . . .”
The boy looked over his shoulder without stopping. “You keep back there,” he said. “You keep where you are.”
The path was a faint scar, doubling and twisting among the brush. “I see it now,” Weddel said. “You go back.”
“I’ll go a piece with you,” the boy said; so quietly that Weddel discovered that he had been holding his breath, in a taut, strained alertness. He breathed again, while the sorrel jolted stiffly downward beneath him. “Nonsense,” he thought. “He will have me playing Indian also in five minutes more.
I had wanted to recover the power to be afraid, but I seem to have outdone myself.” The path widened; the Thoroughbred came alongside, the boy walking between them; again he looked at the Negro.
“You keep back, I tell you,” he said.
“Why back?” Weddel said. He looked at the boy’s wan, strained face; he thought swiftly, “I dont know whether I am playing Indian or not.” He said aloud: “Why must he keep back?”
The boy looked at Weddel; he stopped, pulling the sorrel up. “We’d work,” he said. “We wouldn’t shame you.”
Weddel’s face was now as sober as the boy’s. They looked at one another. “Do you think we have guessed wrong? We had to guess. We had to guess one out of three.”
Again it was as if the boy had not heard him. “You wont think hit is me? You swear hit?”
“Yes. I swear it.” He spoke quietly, watching the boy; they spoke now as two men or two children. “What do you think we ought to do?”
“Turn back. They will be gone now. We could . . .” He drew back on the bridle; again the Thoroughbred came abreast and forged ahead.
“You mean, it could be along here?” Weddel said. Suddenly he spurred the sorrel, jerking the clinging boy forward. “Let go,” he said. The boy held onto the bridle, swept forward until the two horses were again abreast. On the Thoroughbred the Negro perched, highkneed, his mouth still talking, flobbed down with ready speech, easy and worn with talk like an old shoe with walking.
“I done tole him en tole him,” the Negro said.
“Let go!” Weddel said, spurring the sorrel, forcing its shoulder into the boy. “Let go!”
“You wont turn back?” the boy said. “You wont?”
“Let go!” Weddel said. His teeth showed a little beneath his mustache; he lifted the sorrel bodily with the spurs. The boy let go of the bridle and ducked beneath the Thoroughbred’s neck; Weddel, glancing back as the sorrel leaped, saw the boy surge upward and on to the Thoroughbred’s back, shoving the Negro back along its spine until he vanished.
“They think you will be riding the good horse,” the boy said in a thin, panting voice; “I told them
