“You ain’t going to give hit back to me?” he said.
“You was the one that said to let’s go back to where we started,” Mrs. Hait said.
“Fo God you wuz, en dat’s de fack,” old Het said. Snopes mused upon the fire; he spoke in a tone of musing and amazed despair:
“I go to the worry and the risk and the agoment for years and years and I get sixty dollars. And you, one time, without no trouble and no risk, without even knowing you are going to git it, git eighty-five hundred dollars.
I never begrudged hit to you; can’t nere a man say I did, even if hit did seem a little strange that you should git it all when he wasn’t working for you and you never even knowed where he was at and what doing; that all you done to git it was to be married to him. And now, after all these ten years of not begrudging you hit, you taken the best mule I had and you ain’t even going to pay me ten dollars for hit. Hit ain’t right. Hit ain’t justice.”
“You got de mule back, en you ain’t satisfried yit,” old Het said. “Whut does you want?” Now Snopes looked at Mrs. Hait.
“For the last time I ask hit,” he said. “Will you or won’t you give hit back?”
“Give what back?” Mrs. Hait said. Snopes turned. He stumbled over something — it was old Het’s shopping-bag — and recovered and went on. They could see him in silhouette, as though framed by the two blackened chimneys against the dying west; they saw him fling up both clenched hands in a gesture almost Gallic, of resignation and impotent despair. Then he was gone. Old Het was watching Mrs. Hait.
“Honey,” she said. “Whut did you do wid de mule?” Mrs. Hait leaned forward to the fire. On her plate lay a stale biscuit. She lifted the skillet and poured over the biscuit the grease in which the ham had cooked.
“I shot it,” she said.
“You which?” old Het said. Mrs. Hait began to eat the biscuit. “Well,” old Het said, happily, “de mule burnt de house en you shot de mule. Dat’s whut I calls justice.” It was getting dark fast now, and before her was still the three-mile walk to the poorhouse. But the dark would last a long time in January, and the poorhouse too would not move at once.
She sighed with weary and happy relaxation. “Gentlemen, hush! Ain’t we had a day!”
The End
