And at first I thought that the black man was Grumby, like I had thought that maybe Ab Snopes was. But Uncle Buck said not. It was the next morning; we hadn’t slept much because Uncle Buck wouldn’t go to sleep; only we didn’t know then that it was his arm, because he wouldn’t even let us talk about taking him back home.
And now we tried again, after we had finished breakfast, but he wouldn’t listen, already on his mule with his left arm tied across his chest and the pistol stuck between the arm and his chest, where he could get to it quick, saying, “Wait. Wait,” and his eyes hard and snapping with thinking. “It’s something I ain’t quite got yet,” he said. “Something he was telling us last night without aiming to have us know yet that he had told us. Something that we are going to find out today.”
“Likely a bullet that’s fixing to hit you halfway betwixt both arms stid of halfway betwixt one,” Ringo said.
Uncle Buck rode fast; we could watch his stick rising and falling against the mule’s flank, not hard, just steady and fast, like a crippled man in a hurry that has used the stick so long he don’t even know it any more. Because we didn’t know that his arm was making him sick yet; he hadn’t given us time to realise it. So we hurried on, riding along beside a slough, and then Ringo saw the snake.
It had been warm for a week, until last night. But last night it made ice, and now we saw the moccasin where it had crawled out and was trying to get back into the water when the cold got it, so that it lay with its body on the land and its head fixed in the skim ice like it was set into a mirror, and Uncle Buck turned sideways on his mule, hollering at us: “There it is, by Godfrey! There’s the sign! Didn’t I tell you we would—”
We all heard it at once — the three or maybe four shots and then the sound of horses galloping, except that some of the galloping came from Uncle Buck’s mule, and he had his pistol out now before he turned from the road and into the trees, with the stick jammed under his hurt arm and his beard flying back over his shoulder. But we didn’t find anything.
We saw the marks in the mud where the five horses had stood while the men that rode them had watched the road, and we saw the sliding tracks where the horses had begun to gallop, and I thinking quietly, “He still don’t know that that shoe is gone.” But that was all, and Uncle Buck sitting on his mule with the pistol raised in his hand and his beard blown back over his shoulder and the leather thong of the pistol hanging down his back like a girl’s pigtail, and his mouth open and his eyes blinking at me and Ringo.
“What in the tarnation hell!” he said. “Well, let’s go back to the road. Whatever it was has done gone that way too.”
So we had turned. Uncle Buck had put the pistol up and his stick had begun to beat the mule again when we saw what it was, what it meant.
It was Ab Snopes. He was lying on his side, tied hand and foot, and hitched to a sapling; we could see the marks in the mud where he had tried to roll back into the underbrush until the rope stopped him.
He had been watching us all the time, lying there with his face in the shape of snarling and not making a sound after he found out he could not roll out of sight. He was watching our mules’ legs and feet under the bushes; he hadn’t thought to look any higher yet, and so he did not know that we could see him; he must have thought that we had just spied him, because all of a sudden he began to jerk and thrash on the ground, hollering, “Help! Help! Help!”
We untied him and got him onto his feet, and he was still hollering, loud, with his face and his arms jerking, about how they had caught and robbed him, and they would have killed him if they hadn’t heard us coming and run away; only his eyes were not hollering. They were watching us, going fast and quick from Ringo to me to Uncle Buck, and then at Ringo and me again, and they were not hollering, like his eyes belonged to one man and his gaped and yelling mouth belonged to another.
“So they caught you, hey?” Uncle Buck said. “A innocent and unsuspecting traveler. I reckon the name of them would never be Grumby now, would it?”
It was like we might have stopped and built a fire and thawed out that moccasin — just enough for it to find out where it was, but not enough for it to know what to do about it.
Only I reckon it was a high compliment to set Ab Snopes up with a moccasin, even a little one. I reckon it was bad for him. I reckon he realised that they had thrown him back to us without mercy, and that if he tried to save himself from us at their expense, they would come back and kill him.
I reckon he decided that the worst thing that could happen to him would be for us not to do anything to him at all. Because he quit jerking his arms; he even quit lying; for a minute his eyes and his mouth were telling the same thing.
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I admit hit. I reckon everybody does. The question is, what are you fellows going to do about hit?”
“Yes,” Uncle Buck said. “Everybody makes mistakes. Your trouble is, you make too many. Because mistakes are bad. Look at Rosa Millard. She just made one, and look at her. And you have made two.”
Ab Snopes watched Uncle Buck. “What’s them?”
“Being born too soon and dying too late,” Uncle Buck said.
He looked at all of us, fast; he didn’t move, still talking to Uncle Buck. “You ain’t going to kill me. You don’t dast.”
“I don’t even need to,” Uncle Buck said. “It wasn’t my grandmaw you sicked onto that snake den.”
He looked at me now, but his eyes were going again, back and forth across me at Ringo and Uncle Buck; it was the two of them again now, the eyes and the voice. “Why, then I’m all right. Bayard ain’t got no hard feelings against me.
He knows hit was a pure accident; that we was doing hit for his sake and his paw and them niggers at home. Why, here hit’s a whole year and it was me that holp and tended Miss Rosa when she never had ara living soul but them chil—” Now the voice began to tell the truth again; it was the eyes and the voice that I was walking toward. He fell back, crouching, his hands flung up.
Behind me, Uncle Buck said, “You, Ringo! Stay back.”
He was walking backward now, with his hands flung up, hollering, “Three on one! Three on one!”
“Stand still,” Uncle Buck said. “Ain’t no three on you. I don’t see nobody on you but one of them children you was just mentioning.” Then we were both down in the mud; and then I couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t seem to find him any more, not even with the hollering; and then I was fighting three or four for a long time before Uncle Buck and Ringo held me, and then I could see him again, lying on the ground with his arms over his face. “Get up,” Uncle Buck said.
“No,” he said. “Three of you can jump on me and knock me down again, but you got to pick me up first to do hit. I ain’t got no rights and justice here, but you can’t keep me from protesting hit.”
“Lift him up,” Uncle Buck said. “I’ll hold Bayard.”
Ringo lifted him; it was like lifting up a half-filled cotton sack. “Stand up, Mr. Ab Snopes,” Ringo said. But he would not stand, not even after Ringo and Uncle Buck tied him to the sapling and Ringo had taken off his and Uncle Buck’s and Ab Snopes’ galluses and knotted them together with the bridle reins from the mules.
He just hung there in the rope, not even flinching when the lash fell, saying, “That’s hit. Whup me. Lay hit on me; you got me three to one.”
“Wait,” Uncle Buck said. Ringo stopped. “You want another chance with one to one? You can take your choice of the three of us.”
“I got my rights,” he said. “I’m helpless, but I can still protest hit. Whup me.”
I reckon he was right. I reckon if we had let him go clean, they would have circled back and killed him themselves before dark. Because — that was the night it began to rain and we had to burn Ringo’s stick because Uncle Buck admitted now that his arm was getting bad — we all ate supper together, and it was Ab Snopes that was the most anxious about Uncle Buck, saying how it wasn’t any hard feelings and
