“I can walk,” Armstid said harshly.
“Sholy,” Ratliff said. “Besides, them dogs knows me.”
“They’ll know me, after the first one runs at me once,” Armstid said.
“Sholy,” Ratliff said. He was already out of the buckboard. “You wait here and hold the team.” Armstid swung his leg back into the buckboard, not invisible even in the moonless August darkness, but on the contrary, because of his faded overalls, quite distinct against the buckboard’s dark upholstery; it was only his features beneath his hatbrim which could not be distinguished. Ratliff handed him the reins and turned past the metal mailbox on its post in the starlight, toward the gate beyond it and the mellow uproar of the dogs.
When he was through the gate he could see them — a yelling clump of blackness against the slightly paler earth which broke and spread fanwise before him, braced, yelling, holding him bayed — three black-and-tan hounds whose tan the starlight had transposed to black too so that, not quite invisible but almost and without detail, they might have been the three intact carbons of burned newspaper-sheets standing upright from the earth, yelling at him. He shouted at them. They should have recognised him already by smell.
When he shouted, he knew that they already had, because for perhaps a second they hushed, then as he moved forward they retreated before him, keeping the same distance, baying. Then he saw Bookwright, pale too in overalls against the black house. When Bookwright shouted at the hounds, they did hush.
“Git,” he said. “Shut up and git.” He approached, becoming black in his turn against the paler earth, to where Ratliff waited. “Where’s Henry?” he said.
“In the buggy,” Ratliff said. He turned back toward the gate.
“Wait,” Bookwright said. Ratliff stopped. The other came up beside him. They looked at one another, each face invisible to the other. “You ain’t let him persuade you into this, have you?” Bookwright said. “Between having to remember them five dollars every time he looks at his wife maybe, and that broke leg, and that horse he bought from Flem Snopes with it he ain’t even seen again, he’s plumb crazy now. Not that he had far to go. You ain’t just let him persuade you?”
“I don’t think so,” Ratliff said. “I know I ain’t,” he said. “There’s something there. I’ve always knowed it. Just like Will Varner knows there is something there. If there wasn’t, he wouldn’t never bought it.
And he wouldn’t a kept it, selling the balance of it off and still keeping that old house, paying taxes on it when he could a got something for it, setting there in that flour-barrel chair to watch it and claiming he did it because it rested him to set there where somebody had gone to all that work and expense just to build something to sleep and eat and lay with his wife in. And I knowed it for sho when Flem Snopes took it.
When he had Will Varner just where he wanted him, and then he sold out to Will by taking that old house and them ten acres that wouldn’t hardly raise goats. And I went with Henry last night. I saw it too. You don’t have to come in, if you feel uncertain. I’d rather you wouldn’t.”
“All right,” Bookwright said. He moved on. “That’s all I wanted to know.” They returned to the buckboard. Henry moved to the middle of the seat and they got in. “Don’t let me crowd your leg,” Bookwright said.
“There ain’t anything wrong with my leg,” Armstid said in that harsh voice. “I can walk as far as you or any man any day.”
“Sholy,” Ratliff said quickly, taking the reins. “Henry’s leg is all right now. You can’t even notice it.”
“Let’s get on,” Bookwright said. “Won’t nobody have to walk for a while, if that team can.”
“It’s shorter through the Bend,” Ratliff said. “But we better not go that way.”
“Let them see,” Armstid said. “If anybody here is afraid, I don’t need no help. I can — —”
“Sholy,” Ratliff said. “If folks sees us, we might have too much help. That’s what we want to dodge.” Armstid hushed. He said no more from then on, sitting between them in an immobility which was almost like a temperature, thinner, as though it had not been the sickness (after being in bed about a month, he had got up one day and broken the leg again; nobody ever knew how, what he had been doing, trying to do, because he never talked about it) but impotence and fury which had wasted him.
Ratliff asked neither advice nor directions; there was little anybody could have told him about the back roads and lanes of that or any of the other country he travelled. They passed nobody; the dark and sleeping land was empty, the scattered and remote homesteads indicated only by the occasional baying of dogs.
The lanes he followed ran pale between the broad spread of fields felt rather than seen, where the corn was beginning to fire and the cotton to bloom, then into tunnels of trees rising and feathered lushly with summer’s full leaf against the sky of August heavy and thick with stars.
Then they were in the old lane which for years now had been marked by nothing save the prints of Varner’s old white horse and, for a brief time, by the wheels of the parasol-topped runabout — the old scar almost healed now, where thirty years ago a courier (perhaps a neighbour’s slave flogging a mule taken out of the plough) had galloped with the news of Sumter, where perhaps the barouche had moved, the women swaying and pliant in hooped crinoline beneath parasols, the men in broadcloth riding the good horses at the wheels, talking about it, where the son, and perhaps the master himself had ridden into Jefferson with his pistols and his portmanteau and a body-servant on the spare horse behind, talking of regiments and victory; where the Federal patrols had ridden the land peopled by women and negro slaves about the time of the battle of Jefferson.
There was nothing to show of that now. There was hardly a road; where the sand darkened into the branch and then rose again, there was no trace left of the bridge. Now the scar ran straight as a plumb-line along a shaggy hedgerow of spaced cedars decreed there by the same nameless architect who had planned and built the house for its nameless master, now two and three feet thick, the boughs interlocked and massed now. Ratliff turned in among them. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. But then Bookwright remembered that he had been here last night.
Armstid didn’t wait for them. Ratliff tied the team hurriedly and they overtook him — a shadow, still faintly visible because of his overalls faded pale with washing, hurrying stiffly on through the undergrowth. The earth yawned black before them, a long gash: a ravine, a ditch. Bookwright remembered that Armstid had been here for more than one night, nevertheless the limping shadow seemed about to hurl itself into the black abyss. “You better help him,” Bookwright said. “He’s going to break — —”
“Hush!” Ratliff hissed. “The garden is just up the hill yonder.”
“ — break that leg again,” Bookwright said, quieter now. “Then we’ll be into it.”
“He’ll be all right,” Ratliff whispered. “It’s been this way every night. Just don’t push him too close. But don’t let him get too far ahead. Once last night while we were laying there I had to hold him.” They went on, just behind the figure which moved now in absolute silence and with surprising speed. They were in a ravine massed with honeysuckle and floored with dry sand in which they could hear the terrific labouring of the lame leg.
Yet still they could hardly keep up with him. After about two hundred yards Armstid turned to climb up out of the ravine. Ratliff followed him. “Careful now,” he whispered back to Bookwright. “We’re right at it.” But Bookwright was watching Armstid. He won’t never make it, he thought.
He won’t never climb that bank. But the other did it, dragging the stiffened and once-fragile and hence maybe twice-fragile leg at the almost sheer slope, silent and unaided and emanating that trigger-like readiness to repudiate assistance and to deny that he might possibly need it.
Then on hands and knees Bookwright was crawling after the others in a path through a mass of man-tall briers and weeds and persimmon shoots, overtaking them where they lay flat at the edge of a vague slope which rose to the shaggy crest on which, among oaks, the shell of the tremendous house stood where it had been decreed too by the imported and nameless architect and its master whose anonymous dust lay with that of his blood and of the progenitors of saxophone players in Harlem honkytonks beneath the weathered and illegible headstones on another knoll four hundred yards away, with its broken roof and topless chimneys and one high rectangle of window through which he could see the stars in the opposite sky.
The slope had probably been a rose-garden. None of them knew or cared, just as they, who had seen it, walked past and looked at it perhaps a hundred times, did not know that the fallen pediment in the middle of the slope had once been a sundial. Ratliff reached across Armstid’s body and gripped his arm, then, above the sound of their panting breath, Bookwright heard the steady and unhurried sigh of a shovel
