If they’d just let me do it: hang you just enough to take you down and bring you to and hang you again just enough to cut you down and bring you to — —” He slashed out again, viciously. But she had already released him, standing on one foot now, the other foot angled upward from the knee to meet her reaching hand. She took something from her shoe and put it into his hand.
He knew at once what it was — a banknote, folded and refolded small and square and still warm with body-heat.
And it was just one note. It’s one dollar, he thought, knowing it was not. It was I. O. and Eck, he told himself, knowing it was not, just as he knew there was but one man in the country who would have ten dollars in one bill — or at the most, two men; now he even heard what his cousin had said as he walked out of the store fifteen minutes ago. He didn’t even look toward his hand.
“Did you sell Will something for it, or did you just take it out of his pants while he was asleep? Or was it Jody?”
“What if I did? What if I can sell enough more of it tonight to get ten more. Only for God’s sake don’t go back to the house. Stay in the woods. Then tomorrow morning — —” He did not move; she saw only the slight jerk of his hand and wrist — no coin to ring against his thumbnail or to make any sound among the dust-stiffened roadside weeds where gouts of dusty cotton clung.
When he went on, she began to run after him. “Mink!” she said. He walked steadily on. She was at his shoulder, running, though he continued to walk. “For God’s sake,” she said. “For God’s sake.” Then she caught his shoulder and swung him to face her. This time he slashed free and sprang into the weeds, stooping, and rose with a stick lifted in his hand and walked toward her again with that patient and implacable weariness, until she turned.
He lowered the stick, but he continued to stand there until he could no longer distinguish her, even against the pale dust of the road. Then he tossed the stick into the weeds and turned. The cousin was standing behind him. If the other had been smaller or he larger he would have stepped on him, walked him down. The other stepped aside and turned with him, the faint rasp of the repressed breathing at his shoulder.
“So you throwed that away too,” the cousin said. He didn’t answer. They went on side by side in the thick, ankle-deep dust. Their feet made no sound in it. “He had at least fifty dollars. I tell you I saw it. And you expect me to believe you ain’t got it.” He didn’t answer.
They walked steadily on, not fast, like two people walking without destination or haste, for pleasure or exercise. “All right. I’m going to do what wouldn’t no other man living do: I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you ain’t got it, actually never looked. Now where did you put him?”
He didn’t answer nor pause. The cousin caught him by the shoulder, stopping him; now there was in the fierce baffled breathing, the whispering voice, not only the old amazement but a sort of cold and desperate outrage, like one trying to reach through a fleeing crisis to the comprehension of an idiot: “Are you going to let that fifty dollars lay there for Hampton and them deputies to split up between them?”
He struck the hand off. “Let me alone,” he said.
“All right. I’ll do this. I’ll give you twenty-five dollars now. I’ll go with you, all you got to do is hand me the wallet, sight unseen. Or hand me his pants, if you don’t want to take it out of them. You won’t even touch or even see the money.” He turned to go on again. “All right.
If you are too puke-stomached to do it yourself, tell me where it is. When I come back, I’ll give you ten dollars, though a fellow that just throwed away a ten-dollar bill don’t — —” He walked on. Again the hand caught his shoulder and swung him about; the tense fierce voice murmured from nowhere and everywhere out of the breathless dark: “Wait. Listen. Listen good. Suppose I look up Hampton; he’s been around here all day; he’s probably still somewhere here tonight.
Suppose I tell him I done recollected a mistake, that that gun wasn’t lost last fall because you come in the store and bought a nickel’s worth of powder just last week. Then you can explain how you was aiming to swap Houston the powder for the pound-free on that yearling — —”
This time he did not fling the hand off. He merely began to walk toward the other with that patient and invincible weariness which the other did not recognise, walking steadily toward the cousin as the other gave ground.
His voice was not loud either; it was flat, absolutely toneless: “I ask you to let me alone,” he said. “I don’t tell you; I ask you to let me alone. Not for my sake. Because I’m tired. I ask you to let me alone.” The other backed away before him, moving slightly faster, so that the distance between them increased.
When he stopped, it continued to increase until he could no longer see the other and only the whisper, furious and outraged, came back:
“All right, you durn little tight-fisted murderer. See if you get away with it.”
Approaching the village again, his feet made no sound in the dust and, in the darkness, seemingly no progress either, though the light in Mrs. Littlejohn’s kitchen window just beyond the store’s dark bulk — the only light anywhere — drew steadily nearer. Just beyond it the lane turned off which led to his cabin four miles away.
That’s where I would have kept straight on, to Jefferson and the railroad, he thought; and suddenly, now that it was too late, now that he had lost all hope of alternative between planned and intelligent escape and mere blind desperate harried fleeing and doubling through the swamp and jungle of the bottom like a spent and starving beast cut off from its den, he knew that for three days now he had not only hoped but had actually believed that opportunity to choose would be given him.
And he had not only lost that privilege of choice, but due to the blind mischance which had permitted his cousin either to see or guess what was in the wallet, even the bitter alternative was deferred for another night.
It began to seem to him now that that puny and lonely beacon not only marked no ultimate point for even desperate election but was the period to hope itself, and that all which remained to him of freedom lay in the shortening space between it and his advancing foot. I thought that when you killed a man, that finished it, he told himself. But it don’t. It just starts then.
When he reached home, he did not enter it. Instead, he went around to the woodpile and got his axe and stood for a moment to examine the stars. It was not much past nine; he could allow himself until midnight. Then he circled the house and entered the corn-patch. Halfway down the slope he paused, listening, then he went on.
He did not enter the bottom either; he stepped behind the first tree large enough to conceal him and leaned the axe carefully against it where he could find it again and stood there, motionless, breathing quietly, and listened to the heavy body running with hurried and cautious concern among the clashing cornstalks, the tense and hurried panting drawing rapidly nearer, then the quick indraw of breath when the other ran past the tree, checking, as he stepped out from behind it and turned back up the slope.
They went back through the corn, in single file and five feet apart. He could hear the clumsy body behind him stumbling and thrashing among the sibilant rows, and the breathing fierce, outraged, and repressed. His own passage made no noise, even in the trigger-set dryness of the corn, as if his body had no substance. “Listen,” the cousin said. “Let’s look at this thing like two reasonable . . .”
They emerged from the corn and crossed the yard and entered the house, still five feet apart. He went onto the kitchen and lit the lamp and squatted before the stove, preparing to start the fire. The cousin stood in the door, breathing heavily and watching while the other coaxed the chips into a blaze and took the coffee-pot from the stove and filled it from the water pail and set it back. “Ain’t you even got nothing to eat?” the cousin said.
The other did not answer. “You got some feed corn, ain’t you? We could parch some of that.” The fire was burning well now. The other laid his hand on the pot, though of course it had not even begun to be warm yet. The cousin watched the back of his head. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go get some of it.”
The other removed his hand from the pot. He did not look back. “Get it,” he said. “I’m not
