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 the kitchen to start a fire in the stove and cook breakfast. Though the house was empty then.
Not safe of course: jest empty except for themselves while they tried to decide whether to try to get word in to Flem or Hub Hampton to come out and get them, or jest pack up themselves without even waiting to wash up the breakfast dishes, and move over to Tull’s.
Anyhow Dee-wit said him and Miz Dee-wit was through and they knowed it, four dollars a week or no four dollars a week; and so, it was about nine oclock, he was on his way to the store to use the telephone to call Jefferson, when Miz I.O. Snopes, I mean the Number Two one that got superseded back before she ever had a chance to move to town, saved him the trouble.”
We knew Clarence Snopes ourselves. He would be in town every Saturday, or every other time he could get a ride in, according to Ratliff — a big hulking man now, eighteen or nineteen, who was all a gray color: a graying tinge to his tow-colored hair, a grayish pasty look to his flesh, which looked as if it would not flow blood from a wound but instead a pallid fluid like thin oatmeal; he was the only Snopes or resident of Frenchman’s Bend or Yoknapatawpha County either for that matter, who made his Texas cousins welcome.
“You might say he adopted them,” Ratliff said. “Right from that first day. He even claimed he could talk to them and that he was going to train them to hunt in a pack; they would be better than any jest pack of dogs because sooner or later dogs always quit and went home, while it didn’t matter to them where they was.
“So he trained them. The first way he done it was to set a bottle of sody pop on a stump in front of the store with a string running from it to where he would be setting on the gallery, until they would maneuver around and finally bushwack up to where one of them could reach for it, when he would snatch it off the stump with the string and drag it out of their reach.
Only that never worked but once so then he would have to drink the bottles empty and then fill them again with muddy water or some such, or another good training method was to gather up a few throwed-away candy bar papers and wrap them up again with mud inside or maybe jest not nothing a-tall because it taken them a good while to give up then, especially if now and then he had a sho enough candy bar or a sho enough bottle of strawberry or orange shuffled into the other ones.
“Anyhow he was always with them, hollering at them and waving his arms to go this way or that way when folks was watching, like dogs; they even had some kind of a play house or cave or something in another ditch about half a mile up the road. That’s right. What you think you are laughing at is the notion of a big almost growed man like Clarence, playing, until all of a sudden you find out that what you’re laughing at is calling anything playing that them four things would be interested in.
“So Dee-wit had jest reached the store when here come Clarence’s maw, down the road hollering ‘Them Indians! Them Indians!’ jest like that: a pure and simple case of mother love and mother instinct.
Because likely she didn’t know anything yet and even if she had, in that state she couldn’t a told nobody: jest standing there in the road in front of the store wringing her hands and hollering Them Indians until the men squatting along the gallery begun to get up and then to run because about that time Dee-wit come up. Because he knowed what Miz Snopes was trying to say. Maybe he never had no mother love and mother instinct but then neither did Miz Snopes have a last-night’s knife-slash down both cheeks.
“ ‘Them Indians?’ he says. ‘Fore God, men, run. It may already be too late.’
“But it wasn’t. They was in time. Pretty soon they could hear Clarence bellowing and screaming and then they could line him out and the fastest ones run on ahead and down into the ditch to where Clarence was tied to a blackjack sapling with something less than a cord of wood stacked around him jest beginning to burn good.
“So they was in time. Jody telephoned Flem right away and in fact all this would a formally took place yesterday evening except that Clarence’s hunting pack never reappeared in sight until this morning when Dee-wit lifted the shade enough to see them waiting on the front gallery for breakfast.
But then his house was barred in time because he hadn’t never unbarred it from last night. And Jody’s car was already standing by on emergency alert as they say and it wasn’t much trouble to toll them into it since like Clarence said one place was jest like another to them.
“So they’re down at the dee-po now. Would either of you gentlemen like to go down with me and watch what they call the end of a erea, if that’s what they call what I’m trying to say? The last and final end of Snopes out-and-out unvarnished behavior in Jefferson, if that’s what I’m trying to say?”
So Ratliff and I went to the station while he told me the rest of it. It was Miss Emily Habersham; she had done the telephoning herself: to the Travellers’ Aid in New Orleans to meet the Jefferson train and put them on the one for El Paso, and to the El Paso Aid to get them across the border and turn them over to the Mexican police to send them back home, to Byron Snopes or the reservation or wherever it was.
Then I noticed the package and said, “What’s that?” but he didn’t answer. He just parked the pickup and took the cardboard carton and we went around onto the platform where they were: the three in the overalls and what Ratliff called the least un in the nightshirt, each with the new shipping tag wired to the front of its garment, but printed in big block capitals this time, like shouting this time:
From: Flem Snopes, Jefferson, Miss.
To: BYRON SNOPES
EL PASO, TEXAS
There was a considerable crowd around them, at a safe distance, when we came up and Ratliff opened the carton; it contained four of everything: four oranges and apples and candy bars and bags of peanuts and packages of chewing gum. “Watch out, now,” Ratliff said. “Maybe we better set it on the ground and shove it up with a stick or something.” But he didn’t mean that. Anyway, he didn’t do it.
He just said to me, “Come on; you aint quite growed so they may not
