“All right,” he said. “I’ll go to the barn and get some.” He left the door and walked heavily down the hallway and onto the back porch and stepped down to the earth, already running. He ran frantically in the blind darkness and on tiptoe, around toward the front of the house and stopped, peering around the corner toward the front door, holding his breath, then ran again, onto the steps, where he could see into the hallway lighted faintly by the lamp in the kitchen, and paused again for an instant, crouched, glaring.
The son of a bitch tricked me, he thought. He went out the back: and ran up the steps, stumbling heavily and recovering, and thundered down the hall to the kitchen door and saw, in the instant of passing it, the other standing beside the stove as he had left him, his hand again on the coffee-pot.
The murdering little son of a bitch, he thought. I wouldn’t have believed it. I wouldn’t have believed a man would have to go through all this even for five hundred dollars.
But when he stood in the door again, save for the slightly increased rasp and tempo of his breathing, he might never have left it. He watched the other fetch to the stove a cracked china cup, a thick glass tumbler, a tin can containing a little sugar, and a spoon; when he spoke, he might have been talking to his employer’s wife over a tea-table: “It’s done made up its mind at last to get hot, has it?” The other did not answer. He filled the cup from the pot and spooned sugar into it and stirred it and stood beside the stove, turned three-quarters from the cousin, his head bent, sipping from the cup.
After a moment the cousin approached and filled the tumbler and put sugar into it and sipped, wry-faced, his features all seeming to flee from the tumbler’s rim, upward, gathering, eyes, nose, even mouth, toward his forehead, as if the skin in which they were embedded was attached to his skull only at one point somewhere in the back. “Listen,” the cousin said. “Just try to look at this thing like two reasonable people. There’s that fifty dollars laying out there, not belonging to nobody. And you can’t go and get it without taking me, because I ain’t going to let you.
And I can’t go get it without taking you, because I don’t know where it’s at. Yet here we are, setting around this house while every minute we waste is bringing that durn sheriff and them deputies just that much closer to finding it.
It’s just a matter of pure and simple principle. Ain’t no likes and dislikes about it. If I had my way, I’d keep all of it myself, the same as you would. But you can’t and I can’t. Yet here we are, setting here — —” The other tilted the cup and drained it.
“What time is it?” he said. From the creased bulge of his waistband the cousin wrenched a dollar watch on a thong of greasy leather and looked at it and prized it back into the fob-pocket.
“Twenty-eight past nine. And it ain’t going to stay that forever.
And I got to open the store at six o’clock in the morning. And I got to walk five miles tonight before I can go to bed. But never mind that. Don’t pay no attention to that, because there ain’t nothing personal in this because it is a pure and simple business matter. Think about your — —” The other set the empty cup on the stove.
“Checkers?” he said.
“ — self. You got — what?” The cousin stopped talking. He watched the other cross the room and lift from among the shadows in the corner a short, broad piece of plank. From the shelf above it he took another tin can and brought them to the table. The board was marked off with charcoal into alternate staggered squares; the can contained a handful of small china- and glass-fragments in two colours, apparently from a broken plate and a blue glass bottle.
He laid the board beside the lamp and began to oppose the men. The cousin watched him, the tumbler arrested halfway to his mouth. For an instant he ceased to breathe. Then he breathed again. “Why, sholy,” he said. He set the glass on the stove and drew up a chair opposite.
Sitting, he seemed to be on the point of enveloping not only the chair but the table too in a collapsing mass of flabby and badly-filled flesh, like a collapsing balloon. “We’ll play a nickel a game against that fifty dollars,” he said. “All right?”
“Move,” the other said. They began to play — the one with a cold and deadly deliberation and economy of moves, the other with a sort of clumsy speed and dash.
It was that amateurish, that almost childlike, lack of premeditation and plan or even foresight of one who, depending on manipulation and not intellect in games of chance, finds himself involved in one where dexterity cannot avail, yet nevertheless attempting to cheat even at bald and simple draughts with an incredible optimism, an incorrigible dishonesty long since become pure reflex and probably now beyond his control, making his dashing and clumsy moves then withdrawing his closed fist to sit watching with his little intent unwinking eyes the still, wasted, down-looking face opposite, talking steadily about almost everything except money and death, the fist resting on the table-edge still closed about the pawn or the king’s crown which it had palmed.
The trouble with checkers is, he thought, It ain’t nothing but checkers. At the end of an hour he was thirteen games ahead.
“Make it a quarter,” he said.
“What time is it?” the other said. The cousin wrung the watch from his waistband again and returned it.
“Four minutes to eleven.”
“Move,” the other said. They played on. The cousin was not talking now. He was keeping score now with a chewed pencil stub on the edge of the board. Thus when, thirty minutes later, he totted up the score, the pencil presented to his vision not a symbol but a sum complete with decimal and dollar mark, which seemed in the next instant to leap upward and strike comprehension, with an impact almost audible; he became dead still, for an instant he did not breathe indeed, thinking rapidly: Hell fire. Hell fire. Of course he never caught me.
He didn’t want to. Because when I have won all of his share, he’ll figure he won’t need to risk going where it’s at. So now he had to completely reverse his entire tactics. And now for the first time the crawling hands on the face of the watch which he now produced without being asked and laid face-up beside the board, assumed a definite significance. Because this here just can’t go on forever, he thought in a resurgence of the impotent rage.
It just can’t. A man just can’t be expected to go through much more of this even for all of fifty dollars. So he reversed himself. Whereupon it was as if even dishonesty had foresworn him. He would make the dashing, clumsy, calculated moves; he would sit back with his own pawn or king’s crown in his fist now.
Only now the other’s thin hard hand would be gripping that wrist while the cold, flat, dead voice demonstrated how a certain pawn could not possibly have arrived at the square on which it suddenly appeared to be, and lived, or even rapping the knuckles of that gripped hand on the table until it disgorged.
Yet he would attempt it again, with that baffled and desperate optimism and hope, and be caught again and then try it again, until at the end of the next hour his movements on the board were not even childlike, they were those of an imbecile or a blind person. And he was talking again now: “Listen. There’s that fifty dollars that don’t belong to nobody because he never had no kin, nobody to claim it. Just laying out there for the first man that comes along to — —”
“Move,” the other said. He moved a pawn. “No,” the other said. “Jump.” He made the jump. The other moved a second pawn.
“ — and here you are needing money to keep from being hung maybe and you can’t go and get it because I won’t leave. And me that can’t get up and go on home and get to bed so I can get up, and go to work tomorrow because you won’t show me where that money’s at — —”
“Move,” the other said. The cousin moved a pawn. “No,” the other said. “Jump.” The cousin took the jump. Then he watched the gaunt black-haired fingers holding the scrap of blue glass clear the board in five jumps.
“And now it’s after midnight. It will be light in six hours. And Hampton and them durn deputies — —” The cousin ceased. The other was now standing, looking down at him; the cousin rose quickly. They stared at one another across the table. “Well?” the cousin said. His breath began to make the harsh, tense, rasping sound again, not triumphant yet. “Well?” he said. “Well?” But the other was not looking at him, he was looking down, the face still, wasted, seemingly without life.
“I ask you to go,” the other said. “I ask you to leave me alone.”
“Sholy,” the cousin said, his voice
