She didn’t look sick; that wasn’t it. “I reckon it’s bedtime,” she said. She went beyond the quilt; it came back and hung straight down from the rafter, and I heard the loose board when she put the can away under the floor, and then I heard the sound the bed made when she would hold to the post to kneel down. It would make another sound when she got up, but when it made that sound, I was already undressed and in my pallet. The quilts were cold, but when the sound came I had been there long enough for them to begin to get warm.
Ab Snopes came and helped me and Joby with the new fence the next day, so we finished it early in the afternoon and I went back to the cabin. I was almost there when I saw Ringo on the mule turning in at the gates. Granny had seen him, too, because when I went inside the quilt, she was kneeling in the corner, taking the window shade from under the loose floor board. While she was unrolling the shade on the bed we heard Ringo getting off the mule, hollering at it while he hitched it to Louvinia’s clothesline.
Then Granny stood up and looked at the quilt until Ringo pushed it aside and came in. And then they sounded like two people playing a guessing game in code.
“ — th Illinois Infantry,” Ringo said. He came on toward the map on the bed. “Col. G. W. Newberry. Eight days out of Memphis.”
Granny watched him while he came toward the bed. “How many?” she said.
“Nineteen head,” Ringo said. “Four with; fifteen without.” Granny just watched him; she didn’t have to speak at all for the next one. “Twelve,” Ringo said. “Out of that Oxford batch.”
Granny looked at the map; they both looked at it. “July the twenty-second,” Granny said.
“Yessum,” Ringo said. Granny sat down on the saw chunk before the map. It was the only window shade Louvinia had; Ringo had drawn it (Father was right; he was smarter than me; he had even learned to draw, who had declined even to try to learn to print his name when Loosh was teaching me; who had learned to draw immediately by merely taking up the pen, who had no affinity for it and never denied he had not but who learned to draw simply because somebody had to.) with Granny showing him where to draw in the towns.
But it was Granny who had done the writing, in her neat spidery hand like she wrote in the cook-book with, written on the map by each town: Colonel or Major or Captain So-and-So, Such-and-Such Regiment or Troop Then, under that: 12 or 9 or 21 mules And around four of them, town and writing and all, in purple pokeberry juice instead of ink, a circle with a date in it, and in big neat letters Complete.
They looked at the map, Granny’s head white and still where the light came through the window on it, and Ringo leaning over her. He had got taller during the summer; he was taller than me now, maybe from the exercise of riding around the country, listening out for fresh regiments with mules, and he had got to treating me like Granny did — like he and Granny were the same age instead of him and me.
“We just sold that twelve in July,” Granny said. “That leaves only seven. And you say that four of them are branded.”
“That was back in July,” Ringo said. “It’s October now. They done forgot about hit. ‘Sides, look here” — he put his finger on the map. “We captived these here fourteen at Madison on the twelf of April, sont um to Memphis and sold um, and had all fourteen back and three more besides, here at Caledonia on the third of May.”
“But that was four counties apart,” Granny said. “Oxford and Mottstown are only a few miles apart.”
“Phut,” Ringo said, “these folks is too busy keeping us conquered to recognise no little ten or twelve head of stock. ‘Sides, if they does recognise um in Memphis, that’s Ab Snope’s trouble, not ourn.”
“Mister Snopes,” Granny said.
“All right,” Ringo said. He looked at the map. “Nineteen head, and not two days away. Jest forty-eight hours to have um in the pen.”
Granny looked at the map. “I don’t think we ought to risk it. We have been successful so far. Too successful perhaps.”
“Nineteen head,” Ringo said. “Four to keep and fifteen to sell back to um. That will make a even two hundred and forty-eight head of Confed’rit mules we done recovered and collected interest on, let alone the money.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Granny said. “I want to think about it.”
“All right,” Ringo said. Granny sat still beside the map. Ringo didn’t seem patient or impatient either; he just stood there, thin and taller than me against the light from the window, scratching himself. Then he began to dig with his right-hand little fingernail between his front teeth; he looked at his fingernail and spat something, and then he said, “Must been five minutes now.” He turned his head a little toward me without moving. “Get the pen and ink,” he said.
They kept the paper under the same floor board with the map and the tin can. I don’t know how or where Ringo got it. He just came back one night with about a hundred sheets of it, stamped with the official letterhead: UNITED STATES FORCES. DEPARTMENT OF TENNESSEE. He had got the pen and the ink at the same time, too; he took them from me, and now it was Ringo sitting on the saw chunk and Granny leaning over him. Granny still had the first letter — the order that Colonel Dick had given us in Alabama last year — she kept it in the can, too, and by now Ringo had learned to copy it so that I don’t believe that Colonel Dick himself could have told the difference.
All they had to do was to put in the right regiment and whatever number of mules Ringo had examined and approved, and sign the right general’s name to it. At first Ringo had wanted to sign Grant’s name every time, and when Granny said that would not do anymore, Lincoln’s.
At last Granny found out that Ringo objected to having the Yankees think that Father’s folks would have any dealings with anybody under the General-in-Chief. But at last he realised that Granny was right, that they would have to be careful about what general’s name was on the letter, as well as what mules they requisitioned. They were using General Smith now; he and Forrest were fighting every day up and down the road to Memphis, and Ringo always remembered to put in rope.
He wrote the date and the town, the headquarters; he wrote in Colonel Newberry’s name and the first line. Then he stopped; he didn’t lift the pen.
“What name you want this time?” he said.
“I’m worried about this,” Granny said. “We ought not to risk it.”
“We was on ‘F’ last time,” Ringo said. “It’s ‘H’ now. Think of a name in ‘H.’”
“Mrs. Mary Harris,” Granny said.
“We done used Mary before,” Ringo said. “How about Plurella Harris?”
“I’m worried about this time,” Granny said.
“Miz Plurella Harris,” Ringo said, writing. “Now we done used up ‘P’ too. ‘Member that, now. I reckon when we run out of letters, maybe we can start in on numbers. We will have nine hundred and ninety-nine before we have to worry, then.” He finished the order and signed “General Smith” to it; it looked exactly like the man who had signed the one Colonel Dick gave us was named General Smith, except for the number of mules. Then Granny turned and looked at me.
“Tell Mr. Snopes to be ready at sunup,” she said.
We went in the wagon, with Ab Snopes and his two men following on two of the mules. We went just fast enough so that we would reach the bivouac at suppertime, because Granny and Ringo had found out that that was the best time — that the stock would all be handy, and the men would be too hungry or sleepy or something to think very quick in case they happened to think, and we would just have time to get the mules and get out of sight before dark came. Then, if they should decide to chase us, by the time they found us in the dark, there wouldn’t be anything but the wagon with me and Granny in it to capture.
So we did; only this time it was a good thing we did. We left Ab Snopes and his men in the woods beyond the bivouac, and Granny and Ringo and I drove up to Colonel Newberry’s tent at exactly the right time, and Granny passed the sentry and went into the tent, walking thin and straight, with the shawl over her shoulders and Mrs. Compson’s hat on her head and the parasol in one hand and hers and Ringo’s General Smith order in the other, and Ringo and I sat in the wagon and looked at the cook fires about the grove and smelled the coffee and the meat. It was always the same.
Granny would disappear into the tent or the house, and then, in
