“Hi, Mr. Snopes,” the boy said genially, rising. Snopes strode on and entered the grille and approached the cashier.
“Res,” he said in a voice scarcely articulate, “gimme five dollars.”
“What?’”
“Gimme five dollars,” he repeated hoarsely. The cashier did so, and scribbled a notation and speared it on the file beside him. The boy had come up to the window, but Snopes went on and he followed the man back to the office, his bare feet hissing on the linoleum floor.
“I tried to find you last night,” he explained. “But you wasn’t to home.” Then he looked up and saw Snopes’ face, and after a moment he screamed and broke his trance and turned to flee. But the man caught him by his overalls, and he writhed and twisted, screaming with utter terror as the man dragged him across the office and opened the door that gave upon the vacant lot. Snopes was trying to say something in his mad, shaking voice, but the boy screamed steadily, hanging limp from the other’s hand as he tried to thrust the bill into his pocket. At last he succeeded and released the boy, who staggered away, found his legs and fled.
“What were you whuppin’ that boy, for?” the cashier asked curiously, when Snopes returned to his desk.
“For not minding his own business,” he snapped, opening his ledger again.
As he crossed the now empty square he looked up at the lighted face of the clock. It was ten minutes past eleven. There was no sign of life save the lonely figure of the night marshal in the door of the lighted postoffice lobby.
He left the square and entered a street and went steadily beneath the arc lights, having the street to himself and the regular recapitulation of his striding shadow dogging him out of the darkness, through the pool of the light and into darkness again. He turned a corner and followed a yet quieter street and turned presently from it into a lane between massed banks of honeysuckle higher than his head and sweet on the night air. The lane was dark and he increased his pace.
On either hand the upper stories of houses rose above the honeysuckle, with now and then a lighted window among the dark trees. He kept close to the wall and went swiftly on, passing now between back premises. After a while another house loomed, and a serried row of cedars against the paler sky, and he stole beside a stone wall and so came opposite the garage. He stopped here and sought in the lush grass beneath the wall and stooped and picked up a pole, which he leaned against the wall. With the aid of the pole he mounted on to the wall and thence to the garage roof.
The house was dark, and presently he slid to the ground and stole across the lawn and stopped beneath a window. There was a light somewhere toward the front, but no sound, no movement; and he stood for a time listening, darting his eyes this way and that, covert and ceaseless as a cornered animal.
The screen responded easily to his knife, and he raised it and listened again. Then with a single scrambling motion he was in the room, crouching. Still no sound save the thudding of his heart, and the whole house gave off that unmistakable emanation of temporary desertion. He drew out his handkerchief and wiped his mouth.
The light was in the next room, and he went on. The stairs rose from the end of this room and he scuttled silently across it and mounted swiftly into the upper darkness and groped forward until he touched a wall, then a door. The knob turned in his fingers.
It was the right room; he knew that at once. Her presence was all about him, and for a time his heart thudded and thudded in his throat and fury and lust and despair shook him. He pulled himself together; he must get out quickly, and he groped his way across to the bed and lay face down on it, his head buried in the pillows, writhing and making smothered, animal-like meanings.
But he must get out, and he got up and groped across the room again. What little light there was was behind him now, and instead of finding the door, he blundered into a chest of drawers, and stood there a moment, learning its shape with his hands. Then he opened one of the drawers and fumbled in it. It was filled with a faintly-scented fragility of garments, but he could not distinguish one from another with his hands.
He found a match in his pocket and struck it beneath the shelter of his palm, and by its light he chose one of the soft garments, discovering as the match died a packet of letters in the corner of the drawer. He recognized them at once, dropped the dead match to the floor and took the packet from the drawer and put it in his pocket, and placed the letter he had just written in the drawer, and he stood for a time with the garment crushed against his face; remained so for some time before a sound caused him to jerk his head up, listening.
A car was entering the drive, and as he sprang to the window its lights swept beneath him and fell full upon the open garage, and he crouched at the window in a panic. Then he sped to the door and stopped again, crouching, panting and snarling with indecision.
He ran back to the window. The garage was dark, and two dark figures were approaching the house, and he crouched beside the window until they had passed from sight. Then, still clutching the garment, he climbed out the window and swung from the sill a moment by his hands, and closed his eyes and dropped.
A crash of glass, and he sprawled numbed by shock amid lesser crashes and a burst of stale, dry dust. He had fallen into a shallow flower-pit and he scrambled out and tried to stand and fell again, while nausea swirled in him.
It was his knee, and he lay sick and withdrawn, gasping lips while his trouser leg sopped slowly and warmly, clutching the garment and staring at the dark sky with wide, mad eyes. He heard voices in the house, and a light came on behind the window above him and he turned crawling, and at a scrambling hobble he crossed the lawn and plunged into the shadow of the cedars beside the garage, where he lay watching the window in which a man leaned, peering out; and he moaned a little while his blood ran between his clasped fingers. He drove himself onward again and dragged his bleeding leg up on to the wall, and dropped into the lane and cast the pole down.
A hundred yards further he stopped and drew his torn trousers aside and tried to bandage the gash in his leg. But the handkerchief stained over almost at once and still blood ran and ran down his leg and into his shoe.
Once in the back room of the bank he rolled his trouser leg up and removed the handkerchief and bathed the gash at the lavatory. It still bled, and the sight of his own blood sickened him, and he swayed against the wall, watching his blood.
Then he removed his shirt and bound it as tightly as he could about his leg. He still felt nausea, and he drank long of the tepid water from the tap. Immediately it welled salinely within him and he clung to the lavatory, sweating, trying not to vomit, until the spell passed. His leg felt numb and dead, and he was weak and he wished to lie down, but he dared not.
He entered the grille, his left heel showing a red print at each step. The vault door opened soundlessly; without a light he found the key to the cash box and opened it. He took only bank notes, but he took all he could find. Then he closed the vault and locked it, returned to the lavatory and wetted a towel and removed his heel prints from the linoleum floor.
Then he passed out the back door, threw the latch so it would lock behind him. The clock on the courthouse rang midnight.
In an alley between two negro stores a negro man sat in a battered Ford, waiting. He gave the negro a bill and the negro cranked the engine and came and stared curiously at the bloody cloth beneath his torn trousers. “Whut happened, boss? Y’ain’t hurt, is you?”
“Run into some wire,” he answered shortly: “She’s got plenty gas, ’ain’t she?” The negro said yes, and he drove on. As he crossed the square the marshal, Buck, stood beneath the light before the post office, and Snopes cursed him with silent and bitter derision. He drove on and entered another street and passed from view, and presently the sound of his going had died away.
Part Four
IT WAS A SUNNY Sunday afternoon in October. Narcissa and Bayard had driven off soon after dinner and Miss Jenny and old Bayard were sitting on the sunny end of the veranda when, preceded by Simon, the deputation came solemnly around the corner of the house from the rear. It consisted of six negroes in a catholic variety of Sunday raiment and it was headed by a huge, bull-necked negro in a hind-side-before collar and a Prince Albert coat, with an orotund air
