Twice more the old man’s peach branch sprang and bent; twice more they found small bulging canvas bags solid and unmistakable even in the dark. “Now,” Ratliff said, “we got a hole a-piece and till daylight to do it in. Dig, boys.”
When the east began to turn grey, they had found nothing else. But digging three holes at once, as they had been doing, none of them had been able to go very deep. And the bulk of the treasure would be deep; as Ratliff had said, if it were not it would have been found ten times over during the last thirty years since there probably were not many square feet of the ten acres which comprised the old mansion-site which had not been dug into between some sunset and dawn by someone without a light, trying to dig fast and dig quiet at the same time.
So at last he and Bookwright prevailed on Armstid to see a little of reason, and they desisted and filled up the holes and removed the traces of digging. Then they opened the bags in the grey light. Ratliff’s and Bookwright’s contained twenty-five silver dollars each. Armstid refused to tell what his contained or to let anyone see it.
He crouched over it, his back toward them, cursing them when they tried to look. “All right,” Ratliff said. Then a thought struck him. He looked down at Armstid. “Of course ain’t nobody fool enough to try to spend any of it now.”
“Mine’s mine,” Armstid said. “I found it. I worked for it. I’m going to do any God damn thing I want to with it.”
“All right,” Ratliff said. “How are you going to explain it?”
“How am I — —” Armstid said. Squatting, he looked up at Ratliff. They could see one another’s faces now. All three of them were strained, spent with sleeplessness and fatigue.
“Yes,” Ratliff said. “How are you going to explain to folks where you got it? Got twenty-five dollars all coined before 1861?” He quit looking at Armstid. He and Bookwright looked at one another quietly in the growing light. “There was somebody in the ditch, watching us,” he said. “We got to buy it.”
“We got to buy it quick,” Bookwright said. “Tomorrow.”
“You mean today,” Ratliff said. Bookwright looked about him. It was as though he were waking from an anaesthetic, as if he saw the dawn, the earth, for the first time.
“That’s right,” he said. “It’s already tomorrow now.”
The old man lay under a tree beside the ditch, asleep, flat on his back, his mouth open, his beard dingy and stained in the increasing dawn; they hadn’t even missed him since they really began to dig. They waked him and helped him back to the buckboard.
The dog kennel box in which Ratliff carried the sewing-machines had a padlocked door. He took a few ears of corn from the box, then he stowed his and Bookwright’s bags of coins beneath the odds and ends of small and still-frozen traded objects at the back of it and locked it again.
“You put yours in here too, Henry,” he said. “What we want to do now is to forget we even got them until we find the rest of it and get it out of the ground.” But Armstid would not. He climbed stiffly onto the horse behind Bookwright, unaided, repudiating the aid which had not even been offered yet, clutching his bag inside the bib of his patched and faded overalls, and they departed.
Ratliff fed his team and watered them at the branch; he too was on the road before the sun rose. Just before nine o’clock he paid the old man his dollar fee and put him down where the five-mile path to his hut entered the river-bottom, and turned the wiry and indefatigable little horses back toward Frenchman’s Bend. There was somebody hid in that ditch, he thought. We got to buy it damn quick.
Later it seemed to him that, until he reached the store, he had not actually realised himself how quick they would have to buy it. Almost as soon as he came in sight of the store, he saw the new face among the familiar ones along the gallery and recognised it — Eustace Grimm, a young tenant-farmer living ten or twelve miles away in the next county with his wife of a year, to whom Ratliff intended to sell a sewing-machine as soon as they had finished paying for the baby born two months ago; as he tied his team to one of the gallery posts and mounted the heel-gnawed steps, he thought, Maybe sleeping rests a man, but it takes staying up all night for two or three nights and being worried and scared half to death during them, to sharpen him.
Because as soon as he recognised Grimm, something in him had clicked, though it would be three days before he would know what it was. He had not had his clothes off in more than sixty hours; he had had no breakfast today and what eating he had done in the last two days had been more than spotty — all of which showed in his face. But it didn’t show in his voice or anywhere else, and nothing else but that showed anywhere at all. “Morning, gentlemen,” he said.
“Be durn if you don’t look like you ain’t been to bed in a week, V. K.,” Freeman said. “What you up to now? Lon Quick said his boy seen your team and buckboard hid out in the bottom below Armstid’s two mornings ago, but I told him I didn’t reckon them horses had done nothing to have to hide from. So it must be you.”
“I reckon not,” Ratliff said. “Or I’d a been caught too, same as the team. I used to think I was too smart to be caught by anybody around here. But I don’t know now.” He looked at Grimm, his face, except for the sleeplessness and fatigue, as bland and quizzical and impenetrable as ever. “Eustace,” he said, “you’re strayed.”
“It looks like it,” Grimm said. “I come to see — —”
“He’s paid his road-tax,” Lump Snopes, the clerk, sitting as usual in the single chair tilted in the doorway, said. “Do you object to him using Yoknapatawpha roads too?”
“Sholy not,” Ratliff said. “And if he’d a just paid his poll-tax in the right place, he could drive his wagon through the store and through Will Varner’s house too.” They guffawed, all except Lump.
“Maybe I will yet,” Grimm said. “I come up here to see — —” He ceased, looking up at Ratliff. He was perfectly motionless, squatting, a sliver of wood in one hand and his open and arrested knife in the other. Ratliff watched him.
“Couldn’t you see him last night either?” he said.
“Couldn’t I see who last night?” Grimm said.
“How could he have seen anybody in Frenchman’s Bend last night when he wasn’t in Frenchman’s Bend last night?” Lump Snopes said. “Go on to the house, Eustace,” he said. “Dinner’s about ready. I’ll be along in a few minutes.”
“I got — —” Grimm said.
“You got twelve miles to drive to get home tonight,” Snopes said. “Go on, now.” Grimm looked at him a moment longer. Then he rose and descended the steps and went on up the road. Ratliff was no longer watching him. He was looking at Snopes.
“Eustace eating with you during his visit?” he said.
“He happens to be eating at Winterbottom’s where I happen to be boarding,” Snopes said harshly. “Where a few other folks happens to be eating and paying board too.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “You hadn’t ought to druv him away like that. Likely Eustace don’t get to town very often to spend a day or two examining the country and setting around store.”
“He’ll have his feet under his own table tonight,” Snopes said. “You can go down there and look at him. Then you can be in his backyard even before he opens his mouth.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said, pleasant, bland, inscrutable, with his spent and sleepless face. “When you expecting Flem back?”
“Back from where?” Snopes said, in that harsh voice. “From laying up yonder in that barrel-slat hammock, taking time about with Will Varner, sleeping? Likely never.”
“Him and Will and the womenfolks was in Jefferson yesterday,” Freeman said. “Will said they was coming home this morning.”
“Sho now,” Ratliff said. “Sometimes it takes a man even longer than a year to get his new wife out of the idea that money was just made to shop with.” He stood above them, leaning against a gallery post, indolent and easy, as if he had not ever even heard of haste.
So Flem Snopes has been in Jefferson since yesterday, he thought. And Lump Snopes didn’t want it mentioned. And Eustace Grimm — again his mind clicked still it would be three days before he would know what had clicked, because now he believed he did know, that he saw the pattern complete — and Eustace Grimm has been here since last night, since we heard that galloping horse anyway. Maybe they was both on the horse.
Maybe that’s why it sounded so loud. He could see that too — Lump Snopes and Grimm on the single horse, fleeing, galloping in the dark back to Frenchman’s Bend where Flem Snopes would still be absent until sometime in the early afternoon.
And Lump Snopes didn’t want that mentioned either, he thought, and Eustace Grimm
