“You ain’t going to find them behind a tree we have already passed,” I said. We didn’t. We had passed where a house had burned, and then we were passing another house with an old white horse looking at us out of the stable door behind it, and then I saw six men running in the next field, and then we saw a dust cloud coming fast out of a lane that crossed the road.
Joby said, “Them folks look like they trying to make the Yankees take they stock, running hit up and down the big road in broad daylight like that.”
They rode right out of the dust cloud without seeing us at all, crossing the road, and the first ten or twelve had already jumped the ditch with pistols in their hands, like when you run with a stick of stove wood balanced on your palm; and the last ones came out of the dust with five men running and holding to stirrups, and us sitting there in the wagon with Joby holding the mules like they were sitting down on the whiffletrees and his mouth hanging open and his eyes like two eggs, and I had forgotten what the blue coats looked like.
It was fast — like that — all sweating horses with wild eyes, and men with wild faces full of yelling, and then Granny standing up in the wagon and beating the five men about their heads and shoulders with the umbrella while they unfastened the traces and cut the harness off the mules with pocket knives.
They didn’t say a word; they didn’t even look at Granny while she was hitting them; they just took the mules out of the wagon, and then the two mules and the five men disappeared together in another cloud of dust, and the mules came out of the dust, soaring like hawks, with two men on them and two more just falling backward over the mules’ tails and the fifth man already running, too, and the two that were on their backs in the road getting up with little scraps of cut leather sticking to them like a kind of black shavings in a sawmill.
The three of them went off across the field after the mules, and then we heard the pistols away off like striking a handful of matches at one time, and Joby still sitting on the seat with his mouth still open and the ends of the cut reins in his hands, and Granny still standing in the wagon with the bent umbrella lifted and hollering at Ringo and me while we jumped out of the wagon and ran across the road.
“The stable,” I said. “The stable!” While we were running up the hill toward the house, we could see our mules still galloping in the field, and we could see the three men running too.
When we ran around the house, we could see the wagon, too, in the road, with Joby on the seat above the wagon tongue sticking straight out ahead, and Granny standing up and shaking the umbrella toward us, and even though I couldn’t hear her I knew she was still shouting.
Our mules had run into the woods, but the three men were still in the field and the old white horse was watching them, too, in the barn door; he never saw us until he snorted and jerked back and kicked over something behind him. It was a homemade shoeing box, and he was tied by a rope halter to the ladder to the loft, and there was even a pipe still burning on the ground.
We climbed onto the ladder and got on him, and when we came out of the barn we could still see the three men; but we had to stop while Ringo got down and opened the lot gate and got back on again, and so they were gone, too, by then.
When we reached the woods, there was no sign of them and we couldn’t hear anything, either, but the old horse’s insides. We went on slower then, because the old horse wouldn’t go fast again, anyway, and so we tried to listen, and so it was almost sunset when we came out into a road.
“Here where they went,” Ringo said. They were mule tracks. “Tinney and Old Hundred’s tracks bofe,” Ringo said. “I know um anywhere. They done throwed them Yankees and heading back home.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Is I sure? You reckon I ain’t followed them mules all my life and can’t tell they tracks when I see um? . . . Git up there, horse!”
We went on, but the old horse could not go very fast. After a while the moon came up, but Ringo still said he could see the tracks of our mules. So we went on, only now the old horse went even slower than ever because presently I caught Ringo and held him as he slipped off and then a little later Ringo caught and held me from slipping before I even knew that I had been asleep.
We didn’t know what time it was, we didn’t care; we only heard after a time the slow hollow repercussion of wood beneath the horse’s feet and we turned from the road and hitched the bridle to a sapling; we probably both crawled beneath the bridge already asleep; still sleeping, we doubtless continued to crawl.
Because if we had not moved, they would not have found us. I waked, still believing I dreamed of thunder. It was light; even beneath the close weed-choked bridge Ringo and I could sense the sun though not at once; for the time we just sat there beneath the loud drumming, while the loose planks of the bridge floor clattered and danced to the hooves; we sat there for a moment staring at one another in the pale jonquil-colored light almost before we were awake.
Perhaps that was it, perhaps we were still asleep, were taken so suddenly in slumber that we had not time to think of Yankees or anything else; we were out from beneath the bridge and already running before we remembered having begun to move; I looked back one time and (the road, the bridge, was five or six feet higher than the earth beside it) it looked as if the whole rim of the world was full of horses running along the sky.
Then everything ran together again as it had yesterday; even while our legs still continued to run Ringo and I had dived like two rabbits into a brier patch, feeling no thorn, and lay on our faces in it while men shouted and horses crashed around us, then hard hands dragged us, clawing and kicking and quite blind, out of the thicket and onto our feet.
Then sight returned — a vacuum, an interval, of amazing and dewy-breathed peace and quiet while Ringo and I stood in a circle of mounted and dismounted men and horses. Then I recognised Jupiter standing big and motionless and pale in the dawn as a mesmerised flame, then Father was shaking me and shouting, “Where’s your grandmother? Where’s Miss Rosa?” and then Ringo, in a tone of complete amazement: “We done fergot Granny!”
“Forgot her?” Father shouted. “You mean you ran away and left her sitting there in that wagon in the middle of the road?”
“Lord, Marse John,” Ringo said. “You know hit ain’t no Yankee gonter bother her if he know hit.”
Father swore. “How far back did you leave her?”
“It was about three o’clock yesterday,” I said. “We rode some last night.”
Father turned to the others. “Two of you boys take them up behind you; we’ll lead that horse.” Then he stopped and turned back to us. “Have you-all had anything to eat?”
“Eat?” Ringo said. “My stomach think my throat been cut.”
Father took a pone of bread from his saddle bag and broke it and gave it to us. “Where did you get that horse?” he said.
After a while I said, “We borrowed it.”
“Who from?” Father said.
After a while Ringo said, “We ain’t know. The man wasn’t there.” One of the men laughed. Father looked at him quick, and he hushed. But just for a minute, because all of a sudden they all began to whoop and holler, and Father looking around at them and his face getting redder and redder.
“Don’t you say a word, Colonel,” one of them said. “Hooraw for Sartoris!”
We galloped back; it was not far; we came to the field where the men had run, and the house with the barn, and in the road we could still see the scraps of harness where they had cut it. But the wagon was gone.
Father led the old horse up to the house himself and knocked on the porch floor with his pistol, and the door of the house was still open, but nobody came. We put the old horse back into the barn; the pipe was still on the ground by the overturned shoeing box. We came back to the road and Father sat Jupiter in the middle of the litter of harness scraps.
“You damn boys,” he said. “You damn boys.”
When we went on now, we went slower; there were three men riding on ahead out of sight. In the afternoon, one of them came galloping back, and Father left Ringo and me three. others, and he and the rest rode on; it was almost sunset when they came back with their horses sweated a little and
