“I tole you they wasn’t no Yankees gonter stop Granny,” Ringo said. “I bet she in Memphis right now.”
“I hope for your sake she is,” Father said. He jerked his hand at the new horses. “You and Bayard get on them.” Ringo went to one of the new horses. “Wait,” Father said; “the other one is yours.”
“You mean hit belong to me?” Ringo said.
“No,” Father said. “You borrowed it.”
Then we all stopped and watched Ringo trying to get on his horse. The horse would stand perfectly still until he would feel Ringo’s weight on the stirrup; then he would whirl completely around until his off side faced Ringo; the first time Ringo wound up lying on his back in the road.
“Get on him from that side,” Father said laughing.
Ringo looked at the horse and then at Father. “Git up from the wrong side?” Ringo said. “I knowed Yankees wasn’t folks, but I never knowed before they horses ain’t horses.”
“Get on up,” Father said. “He’s blind in his near eye.”
It got dark while we were still riding, and after a while I waked up with somebody holding me in the saddle, and we were stopped in some trees and there was a fire, but Ringo and I didn’t even stay awake to eat, and then it was morning again and all of them were gone but Father and eleven more, but we didn’t start off even then; we stayed there in the trees all day. “What are we going to do now?” I said.
“I’m going to take you damn boys home, and then I’ve got to go to Memphis and find your grandmother,” Father said.
Just before dark we started; we watched Ringo trying to get on his horse from the nigh side for a while and then we went on. We rode until dawn and stopped again. This time we didn’t build a fire; we didn’t even unsaddle right away; we lay hidden in the woods, and then Father was waking me with his hand. It was after sunup and we lay there and listened to a column of Yankee infantry pass in the road, and then I slept again. It was noon when I waked. There was a fire now and a shote cooking over it, and we ate. “We’ll be home by midnight,” Father said.
Jupiter was rested. He didn’t want the bridle for a while and then he didn’t want Father to get on him, and even after we were started he still wanted to go; Father had to hold him back between Ringo and me. Ringo was on his right. “You and Bayard better swap sides,” Father told Ringo, “so your horse can see what’s beside him.”
“He going all right,” Ringo said. “He like hit this way. Maybe because he can smell Jupiter another horse, and know Jupiter ain’t fixing to get on him and ride.”
“All right,” Father said. “Watch him though.” We went on. Mine and Ringo’s horses could go pretty well, too; when I looked back, the others were a good piece behind, out of our dust. It wasn’t far to sundown.
“I wish I knew your grandmother was all right,” Father said.
“Lord, Marse John,” Ringo said, “is you still worrying about Granny? I been knowed her all my life; I ain’t worried about her.”
Jupiter was fine to watch, with his head up and watching my horse and Ringo’s, and boring a little and just beginning to drive a little. “I’m going to let him go a little,” Father said. “You and Ringo watch yourselves.” I thought Jupiter was gone then. He went out like a rocket, flattening a little.
But I should have known that Father still held him, because I should have seen that he was still boring, but there was a snake fence along the road, and all of a sudden it began to blur, and then I realised that Father and Jupiter had not moved up at all, that it was all three of us flattening out up toward the crest of the hill where the road dipped like three swallows, and I was thinking, ‘We’re holding Jupiter. We’re holding Jupiter,’ when Father looked back, and I saw his eyes and his teeth in his beard, and I knew he still had Jupiter on the bit.
He said, “Watch out, now,” and then Jupiter shot out from between us; he went out exactly like I have seen a hawk come out of a sage field and rise over a fence.
When they reached the crest of the hill, I could see sky under them and the tops of the trees beyond the hill like they were flying, sailing out into the air to drop down beyond the hill like the hawk; only they didn’t.
It was like Father stopped Jupiter in mid-air on top of the hill; I could see him standing in the stirrups and his arm up with his hat in it, and then Ringo and I were on them before we could even begin to think to pull, and Jupiter reined back onto his haunches, and then Father hit Ringo’s horse across the blind eye with the hat and I saw Ringo’s horse swerve and jump clean over the snake fence, and I heard Ringo hollering as I went on over the crest of the hill, with Father just behind me shooting his pistol and shouting, “Surround them, boys! Don’t let a man escape!”
There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything, given time, but to what it can accept, a limit in time, in the very time which nourishes the believing of the incredible.
And I was still a child at that moment when Father’s and my horses came over the hill and seemed to cease galloping and to float, hang suspended rather in a dimension without time in it while Father held my horse reined back with one hand and I heard Ringo’s half-blind beast crashing and blundering among the trees to our right and Ringo yelling, and looked quietly down at the scene beneath rather than before us — the dusk, the fire, the creek running quiet and peaceful beneath a bridge, the muskets all stacked carefully and neatly and nobody within fifty feet of them; and the men, the faces, the blue Yankee coats and pants and boots, squatting about the fire with cups in their hands and looking toward the crest of the hill with the same peaceful expression on all their faces like so many dolls. Father’s hat was flung onto his head now, his teeth were showing and his eyes were bright as a cat’s.
“Lieutenant,” he said, loud, jerking my horse around, “ride back up the hill and close in with your troop on their right. Git!” he whispered, slapping my horse across the rump with his hand. “Make a fuss! Holler! See if you can keep up with Ringo. — Boys,” he said, while they still looked up at him; they hadn’t even put the cups down: “Boys, I’m John Sartoris, and I reckon I’ve got you.”
Ringo was the only difficult one to capture. The rest of Father’s men came piling over the hill, reining back, and I reckon that for a minute their faces looked about like the Yankees’ faces did, and now and then I would quit thrashing the bushes and I could hear Ringo on his side hollering and moaning and hollering again, “Marse John! You, Marse John! You come here quick!” and hollering for me, calling Bayard and Colonel and Marse John and Granny until it did sound like a company at least, and then hollering at his horse again, and it running back and forth. I reckon he had forgotten again and was trying to get up on the nigh side again, until at last Father said, “All right, boys. You can come on in.”
It was almost dark then. They had built up the fire, and the Yankees still sitting around it and Father and the others standing over them with their pistols while two of them were taking the Yankees’ pants and boots off. Ringo was still hollering off in the trees. “I reckon you better go and extricate Lieutenant Marengo,” Father said.
Only about that time Ringo’s horse came bursting out with his blind eye looking big as a plate and still trotting in a circle with his knees up to his chin, and then Ringo came out. He looked wilder than the horse; he was already talking, he was saying, “I’m gonter tell Granny on you, making my horse run—” when he saw the Yankees.
His mouth was already open, and he kind of squatted for a second, looking at them. Then he hollered, “Look out! Ketch um! Ketch um, Marse John! They stole Old Hundred and Tinney!”
We all ate supper together — Father and us and the Yankees in their underclothes.
The officer talked to Father. He said, “Colonel, I believe you have fooled us. I don’t believe there’s another man of you but what I see.”
“You might try to depart, and prove your point,” Father said.
“Depart? Like this? And have every darky and old woman between here and Memphis shooting at us for ghosts? . . . I suppose we can have our blankets to sleep in, can’t we?”
“Certainly, Captain,” Father said. “And with your permission, I shall now retire and leave you to set about that business.”
We went back into the darkness. We could see them about the
