“Come on,” he said. He turned, running, Bookwright behind him. The old man was sitting up when they reached him. Ratliff plunged down beside him and began to scrabble among the weeds for the other shovel. It was the pick he found first. He flung it away and plunged down again; he and Bookwright found the shovel at the same time. Then they were standing, struggling for the shovel, snatching and jerking at it, their breathing harsh and repressed, hearing even above their own breathing the rapid sound of Armstid’s shovel up the slope. “Leave go!” Ratliff whispered. “Leave go!” The old man, unaided now, was struggling to get up.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait.” Then Ratliff seemed to realise what he was doing. He released the shovel; he almost hurled it at Bookwright.
“Take it,” he said. He drew a long shuddering breath. “God,” he whispered. “Just look at what even the money a man ain’t got yet will do to him.” He stooped and jerked the old man to his feet, not with intentional roughness but merely out of his urgency. He had to hold him up for a moment.
“Wait,” the old man said in a reedy, quavering voice. He was known through all that country. He had no kin, no ties, and he antedated everyone; nobody knew how old he was — a tall thin man in a filthy frock-coat and no shirt beneath it and a long, perfectly white beard reaching below his waist, who lived in a mud-daubed hut in the river-bottom five or six miles from any road.
He made and sold nostrums and charms, and it was said of him that he ate not only frogs and snakes but bugs as well — anything that he could catch. There was nothing in his hut but his pallet bed, a few cooking vessels, a tremendous Bible and a faded daguerreotype of a young man in a Confederate uniform which was believed by those who had seen it to be his son. “Wait,” he said. “There air anger in the yearth. Ye must make that ere un quit a-bruisin hit.”
“That’s so,” Ratliff said. “It won’t work unless the ground is quiet. We got to make him stop.” Again when they stood over him, Henry continued to dig; again when Ratliff touched him he whirled, the shovel raised, and stood cursing them in a spent whisper until the old man himself walked up and touched his shoulder.
“Ye kin dig and ye kin dig, young man,” the reedy voice said. “For what’s rendered to the yearth, the yearth will keep until hit’s ready to reveal hit.”
“That’s right, Henry,” Ratliff said. “We got to give Uncle Dick room to find where it is. Come on, now.” Armstid lowered the shovel and came out of his pit (it was already nearly a foot deep).
But he would not relinquish the shovel; he still held to it until the old man drove them back to the edge of the garden and produced from the tail-pocket of his frock-coat a forked peach branch, from the butt-end of which something dangled on a length of string; Ratliff, who had seen it before at least, knew what it was — an empty cloth tobacco-sack containing a gold-filled human tooth.
He held them there for ten minutes, stooping now and then to lay his hand flat on the earth. Then, with the three of them clumped and silent at his heels, he went to the weed-choked corner of the old garden and grasped the two prongs of the branch in his hands, the string and the tobacco-sack hanging plumblike and motionless before him, and stood for a time, muttering to himself.
“How do I — —” Bookwright said.
“Hush,” Ratliff said. The old man began to walk, the three of them following. They moved like a procession, with something at once outrageously pagan and orthodoxly funereal about them, slowly back and forth across the garden, mounting the slope gradually in overlapping traverses. Suddenly the old man stopped; Armstid, limping just behind him, bumped into him.
“There’s somebody agin it,” he said. He didn’t look back. “It ain’t you,” he said, and they all knew he was talking to Ratliff. “And it ain’t that cripple. It’s that other one. That black one. Let him get offen this ground and quieten hit, or you can take me on back home.”
“Go back to the edge,” Ratliff said quietly over his shoulder to Bookwright. “It’ll be all right then.”
“But I — —” Bookwright said.
“Get off the garden,” Ratliff said. “It’s after midnight. It’ll be daylight in four hours.” Bookwright returned to the foot of the slope. That is, he faded into the darkness, because they did not watch him; they were moving again now, Armstid and Ratliff close at the old man’s heels.
Again they began to mount the slope in traverses, passing the place where Henry had begun to dig, passing the place where Ratliff had found signs of the other man’s excavation on the first night Armstid had brought him here; now Ratliff could feel Armstid beginning to tremble again. The old man stopped.
They did not bump into him this time, and Ratliff did not know that Bookwright was behind him again until the old man spoke:
“Tech my elbers,” he said. “Not you,” he said. “You that didn’t believe.” When Bookwright touched them, inside the sleeves the arms — arms thin and frail and dead as rotten sticks — were jerking faintly and steadily; when the old man stopped suddenly again and Bookwright blundered into him, he felt the whole thin body straining backward.
Armstid was cursing steadily in his dry whisper. “Tech the peach fork,” the old man panted. “You that didn’t believe.” When Bookwright touched it, it was arched into a rigid down-pointing curve, the string taut as wire. Armstid made a choked sound; Bookwright felt his hand on the branch too. The branch sprang free; the old man staggered, the fork lying dead on the ground at his feet until Armstid, digging furiously with his bare hand, flung it away.
They turned as one and plunged back down the slope to where they had left the tools. They could hardly keep up with Armstid. “Don’t let him get the pick,” Bookwright panted. “He will kill somebody with it.” But Armstid was not after the pick.
He went straight to where he had left his shovel when the old man produced the forked branch and refused to start until he put the shovel down, and snatched it up and ran back up the slope. He was already digging when Ratliff and Bookwright reached him.
They all dug then, frantically, hurling the dirt aside, in each other’s way, the tools clashing and ringing together, while the old man stood above them behind the faint gleam of his beard in the starlight and his white brows above the two caverns from which, even if they had paused to look, they could not have told whether his eyes even watched them or not, musing, detached, without interest in their panting frenzy.
Suddenly the three of them became frozen in the attitudes of digging for perhaps a second. Then they leaped into the hole together; the six hands at the same instant touched the object — a heavy solid sack of heavy cloth through which they all felt the round milled edges of coins. They struggled for it, jerking it back and forth among them, clutching it, gripping it, panting.
“Stop it!” Ratliff panted. “Stop it! Ain’t we all three partners alike?” But Armstid clung to it, trying to jerk it away from the others, cursing. “Let go, Odum,” Ratliff said. “Let him have it.” They turned it loose. Armstid clutched it to himself, stooping, glaring at them as they climbed out of the hole. “Let him keep it,” Ratliff said. “Don’t you know that ain’t all?” He turned quickly away. “Come on, Uncle Dick,” he said. “Get your — —” He ceased.
The old man was standing motionless behind them, his head turned as if he were listening toward the ditch from which they had come. “What?” Ratliff whispered. They were all three motionless now, rigid, still stooped a little as when they had stepped away from Armstid. “Do you hear something?” Ratliff whispered. “Is somebody down there?”
“I feel four bloods lust-running,” the old man said. “Hit’s four sets of blood here lusting for trash.” They crouched, rigid. But there was no sound.
“Well, ain’t it four of us here?” Bookwright whispered.
“Uncle Dick don’t care nothing about money,” Ratliff whispered. “If somebody’s hiding there — —” They were running. Armstid was the first to start, still carrying his shovel. Again they could hardly keep up with him as they went plunging down the slope.
“Kill him,” Armstid said. “Watch every bush and kill him.”
“No,” Ratliff said. “Catch him first.” When he and Bookwright reached the ditch, they could hear Armstid beating along the edge of it, making no effort whatever to be quiet, slashing at the dark undergrowth with the axe-like shovel-edge with the same fury he had dug with. But they found nothing, nobody.
“Maybe Uncle Dick never heard nothing,” Bookwright said.
“Well, whatever it was is gone, anyway,” Ratliff said. “Maybe it — —” He ceased. He and Bookwright stared at one another; above their breaths they heard the horse. It was in the old road beyond the cedars; it was as if it had been dropped there from the sky in full gallop. They heard it until it ceased into the sand at the branch. After a moment they heard it again on the hard ground beyond, fainter now.
