They probably had, and so knew at least one of those who were digging in the garden; now Snopes would not only have to get hold of his cousin first through his agent, Grimm, he might even then become involved in the bidding contest for the place against someone who (Ratliff added this without vanity) had more to outbid him with; he thought, musing, amazed as always though still impenetrable, how even a Snopes was not safe from another Snopes. Damn quick, he thought.
He stood away from the post and turned back toward the steps. “I reckon I’ll get along,” he said. “See you boys tomorrow.”
“Come home with me and take dinner,” Freeman said.
“Much obliged,” Ratliff said. “I ate breakfast late at Bookwright’s. I want to collect a machine note from Ike McCaslin this afternoon and be back here by dark.” He got into the buckboard and turned the team back down the road. Presently they had fallen into their road-gait, trotting rapidly on their short legs in the traces though their forward motion was not actually fast, on until they had passed Varner’s house, beyond which the road turned off to McCaslin’s farm and so out of sight from the store.
They entered this road galloping, the dust bursting from their shaggy backs in long spurts where the whip slashed them. He had three miles to go. After the first half-mile it would be all winding and little-used lane, but he could do it in twenty minutes. And it was only a little after noon, and it had probably been at least nine o’clock before Will Varner got his wife away from the Jefferson church-ladies’ auxiliary with which she was affiliated.
He made it in nineteen minutes, hurtling and bouncing among the ruts ahead of his spinning dust, and slowed the now-lathered team and swung them into the Jefferson highroad a mile from the village, letting them trot for another half-mile, slowing, to cool them out gradually.
But there was no sign of the surrey yet, so he went on at a walk until he reached a crest from which he could see the road for some distance ahead, and pulled out of the road into the shade of a tree and stopped. Now he had had no dinner either. But he was not quite hungry, and although after he had put the old man out and turned back toward the village this morning he had had an almost irresistible desire to sleep, that was gone too now.
So he sat in the buckboard, lax now, blinking painfully against the glare of noon, while the team (he never used check-reins) nudged the lines slack and grazed over the breast-yoke. People would probably pass and see him there; some might even be going toward the village, where they might tell of seeing him. But he would take care of that when it arose. It was as though he said to himself, Now I got a little while at least when I can let down.
Then he saw the surrey. He was already in the road, going at that road-gait which the whole countryside knew, full of rapid little hooves which still did not advance a great deal faster than two big horses could have walked, before anyone in the surrey could have seen him. And he knew that they had already seen and recognised him when, still two hundred yards from it, he pulled up and sat in the buckboard, affable, bland and serene except for his worn face, until Varner stopped the surrey beside him. “Howdy, V. K.,” Varner said.
“Morning,” Ratliff said. He raised his hat to the two women in the back seat. “Mrs. Varner. Mrs. Snopes.”
“Where you headed?” Varner said. “Town?” Ratliff told no lie; he attempted none, smiling a little, courteous, perhaps even a little deferential.
“I come out to meet you. I want to speak to Flem a minute.” He looked at Snopes for the first time. “I’ll drive you on home,” he said.
“Hah,” Varner said. “You had to come two miles to meet him and then turn around and go two miles back, to talk to him.”
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. He was still looking at Snopes.
“You got better sense than to try to sell Flem Snopes anything,” Varner said. “And you sholy ain’t fool enough by God to buy anything from him, are you?”
“I don’t know,” Ratliff said in that same pleasant and unchanged and impenetrable voice out of his spent and sleepless face, still looking at Snopes. “I used to think I was smart, but now I don’t know. I’ll bring you on home,” he said. “You won’t be late for dinner.”
“Go on and get out,” Varner said to his son-in-law. “He ain’t going to tell you till you do.” But Snopes was already moving. He spat outward over the wheel and turned and climbed down over it, backward, broad and deliberate in the soiled light-grey trousers, the white shirt, the plaid cap; the surrey went on.
Ratliff cramped the wheel and Snopes got into the buckboard beside him and he turned the buckboard and again the team fell into their tireless and familiar road-gait. But this time Ratliff reined them back until they were walking and held them so while Snopes chewed steadily beside him. They didn’t look at one another again.
“That Old Frenchman place,” Ratliff said. The surrey went on a hundred yards ahead, pacing its own dust, as they themselves were now doing. “What are you going to ask Eustace Grimm for it?” Snopes spat tobacco juice over the moving wheel. He did not chew fast nor did he seem to find it necessary to stop chewing in order to spit or speak either.
“He’s at the store, is he?” he said.
“Ain’t this the day you told him to come?” Ratliff said. “How much are you going to ask him for it?” Snopes told him. Ratliff made a short sound, something like Varner’s habitual ejaculation. “Do you reckon Eustace Grimm can get his hands on that much money?”
“I don’t know,” Snopes said. He spat over the moving wheel again. Ratliff might have said, Then you don’t want to sell it; Snopes would have answered, I’ll sell anything. But they did not. They didn’t need to.
“All right,” Ratliff said. “What are you going to ask me for it?” Snopes told him. It was the same amount. This time Ratliff used Varner’s ejaculation. “I’m just talking about them ten acres where that old house is.
I ain’t trying to buy all Yoknapatawpha County from you.” They crossed the last hill; the surrey began to move faster, drawing away from them. The village was not far now. “We’ll let this one count,” Ratliff said.
“How much do you want for that Old Frenchman place?” His team was trying to trot too, ahead of the buckboard’s light weight. Ratliff held them in, the road beginning to curve to pass the schoolhouse and enter the village. The surrey had already vanished beyond the curve.
“What do you want with it?” Snopes said.
“To start a goat-ranch,” Ratliff said. “How much?” Snopes spat over the moving wheel. He named the sum for the third time. Ratliff slacked off the reins and the little strong tireless team began to trot, sweeping around the last curve and past the empty schoolhouse, the village now in sight, the surrey in sight too, already beyond the store, going on. “That fellow, that teacher you had three-four years ago. Labove. Did anybody ever hear what become of him?”
A little after six that evening, in the empty and locked store, Ratliff and Bookwright and Armstid bought the Old Frenchman place from Snopes. Ratliff gave a quit-claim deed to his half of the side-street lunch-room in Jefferson. Armstid gave a mortgage on his farm, including the buildings and tools and livestock and about two miles of three-strand wire fence; Bookwright paid his third in cash.
Then Snopes let them out the front door and locked it again and they stood on the empty gallery in the fading August afterglow and watched him depart up the road toward Varner’s house — two of them did, that is, because Armstid had already gone ahead and got into the buckboard, where he sat motionless and waiting and emanating that patient and seething fury. “It’s ours now,” Ratliff said. “And now we better get on out there and watch it before somebody fetches in Uncle Dick Bolivar some night and starts hunting buried money.”
They went first to Bookwright’s house (he was a bachelor) and got the mattress from his bed and two quilts and his coffee-pot and skillet and another pick and shovel, then they went to Armstid’s home. He had but one mattress too, but then he had a wife and five small children; besides, Ratliff, who had seen the mattress, knew that it would not even bear being lifted from the bed.
So Armstid got a quilt and they helped him fill an empty feed sack with shucks for a pillow and returned to the buckboard, passing the house in the door of which his wife still stood, with four of the children huddled about her now. But she still said nothing, and when Ratliff looked back from the moving buckboard, the door was empty.
When they turned from the old road and drove up through the shaggy park to the shell of the ruined house, there was still light enough for them to see the wagon and mules standing before
