“Because it wasn’t the horse. It wasn’t the trade. It was a good trade because Ab had just give Beasley a straight stock and a old wore-out sorghum mill of Old Man Anse’s for the horse, and even Miz Snopes had to admit that that was a good swap for anything that could get up and walk from Beasley’s lot to theirn by itself, because like she said while she was shaking the skillet at him, he couldn’t get stung very bad in a horse-trade because he never had nothing of his own that anybody would want to swap even a sorry horse for.
And it wasn’t because Ab had left the plough down in the far field where she couldn’t see it from the house and had snuck the wagon out the back way with the plough stock and the sorghum mill in it while she still thought he was in the field. It was like she knowed already what me and Ab didn’t: that Pat Stamper had owned that horse before Beasley got it and that now Ab had done caught the Pat Stamper sickness just from touching it. And maybe she was right. Maybe to himself Ab did call his self the Pat Stamper of the Holland farm or maybe even of all Beat Four, even if maybe he was fairly sho that Pat Stamper wasn’t going to walk up to that lot fence and challenge him for it.
Sho, I reckon while he was setting there on the gallery with his feet cooling and the sidemeat plopping and spitting in the kitchen and us waiting to eat it so we could go back down to the lot and set on the fence while the folks would come up and look at what he had brung home this time, I reckon maybe Ab not only knowed as much about horse-trading as Pat Stamper, but he owned head for head of them with Old Man Anse himself.
And I reckon while we would be setting there, just moving enough to keep outen the sun, with that empty plough standing in the furrow down in the far field and Miz Snopes watching him outen the back window and saying to herself, ‘Horse-trader! Setting there bragging and lying to a passel of shiftless men with the weeds and morning glories climbing so thick in the cotton and corn I am afraid to tote his dinner down to him for fear of snakes’; I reckon Ab would look at whatever it was he had just traded the mail box or some more of Old Man Anse’s bob-wire or some of the winter corn for this time, and he would say to his self, ‘It’s not only mine, but before God it’s the prettiest drove of a horse I ever see.’
“It was fate. It was like the Lord Himself had decided to buy a horse with Miz Snopes’s separator money. Though I will admit that when He chose Ab He picked out a good quick willing hand to do His trading for Him. The morning we started, Ab hadn’t planned to use Beasley’s horse a tall because he knowed it probably couldn’t make that twenty-eight mile trip to Jefferson and back in one day. He aimed to go up to Old Man Anse’s lot and borrow a mule to work with hisn and he would a done it except for Miz Snopes.
She kept on taunting him about swapping for a yard ornament, about how if he could just git it to town somehow maybe he could swap it to the livery stable to prop up in front for a sign. So in a way it was Miz Snopes herself that put the idea in Ab’s head of taking Beasley’s horse to town. So when I got there that morning we hitched Beasley’s horse into the wagon with the mule.
We had done been feeding it for two-three days now by forced draft, getting it ready to make the trip, and it looked some better now than when we had brung it home. But even yet it didn’t look so good. So Ab decided it was the mule that showed it up, that when it was the only horse or mule in sight it looked pretty good and that it was standing by something else on four legs that done the damage. ‘If it was just some way to hitch the mule under the wagon, so it wouldn’t show but could still pull, and just leave the horse in sight,’ Ab says.
Because he wasn’t soured then. But we had done the best we could with it. Ab thought about mixing a right smart of salt in some corn so it would drink a lot of water so some of the ribs wouldn’t show so bad at least, only we knowed it wouldn’t never get to Jefferson then, let alone back home, besides having to stop at every creek and branch to blow it up again.
So we done the best we could. That is, we hoped for the best. Ab went to the house and come back in his preacher’s coat (it’s the same one he’s still got; it was Colonel Sartoris’s that Miss Rosa Millard give him, it would be thirty years ago) and that twenty-four dollars and sixty-eight cents Miz Snopes had been saving on for four years now, tied up in a rag, and we started out.
“We wasn’t even thinking about horse-trading. We was thinking about horse all right, because we was wondering if maybe we wasn’t fixing to come back home that night with Beasley’s horse in the wagon and Ab in the traces with the mule. Yes sir, Ab eased that team outen the lot and on down the road easy and careful as ere a horse and mule ever moved in this world, with me and Ab walking up every hill that tilted enough to run water offen it, and we was aiming to do that right into Jefferson.
It was the weather, the hot day; it was the middle of July. Because here we was about a mile from Whiteleaf store, with Beasley’s horse kind of half walking and half riding on the double tree and Ab’s face looking worrieder and worrieder every time it failed to lift its feet high enough to step, when all of a sudden that horse popped into a sweat. It flung its head up like it had been touched with a hot poker and stepped up into the collar, touching the collar for the first time since the mule had taken the weight of it when Ab shaken out the whip in the lot, and so we come down the hill and up to Whiteleaf store with that horse of Beasley’s eyes rolling white as darning eggs and its mane and tail swirling like a grass fire.
And I be dog if it hadn’t not only sweated itself into as pretty a dark blood bay as you ever saw, but even its ribs didn’t seem to show so much. And Ab that had been talking about taking the back road so we wouldn’t have to pass the store at all, setting there on the wagon seat like he would set on the lot fence back home where he knowed he was safe from Pat Stamper, telling Hugh Mitchell and the other fellows on the gallery that that horse come from Kentucky. Hugh Mitchell never even laughed. ‘Sho now,’ he says. ‘I wondered what had become of it.
I reckon that’s what taken it so long; Kentucky’s a long walk. Herman Short swapped Pat Stamper a mule and buggy for that horse five years ago and Beasley Kemp give Herman eight dollars for it last summer. What did you give Beasley? Fifty cents?’
“That’s what did it. It wasn’t what the horse had cost Ab because you might say all it had cost Ab was the straight stock, since in the first place the sorghum mill was wore-out and in the second place it wasn’t Ab’s sorghum mill nohow. And it wasn’t the mule and buggy of Herman’s. It was them eight cash dollars of Beasley’s, and not that Ab held them eight dollars against Herman, because Herman had done already invested a mule and buggy in it.
And besides, the eight dollars was still in the country and so it didn’t actually matter whether it was Herman or Beasley that had them. It was the fact that Pat Stamper, a stranger, had come in and got actual Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars to rattling around loose that way. When a man swaps horse for horse, that’s one thing and let the devil protect him if the devil can.
But when cash money starts changing hands, that’s something else. And for a stranger to come in and start that cash money to changing and jumping from one fellow to another, it’s like when a burglar breaks into your house and flings your things ever which way even if he don’t take nothing. It makes you twice as mad. So it was not just to unload Beasley Kemp’s horse back onto Pat Stamper.
It was to get Beasley Kemp’s eight dollars back outen Pat someway. And that’s what I meant about it was pure fate that had Pat
