“Well?” Varner said violently. “If he sets his fires like you tell about it, I reckon I don’t need to worry until Christmas. Get on with it. What does he have to do before he starts lighting matches? Maybe I can recognise at least some of the symptoms in time.”
“All right,” Ratliff said. “So they went up the road, leaving Miz Snopes and the widow wrastling at the cookstove and them two gals standing there now holding a wire rat-trap and a chamber-pot, and went up to Major De Spain’s and walked up the private road where that pile of fresh horse manure was and the nigger said Ab stepped in it on deliberate purpose. Maybe the nigger was watching them through the front window.
Anyway Ab tracked it right across the front porch and knocked and when the nigger told him to wipe it offen his feet, Ab shoved right past the nigger and the nigger said he wiped the rest of it off right on that ere hundred-dollar rug and stood there hollering ‘Hello.
Hello, De Spain’ until Miz de Spain come and looked at the rug and at Ab and told him to please go away. And then De Spain come home at dinner time and I reckon maybe Miz de Spain got in behind him because about middle of the afternoon he rides up to Ab’s house with a nigger holding the rolled-up rug on a mule behind him and Ab setting in a chair against the door-jamb and De Spain hollers ‘Why in hell ain’t you in the field?’ and Ab says, he don’t get up or nothing, ‘I figger I’ll start tomorrow.
I don’t never move and start to work the same day,’ only that ain’t neither here nor there; I reckon Miz de Spain had done got in behind him good because he just set on the horse a while saying ‘Confound you, Snopes, confound you, Snopes’ and Ab setting there saying ‘If I had thought that much of a rug I don’t know as I would keep it where folks coming in would have to tromp on it.’ ” Still he was not laughing. He just sat there in the buckboard, easy and relaxed, with his shrewd intelligent eyes in his smooth brown face, well-shaved and clean in his perfectly clean faded shirt, his voice pleasant and drawling and anecdotal, while Varner’s suffused swollen face glared down at him.
“So after a while Ab hollers back into the house and one of them strapping gals comes out and Ab says, ‘Take that ere rug and wash it.’ And so next morning the nigger found the rolled-up rug throwed onto the front porch against the door and there was some more tracks across the porch too only it was just mud this time and it was said how when Miz de Spain unrolled the rug this time it must have been hotter for De Spain than before even — the nigger said it looked like they had used brickbats instead of soap on it — because he was at Ab’s house before breakfast even, in the lot where Ab and Flem was hitching up to go to the field sho enough, setting on the mare mad as a hornet and cussing a blue streak, not at Ab exactly but just sort of at all rugs and all horse manure in general and Ab not saying nothing, just buckling hames and choke strops until at last De Spain says how the rug cost him a hundred dollars in France and he is going to charge Ab twenty bushels of corn for it against his crop that Ab ain’t even planted yet.
And so De Spain went back home. And maybe he felt it was all neither here nor there now. Maybe he felt that long as he had done something about it Miz de Spain would ease up on him and maybe come gathering-time he would a even forgot about that twenty bushels of corn. Only that never suited Ab. So here, it’s the next evening I reckon, and Major laying with his shoes off in the barrel stave hammock in his yard and here comes the bailiff hemming and hawing and finally gets it out how Ab has done sued him — —”
“Hell fire,” Varner murmured. “Hell fire.”
“Sho,” Ratliff said. “That’s just about what De Spain his self said when he finally got it into his mind that it was so. So it come Sat-dy and the wagon druv up to the store and Ab got out in that preacher’s hat and coat and tromps up to the table on that clubfoot where Uncle Buck McCaslin said Colonel John Sartoris his self shot Ab for trying to steal his clay-bank riding stallion during the war, and the Judge said, ‘I done reviewed your suit, Mr. Snopes, but I ain’t been able to find nothing nowhere in the law bearing on rugs, let alone horse manure. But I’m going to accept it because twenty bushels is too much for you to have to pay because a man as busy as you seem to stay ain’t going to have time to make twenty bushels of corn. So I am going to charge you ten bushels of corn for ruining that rug.’ ”
“And so he burnt it,” Varner said. “Well well well.”
“I don’t know as I would put it just that way,” Ratliff said, repeated. “I would just put it that that same night Major de Spain’s barn taken fire and was a total loss. Only somehow or other De Spain got there on his mare about the same time, because somebody heard him passing in the road. I don’t mean he got there in time to put it out but he got there in time to find something else already there that he felt entitled to consider enough of a foreign element to justify shooting at it, setting there on the mare and blasting away at it or them three or four times until it ran into a ditch on him where he couldn’t follow on the mare.
And he couldn’t say neither who it was because any animal can limp if it wants to and any man is liable to have a white shirt, with the exception that when he got to Ab’s house (and that couldn’t a been long, according to the gait the fellow heard him passing in the road) Ab and Flem wasn’t there, wasn’t nobody there but the four women and De Spain never had time to look under no beds and such because there was a cypress-roofed corn crib right next to that barn.
So he rid back to where his niggers had done fetched up the water barrels and was soaking tow-sacks to lay on the crib, and the first person he see was Flem standing there in a white-coloured shirt, watching it with his hands in his pockets, chewing tobacco. ‘Evening,’ Flem says. ‘That ere hay goes fast’ and De Spain setting on the horse hollering ‘Where’s your paw? Where’s that — —’ and Flem says, ‘If he ain’t here somewhere he’s done went back home.
Me and him left at the same time when we see the blaze.’ And De Spain knowed where they had left from too and he knowed why too. Only that wasn’t neither here nor there neither because, as it was just maintained, any two fellows anywhere might have a limp and a white shirt between them and it was likely the coal oil can he seen one of them fling into the fire when he shot the first time.
And so here the next morning he’s setting at breakfast with a right smart of his eyebrows and hair both swinged off when the nigger comes in and says it’s a fellow to see him and he goes to the office and it’s Ab, already in the preacher hat and coat and the wagon done already loaded again too, only Ab ain’t brought that into the house where it could be seen. ‘It looks like me and you ain’t going to get along together,’ Ab says, ‘so I reckon we better quit trying before we have a misunderstanding over something. I’m moving this morning.’ And De Spain says, ‘What about your contract?’
And Ab says, ‘I done cancelled it,’ and De Spain setting there saying ‘Cancelled. Cancelled’ and then he says, ‘I would cancel it and a hundred more like it and throw in that barn too just to know for sho if it was you I was shooting at last night.’ And Ab says, ‘You might sue me and find out. Justices of the Peace in this country seems to be in the habit of finding for plaintiffs.’ ”
“Hell fire,” Varner said quietly again. “Hell fire.”
“So Ab turned and went stomping out on that stiff foot and went back — —”
“And burnt the tenant house,” Varner said.
“No no. I ain’t saying he might not a looked back at it with a certain regret,
