As soon as Ratliff’s pen stopped Snopes slid the note toward himself and took the pen from Ratliff’s hand and dipped it and signed the note, all in one continuous motion, without even reading it, and shoved the note back to Ratliff and took something from his pocket which Ratliff did not look at yet because he was looking at the signed note, his face perfectly expressionless. He said quietly:
“This is Flem Snopes’ name you have signed.”
“All right,” the other said. “Then what?” Ratliff looked at him. “I see. You want my name on it too, so one of us anyway can’t deny it has been signed. All right.” He took the note and wrote again on it and passed it back. “And here’s your ten dollars. Give me a hand with the machine.” But Ratliff did not move again, because it was not money but another paper which the other had given him, folded, dog-eared and soiled.
Opened, it was another note. It was dated a little more than three years ago, for ten dollars with interest, payable on demand one year after date of execution, to Isaac Snopes or bearer, and signed Flem Snopes. It was indorsed on the back (and Ratliff recognised the same hand which had just signed the two names to the first note) to Mink Snopes by Isaac Snopes (X) his mark, and beneath that and still in the same hand and blotted (or dried at least), to V. K. Ratliff, by Mink Snopes, and Ratliff looked at it quite quietly and quite soberly for almost a minute.
“All right,” the other said. “Me and Flem are his cousins. Our grandma left us all three ten dollars a-piece. We were to get it when the least of us — that was him — come twenty-one. Flem needed some cash and he borrowed his from him on this note. Then he needed some cash a while back and I bought Flem’s note from him. Now if you want to know what colour his eyes are or anything else, you can see for yourself when you get to Frenchman’s Bend. He’s living there now with Flem.”
“I see,” Ratliff said. “Isaac Snopes. He’s twenty-one, you say?”
“How could he have got that ten dollars to lend Flem if he hadn’t been?”
“Sho,” Ratliff said. “Only this here ain’t just exactly a cash ten dollars — —”
“Listen,” the other said. “I don’t know what you are up to and I don’t care. But you ain’t fooling me any more than I am fooling you. If you were not satisfied Flem is going to pay that first note, you wouldn’t have taken it.
And if you ain’t afraid of that one, why are you afraid of this one, for less money, on the same machine, when this one has been collectible by law for more than two years? You take these notes on to him down yonder. Just hand them to him. Then you give him a message from me.
Say ‘From one cousin that’s still scratching dirt to keep alive, to another cousin that’s risen from scratching dirt to owning a herd of cattle and a hay barn. To owning cattle and a hay barn.’ Just say that to him. Better keep on saying it over to yourself on the way down there so you will be sure not to forget it.”
“You don’t need to worry,” Ratliff said. “Does this road lead over to Whiteleaf Bridge?”
He spent that night in the home of kin people (he had been born and raised not far away) and reached Frenchman’s Bend the next afternoon and turned his team into Mrs. Littlejohn’s lot and walked down to the store, on the gallery of which apparently the same men who had been there when he saw it last a year ago were still sitting, including Bookwright. “Well, boys,” he said. “A quorum as usual, I see.”
“Bookwright says it was your pocketbook that Memphis fellow cut outen you,” one said. “No wonder it taken you a year to get over it. I’m just surprised you didn’t die when you reached back and found it gone.”
“That’s when I got up,” Ratliff said. “Otherwise I’d a been laying there yet.” He entered the store. The front of it was empty but he did not pause, not even long enough for his contracted pupils to have adjusted themselves to the obscurity, as he might have been expected to. He went on to the counter, saying pleasantly, “Howdy, Jody. Howdy, Flem. Don’t bother; I’ll get it myself.” Varner, standing beside the desk at which the clerk sat, looked up.
“So you got well, hah,” he said.
“I got busy,” Ratliff said, going behind the counter and opening the store’s single glassed-in case which contained a jumble of shoestrings and combs and tobacco and patent medicines and cheap candy. “Maybe that’s the same thing.” He began to choose sticks of the striped gaudy candy with care, choosing and rejecting. He did not once look toward the rear of the store, where the clerk at the desk had never looked up at all. “You know if Uncle Ben Quick is at home or not?”
“Where would he be?” Varner said. “Only I thought you sold him a sewing-machine two-three years back.”
“Sho,” Ratliff said, rejecting a stick of candy and substituting another one for it. “That’s why I want him to be at home: so his folks can look after him when he faints. I’m going to buy something from him this time.”
“What in thunder has he got you had to come all the way out here to buy?”
“A goat,” Ratliff said. He was counting the candy sticks into a sack now.
“A what?”
“Sho,” Ratliff said. “You wouldn’t think it, would you? But there ain’t another goat in Yoknapatawpha and Grenier County both except them of Uncle Ben’s.”
“No I wouldn’t,” Varner said. “But what’s curiouser than that is what you want with it.”
“What does a fellow want with a goat?” Ratliff said. He moved to the cheese cage and put a coin into the cigar box. “To pull a wagon with. You and Uncle Will and Miss Maggie all well, I hope.”
“Ah-h-h!” Varner said. He turned back to the desk. But Ratliff had not paused to see him do it. He returned to the gallery, offering his candy about.
“Doctor’s orders,” he said. “He’ll probably send me another bill now for ten cents for advising me to eat a nickel’s worth of candy. I don’t mind that though. What I mind is the order he give me to spend so much time setting down.” He looked now, pleasant and quizzical, at the men sitting on the bench. It was fastened against the wall, directly beneath one of the windows which flanked the door, a little longer than the window was wide. After a moment a man on one end of the bench rose.
“All right,” he said. “Come on and set down. Even if you wasn’t sick you will probably spend the next six months pretending like you was.”
“I reckon I got to get something outen that seventy-five dollars it cost me,” Ratliff said. “Even if it ain’t no more than imposing on folks for a while. Only you are fixing to leave me setting in a draft. You folks move down and let me set in the middle.” They moved and made room for him in the middle of the bench. He sat now directly before the open window. He took a stick of his candy himself and began to suck it, speaking in the weak thin penetrating voice of recent illness: “Yes sir.
I’d a been in that bed yet if I hadn’t a found that pocketbook gone. But it wasn’t till I got up that I got sho enough scared. I says to myself, here I been laying on my back for a year now and I bet some enterprising fellow has done come in and flooded not only Frenchman’s Bend but all Yoknapatawpha County too with new sewing-machines. But the Lord was watching out for me. I be dog if I had hardly got outen bed before Him or somebody had done sent me a sheep just like He done to save Isaac in the Book. He sent me a goat-rancher.”
“A what?” one said.
“A goat-rancher. You never heard of a goat-rancher. Because wouldn’t nobody in this country think of it. It would take a Northerner to do that. This here one thought of it away up yonder in Massachusetts or Boston or Ohio and here he come all the way down to Mississippi with his hand grip bulging with greenback money and bought him up two thousand acres of as fine a hill-gully and rabbit-grass land as ever stood on one edge about fifteen miles west of Jefferson and built him a ten foot practically waterproof fence around it and was just getting ready to start getting rich, when he run out of goats.”
“Shucks,” another said. “Never nobody in the world ever run out of goats.”
“Besides,” Bookwright said, suddenly and harshly, “if you want to tell them folks at the blacksmith shop about it too, why don’t we all just move over there.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “You fellows don’t know how good a man’s
