They does things different from us. If a fellow in this country was to set up a goat-ranch, he would do it purely and simply because he had too many goats already. He would just declare his roof or his front porch or his parlour or wherever it was he couldn’t keep the goats out of a goat-ranch and let it go at that. But a Northerner don’t do it that way.
When he does something, he does it with a organised syndicate and a book of printed rules and a gold-filled diploma from the Secretary of State at Jackson saying for all men to know by these presents, greeting, that them twenty thousand goats or whatever it is, is goats. He don’t start off with goats or a piece of land either. He starts off with a piece of paper and a pencil and measures it all down setting in the library — so many goats to so many acres and so much fence to hold them.
Then he writes off to Jackson and gets his diploma for that much land and fence and goats and he buys the land first so he can have something to build the fence on, and he builds the fence around it so nothing can’t get outen it, and then he goes out to buy some things not to get outen the fence. So everything was going just fine at first.
He picked out land that even the Lord hadn’t never thought about starting a goat-ranch on and bought it without hardly no trouble at all except finding the folks it belonged to and making them understand it was actual money he was trying to give them, and that fence practically taken care of itself because he could set in one place in the middle of it and pay out the money for it.
And then he found he had done run out of goats. He combed this country up and down and backwards and forwards to find the right number of goats to keep that gold diploma from telling him to his face he was lying. But he couldn’t do it. In spite of all he could do, he still lacked fifty goats to take care of the rest of that fence. So now it ain’t a goat-ranch; it’s a insolvency. He’s either got to send that diploma back, or get them fifty goats from somewhere.
So here he is, done come all the way down here from Boston, Maine, and paid for two thousand acres of land and built forty-four thousand feet of fence around it, and now the whole blame pro-jeck is hung up on that passel of goats of Uncle Ben Quick’s because they ain’t another goat betwixt Jackson and the Tennessee line apparently.”
“How do you know?” one said.
“Do you reckon I’d a got up outen bed and come all the way out here if I hadn’t?” Ratliff said.
“Then you better get in that buckboard right now and go and make yourself sure,” Bookwright said. He was sitting against a gallery post, facing the window at Ratliff’s back. Ratliff looked at him for a moment, pleasant and inscrutable behind his faint constant humorous mask.
“Sho,” he said. “He’s had them goats a good while now. I reckon he’ll be still telling me I can’t do this and must do that for the next six months, not to mention sending me bills for it” — changing the subject so smoothly and completely that, as they realised later, it was as if he had suddenly produced a signboard with Hush in red letters on it, glancing easily and pleasantly upward as Varner and Snopes came out. Snopes did not speak. He went on across the gallery and descended the steps. Varner locked the door. “Ain’t you closing early, Jody?” Ratliff said.
“That depends on what you call late,” Varner said shortly. He went on after the clerk.
“Maybe it is getting toward supper-time,” Ratliff said.
“Then if I was you I’d go eat it and then go and buy my goats,” Bookwright said.
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Uncle Ben might have a extra dozen or so by tomorrow. Howsomedever — —” He rose and buttoned the overcoat about him.
“Go buy your goats first,” Bookwright said. Again Ratliff looked at him, pleasant, impenetrable. He looked at the others. None of them were looking at him.
“I figure I can wait,” he said. “Any of you fellows eating at Mrs. Littlejohn’s?” Then he said, “What’s that?” and the others saw what he was looking at — the figure of a grown man but barefoot and in scant faded overalls which would have been about right for a fourteen-year-old boy, passing in the road below the gallery, dragging behind him on a string a wooden block with two snuff tins attached to its upper side, watching over his shoulder with complete absorption the dust it raised. As he passed the gallery he looked up and Ratliff saw the face too — the pale eyes which seemed to have no vision in them at all, the open drooling mouth encircled by a light fuzz of golden virgin beard.
“Another one of them,” Bookwright said, in that harsh short voice. Ratliff watched the creature as it went on — the thick thighs about to burst from the overalls, the mowing head turned backward over its shoulder, watching the dragging block.
“And yet they tell us we was all made in His image,” Ratliff said.
“From some of the things I see here and there, maybe he was,” Bookwright said.
“I don’t know as I would believe that, even if I knowed it was true,” Ratliff said. “You mean he just showed up here one day?”
“Why not?” Bookwright said. “He ain’t the first.”
“Sho,” Ratliff said. “He would have to be somewhere.” The creature, opposite Mrs. Littlejohn’s now, turned in the gate.
“He sleeps in her barn,” another said. “She feeds him. He does some work. She can talk to him somehow.”
“Maybe she’s the one that was then,” Ratliff said. He turned; he still held the end of the stick of candy. He put it into his mouth and wiped his fingers on the skirt of his overcoat. “Well, how about supper?”
“Go buy your goats,” Bookwright said. “Wait till after that to do your eating.”
“I’ll go tomorrow,” Ratliff said. “Maybe by then Uncle Ben will have another fifty of them even.” Or maybe the day after tomorrow, he thought, walking on toward the brazen sound of Mrs. Littlejohn’s supper-bell in the winy chill of the March evening.
So he will have plenty of time. Because I believe I done it right. I had to trade not only on what I think he knows about me, but on what he must figure I know about him, as conditioned and restricted by that year of sickness and abstinence from the science and pastime of skullduggery. But it worked with Bookwright. He done all he could to warn me. He went as far and even further than a man can let his self go in another man’s trade.
So tomorrow he not only did not go to see the goat-owner, he drove six miles in the opposite direction and spent the day trying to sell a sewing-machine he did not even have with him. He spent the night there and did not reach the village until midmorning of the second day, halting the buckboard before the store, to one of the gallery posts of which Varner’s roan horse was tied.
So he’s even riding the horse now, he thought. Well well well. He did not get out of the buckboard. “One of you fellows mind handing me a nickel’s worth of candy?” he said. “I might have to bribe Uncle Ben through one of his grandchillen.” One of the men entered the store and fetched out the candy. “I’ll be back for dinner,” he said. “Then I’ll be ready for another needy young doc to cut at again.”
His destination was not far: a little under a mile to the river bridge, a little more than a mile beyond it. He drove up to a neat well-kept house with a big barn and pasture beyond it; he saw the goats. A hale burly old man was sitting in his stocking-feet on the veranda, who roared, “Howdy, V. K. What in thunder are you fellows up to over at Varner’s?”
Ratliff did not get out of the buckboard. “So he beat me,” he said.
“Fifty goats,” the other roared. “I’ve heard of a man paying a dime to get shut of two or three, but I never in my life heard of a man buying fifty.”
“He’s smart,” Ratliff said. “If he bought fifty of anything he knowed beforehand he was going to need exactly that many.”
“Yes, he’s smart. But fifty goats. Hell and sulphur. I still got a passel left, bout one hen-house full, say. You want them?”
“No,” Ratliff said. “It was just them first fifty.”
“I’ll give them to you. I’ll even pay you a quarter to get the balance of them outen my pasture.”
“I thank you,” Ratliff said. “Well, I’ll just charge this to social overhead.”
“Fifty goats,” the other said. “Stay and eat dinner.”
“I thank you,” Ratliff said. “I seem to done already wasted too much time eating now. Or sitting down doing something, anyway.” So he returned
