The broader path led to the postoffice. He entered and waited until the window was clear.
“I’m trying to find a young lady, Miss Temple Drake. I probably just missed her, didn’t I?”
“She’s not here any longer,” the clerk said. “She quit school about two weeks ago.” He was young: a dull, smooth face behind horn glasses, the hair meticulous. After a time Horace heard himself asking quietly:
“You dont know where she went?”
The clerk looked at him. He leaned, lowering his voice: “Are you another detective?”
“Yes,” Horace said, “yes. No matter. It doesn’t matter.” Then he was walking quietly down the steps, into the sunlight again. He stood there while on both sides of him they passed in a steady stream of little colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright heads, with that identical cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in their eyes, above the savage identical paint upon their mouths; like music moving, like honey poured in sunlight, pagan and evanescent and serene, thinly evocative of all lost days and outpaced delights, in the sun. Bright, trembling with heat, it lay in open glades of miragelike glimpses of stone or brick: columns without tops, towers apparently floating above a green cloud in slow ruin against the southwest wind, sinister, imponderable, bland; and he standing there listening to the sweet cloistral bell, thinking Now what? What now? and answering himself: Why, nothing. Nothing. It’s finished.
He returned to the station an hour before the train was due, a filled but unlighted cob pipe in his hand. In the lavatory he saw, scrawled on the foul, stained wall, her pencilled name. Temple Drake. He read it quietly, his head bent, slowly fingering the unlighted pipe.
A half hour before the train came they began to gather, strolling down the hill and gathering along the platform with thin, bright, raucous laughter, their blonde legs monotonous, their bodies moving continually inside their scant garments with that awkward and voluptuous purposelessness of the young.
The return train carried a pullman. He went on through the day coach and entered it. There was only one other occupant: a man in the center of the car, next the window, bareheaded, leaning back, his elbow on the window sill and an unlighted cigar in his ringed hand. When the train drew away, passing the sleek crowds in increasing reverse, the other passenger rose and went forward toward the day coach. He carried an overcoat on his arm, and a soiled, light-colored felt hat.
With the corner of his eye Horace saw his hand fumbling at his breast pocket, and he remarked the severe trim of hair across the man’s vast, soft, white neck. Like with a guillotine, Horace thought, watching the man sidle past the porter in the aisle and vanish, passing out of his sight and his mind in the act of flinging the hat onto his head. The train sped on, swaying on the curves, flashing past an occasional house, through cuts and across valleys where young cotton wheeled slowly in fanlike rows.
The train checked speed; a jerk came back, and four whistle-blasts. The man in the soiled hat entered, taking a cigar from his breast pocket. He came down the aisle swiftly, looking at Horace. He slowed, the cigar in his fingers. The train jolted again. The man flung his hand out and caught the back of the seat facing Horace.
“Aint this Judge Benbow?” he said. Horace looked up into a vast, puffy face without any mark of age or thought whatever—a majestic sweep of flesh on either side of a small blunt nose, like looking out over a mesa, yet withal some indefinable quality of delicate paradox, as though the Creator had completed his joke by lighting the munificent expenditure of putty with something originally intended for some weak, acquisitive creature like a squirrel or a rat. “Dont I address Judge Benbow?” he said, offering his hand. “I’m Senator Snopes, Cla’ence Snopes.”
“Oh,” Horace said, “yes. Thanks,” he said, “but I’m afraid you anticipate a little. Hope, rather.”
The other waved the cigar, the other hand, palm-up, the third finger discolored faintly at the base of a huge ring, in Horace’s face. Horace shook it and freed his hand. “I thought I recognised you when you got on at Oxford,” Snopes said, “but I— May I set down?” he said, already shoving at Horace’s knee with his leg. He flung the overcoat—a shoddy blue garment with a greasy velvet collar—on the seat and sat down as the train stopped.
“Yes, sir, I’m always glad to see any of the boys, any time . . .” He leaned across Horace and peered out the window at a small dingy station with its cryptic bulletin board chalked over, an express truck bearing a wire chicken coop containing two forlorn fowls, three or four men in overalls gone restfully against the wall, chewing. “’Course you aint in my county no longer, but what I say a man’s friends is his friends, whichever way they vote. Because a friend is a friend, and whether he can do anything for me or not . . .” He leaned back, the unlighted cigar in his fingers. “You aint come all the way up from the big town, then.”
“No,” Horace said.
“Any time you’re in Jackson, I’ll be glad to accommodate you as if you was still in my county. Dont no man stay so busy he aint got time for his old friends, what I say. Let’s see, you’re in Kinston, now, aint you? I know your senators. Fine men, both of them, but I just caint call their names.”
“I really couldn’t say, myself,” Horace said. The train started. Snopes leaned into the aisle, looking back. His light gray suit had been pressed but not cleaned. “Well,” he said. He rose and took up the overcoat. “Any time you’re in the city . . . You going to Jefferson, I reckon?”
“Yes,” Horace said.
“I’ll see you again, then.”
“Why not ride back here?” Horace said. “You’ll find it more comfortable.”
“I’m going up and have a smoke,” Snopes said, waving the cigar. “I’ll see you again.”
“You can smoke here. There aren’t any ladies.”
“Sure,” Snopes said. “I’ll see you at Holly Springs.” He went on back toward the day coach and passed out of sight with the cigar in his mouth. Horace remembered him ten years ago as a hulking, dull youth, son of a restaurant-owner, member of a family which had been moving from the Frenchman’s Bend neighborhood into Jefferson for the past twenty years, in sections; a family of enough ramifications to have elected him to the legislature without recourse to a public polling.
He sat quite still, the cold pipe in his hand. He rose and went forward through the day coach, then into the smoker. Snopes was in the aisle, his thigh draped over the arm of a seat where four men sat, using the unlighted cigar to gesture with. Horace caught his eye and beckoned from the vestibule. A moment later Snopes joined him, the overcoat on his arm.
“How are things going at the capital?” Horace said.
Snopes began to speak in his harsh, assertive voice. There emerged gradually a picture of stupid chicanery and petty corruption for stupid and petty ends, conducted principally in hotel rooms into which bellboys whisked with bulging jackets upon discreet flicks of skirts in swift closet doors. “Any time you’re in town,” he said. “I always like to show the boys around. Ask anybody in town; they’ll tell you if it’s there, Cla’ence Snopes’ll know where it is. You got a pretty tough case up home there, what I hear.”
“Cant tell yet,” Horace said. He said: “I stopped off at Oxford today, at the university, speaking to some of my step-daughter’s friends. One of her best friends is no longer in school there. A young lady from Jackson named Temple Drake.”
Snopes was watching him with thick, small, opaque eyes. “Oh, yes; Judge Drake’s gal,” he said. “The one that ran away.”
“Ran away?” Horace said. “Ran back home, did she? What was the trouble? Fail in her work?”
“I dont know. When it come out in the paper folks thought she’d run off with some fellow. One of them companionate marriages.”
“But when she turned up at home, they knew it wasn’t that, I reckon. Well, well, Belle’ll be surprised. What’s she doing now? Running around Jackson, I suppose?”
“She aint there.”
“Not?” Horace said. He could feel the other watching him. “Where is she?”
“Her paw sent her up north somewhere, with an aunt. Michigan. It was in the papers couple days later.”
“Oh,” Horace said. He still held the cold pipe, and he discovered his hand searching his pocket for a match. He drew a deep breath. “That Jackson paper’s a pretty good paper. It’s considered the most reliable paper in the state, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Snopes said. “You was at Oxford trying to locate her?”
“No, no. I just happened to meet a friend of my daughter who told me she had left school. Well, I’ll see you at Holly Springs.”
“Sure,” Snopes said. Horace returned to the pullman and sat down and lit the pipe.
When the train slowed for Holly Springs he went to the vestibule, then he stepped quickly back into the car. Snopes emerged from the day coach as the porter opened the door and swung down the step, stool in hand. Snopes descended. He took something from
