“What do they do when they aint eating ice cream up here or breaking in or out of that bottling plant at two oclock in the morning?”
“They got a kind of camp or reservation or whatever you might call it in a cave they dug in the big ditch behind the school house,” Mr Connors said.
“Did you look there?” Mr Hampton said.
“Sure,” Mr Connors said. “Nothing there but just some trash and bones and stuff they play with.”
“Bones?” Mr Hampton said. “What bones?”
“Just bones,” Mr Connors said. “Chicken bones, spare ribs, stuff like that they been eating I reckon.”
So Mr Hampton went and got in his car and Mr Connors went to his that had the red light and the sireen on it and a few others got in while there was still room, and the two cars went to the school house, the rest of us walking because we wanted to see if Mr Hampton with his belly really would try to climb down into that ditch and if he did how he was going to get out again.
But he did it, with Mr Connors showing him where the cave was but letting him go first since he was the sheriff, on to where the little pile of bones was behind the fireplace and turned them over with his toe and then raked a few of them to one side. Because he was a hunter, a woodsman, a good one before his belly got too big to go through a thicket. “There’s your dog,” he said.
And I remember that time, five years ago now, we were all at the table and Matt Levitt’s cut-out passing in the street and Father said at Uncle Gavin: “What’s that sound I smell?” Except that Mr Snopes’s brass business at the power-plant was before I was even born: Uncle Gavin’s office that morning and Mrs Widrington and the insurance man because the dog’s life had been insured only against disease or accident or acts of God, and the insurance man’s contention (I reckon he had been in Jefferson long enough to have talked with Ratliff; any stranger in town for just half a day, let alone almost a week, would find himself doing that) was that four half-Snopeses and half-Jicarilla Apache Indians were none of them and so Jefferson itself was liable and vulnerable to suit.
So I had only heard about Mr Snopes and the missing brass from Uncle Gavin, but I thought about what Father said that day because I had been there then: “What’s that sound I smell?” when Mr Snopes came in, removing his hat and saying “Morning” to everybody without saying it to anybody; then to the insurance man: “How much on that dog?”
“Full pedigree value, Mr Snopes. Five hundred dollars,” the insurance man said and Mr Snopes (the insurance man himself got up and turned his chair around to the desk for him) sat down and took a blank check from his pocket and filled in the amount and pushed it across the desk in front of Uncle Gavin and got up and said “Morning” without saying it to anybody and put his hat on and went out.
Except that he didn’t quite stop there. Because the next day Byron Snopes’s Indians were gone. Ratliff came in and told us.
“Sho,” he said. “Flem sent them out to the Bend. Neither of their grandmaws, I mean I.O.’s wives, would have them but finally Dee-wit Binford” — Dewitt Binford had married another of the Snopes girls. They lived near Varner’s store— “taken them in. On a contract, the Snopeses all clubbing together pro rata and paying Dee-wit a dollar a head a week on them, providing of course he can last a week. Though naturally the first four dollars was in advance, what you might call a retainer you might say.”
It was. I mean, just about a week. Ratliff came in again; it was in the morning. “We jest finished using up Frenchman’s Bend at noon yesterday, and that jest about cleans up the county.
We’re down at the dee-po now, all tagged and the waybill paid, waiting for Number Twenty-Three southbound or any other train that will connect more or less or thereabouts for El Paso, Texas” — telling about that too: “A combination you might say of scientific interest and what’s that word?” until Uncle Gavin told him anthropological “anthropological coincidence; them four vanishing Americans coming durn nigh taking one white man with them if Clarence Snopes’s maw and a few neighbors hadn’t got there in time.”
He told it: how when Dewitt Binford got them home he discovered they wouldn’t stay in a bed at all, dragging a quilt off onto the floor and lying in a row on it and the next morning he and his wife found the bedstead itself dismantled and leaned against the wall in a corner out of the way; and that they hadn’t heard a sound during the process.
He — Dewitt — said that’s what got on his mind even before he began to worry about the little one: you couldn’t hear them; you didn’t even know they were in the house or not, when they had entered it or left it; for all you knew, they might be right there in your bedroom in the dark, looking at you.
“So he tried it,” Ratliff said. “He went over to Tull’s and borrowed Vernon’s flashlight and waited until about midnight and he said he never moved quieter in his life, across the hall to the door of the room, trying to not even breathe if he could help it; he had done already cut two sighting notches in the door-frame so that when he laid the flashlight into them by feel it would be aimed straight at where the middle two heads would be on the pallet; and held his breath again, listening until he was sho there wasn’t a sound, and snapped on the light. And them four faces and them eight black eyes already laying there wide open looking straight at him.
“And Dee-wit said he would like to a give up then. But by that time that least un wouldn’t give him no rest a-tall. Only he didn’t know what to do because he had done been warned about that knife even if he hadn’t never seen it.
Then he remembered them pills, that bottle of knock-out opium pills that Doc Peabody had give Miz Dee-wit that time the brooder lamp blowed up and burnt most of her front hair off so he taken eight of them and bought four bottles of sody pop at the store and put two capsules into each bottle and druv the caps back on and hid the bottles jest exactly where he figgered they would have to hunt jest exactly hard enough to find them.
And by dark the four bottles was gone and he waited again to be sho it had had plenty of time to work and taken Vernon’s flashlight and went across the hall and got on his hands and knees and crawled across to the pallet — he knowed by practice now exactly where on the pallet that least un slept or anyway laid — and reached out easy and found the hem of that nightshirt with one hand and the flashlight ready to snap on in the other.
“And when he told about it, he was downright crying, not with jest skeer so much as pure and simple unbelief. ‘I wasn’t doing nothing,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t going to hurt it. All in the world I wanted was jest to see which it was—’”
“Which is it?” Uncle Gavin said.
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Ratliff said. “He never even got to snap the flashlight on. He jest felt them two thin quick streaks of fire, one down either cheek of his face; he said that all that time he was already running backward on his hands and knees toward the door he knowed there wouldn’t even be time to turn around, let alone get up on his feet to run, not to mention shutting the door behind him; and when he run back into his and Miz Dee-wit’s room there wouldn’t be no time to shut that one neither except he had to, banging it shut and hollering for Miz Dee-wit now, dragging the bureau against it while Miz Dee-wit lit the lamp and then come and holp him until he hollered at her to shut the windows first; almost crying, with them two slashes running from each ear, jest missing his eye on one side, right down to the corners of his mouth like a great big grin that would bust scab and all if he ever let his face go, telling how they would decide that the best thing would be to put the lamp out too and set in the dark until he remembered how they had managed somehow to get inside that locked-up coca cola plant without even touching the patented burglar alarm.
“So they jest shut and locked the windows and left the lamp burning, setting there in that air-tight room on that hot summer night, until it come light enough for Miz Dee-wit to at least jump and dodge on the way back to
