One of them didn’t have any children but they had a Cadillac and his wife had a dog that they said cost five hundred dollars, the only dog higher than fifty dollars except a field-trial pointer or setter (and a part Airedale bear dog named Lion that Major de Spain, Mr de Spain’s father, owned once that hunting people in north Mississippi still talked about) that Jefferson ever heard of, let alone saw — a Pekinese with a gold name-plate on its collar that probably didn’t even know it was a dog, that rode in the Cadillac and sneered through the window not just at other dogs but at people too, and even ate special meat that Mr Wall Snopes’s butcher ordered special from Kansas City because it cost too much for just people to buy and eat it.
One day it disappeared. Nobody knew how, since the only time it wasn’t sneering out through the Cadillac window, it was sneering out through a window in the house where it — they — lived. But it was gone and I dont think anywhere else ever saw a woman take on over anything like Mrs Widrington did, with rewards in all the Memphis and north Mississippi and west Tennessee and east Arkansas papers and Mr Hampton and Mr Connors neither able to sleep at night for Mrs Widrington ringing their telephone, and the man from the insurance company (its life was insured too so maybe there were more people insured in Jefferson than there were dogs but then there was more of them not insured in Jefferson than there was dogs too) and Mrs Widrington herself likely at almost any time day or night to be in your back yard calling what Aleck Sander and I thought was Yow! Yow! Yow! until Uncle Gavin told us it was named Lao T’se for a Chinese poet. Until one day the four Snopes Indians came out of Christian’s drugstore and somebody passing on the street pointed his finger and hollered “Look!”
It was the collar with the gold name-plate. The little one was wearing it around its neck above the nightshirt. Mr Connors came quick and sent about as quick for Mr Hampton. And that was when Mr Hampton didn’t come any closer either and I reckon we all were thinking about what he was: what a mess that big gut of his would make on the sidewalk if he got too close to that knife before he knew it.
And the four Snopes Indians or Indian Snopeses, whichever is right, standing in a row watching him, not looking dangerous, not looking anything; not innocent especially and nobody would have called it affectionate, but not dangerous in the same sense that four shut pocket knives dont look threatening. They look like four shut pocket knives but they dont look lethal. Until Mr Hampton said:
“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
