Sanctuary

down the aisle swiftly, looking at Horace. He slowed, the cigar in his

fingers. The train jolted again. The man flung his hand out and caught the

back of the seat facing Horace.

"Aint this Judge Benbow?" he said. Horace looked up into a vast, puffy face

without any mark of age or thought whatever-a majestic sweep of flesh on

either side of a small blunt nose, like looking out over a mesa, yet withal

some indefinable quality of delicate paradox, as though the Creator had

completed his joke by lighting the munificent expenditure

SANCTUARY 99

of putty with something originally intended for some weak, acquisitive

creature like a squirrel or a rat. "Dont I address Judge Benbow?" he said,

offering his hand. "I'm Senator Snopes, Cla'ence Snopes."

"Oh," Horace said, "yes. Thanks," he said, "but I'm afraid you anticipate

a little. Hope, rather."

The other waved the cigar, the other hand, palm-up, the third finger

discolored faintly at the base of a huge ring, in Horace's face. Horace

shook it and freed his hand. "I thought I recognised you when you got on at

Oxford," Snopes said, "but I-May I sit down?" he said, already shoving at

Horace's knee with his leg. He flung the overcoat-a shoddy blue garment

with a greasy velvet collar--on the seat and sat down as the train stopped.

"Yes, sir, I'm always glad to see any of the boys, any time . . ." He

leaned across Horace and peered out the window at a small dingy station

with its cryptic bulletin board chalked over, an express truck bearing a

wire chicken coop containing two forlorn fowls, at three or four men in

overalls gone restfully against the wall, chewing. " 'Course you aint in my

county no longer, but what I say a man's friends is his friends, whichever

way they vote. Because a friend is a friend and whether he can do anything

for me or not . . ." He leaned back, the unlighted cigar in his fingers.

"You aint come all the way up from the big town, then."

"No," Horace said.

"Anytime you're in Jackson, I'll be glad to accommodate you as if you was

still in my county. Dont no man stay so busy he aint got time for his old

friends, what I say. Let's see, you're in Kinston, now, aint you? I know

your senators. Fine men, both of them, but I just caint call their names."

"I really couldn't say, myself," Horace said. The train started. Snopes

leaned into the aisle, looking back. His light gray suit had been pressed

but not cleaned. "Well," he said. He rose and took up the overcoat. "Any

time you're in the city . . . You going to Jefferson, I reckon?"

"Yes," Horace said.

"I'll see you again, then."

"Why not ride back here?" Horace said. "You'll find it more comfortable."

"I'm going up and have a smoke," Snopes said, waving his cigar. "I'll see

you again."

"You can smoke here. There aren't any ladies."

"Sure," Snopes said. "I'll see you at Holly Springs." He went on back

toward the day coach and passed out of sight with the cigar in his mouth.

Horace remembered him ten years ago as a hulking, dull youth, son of a

restaurant-owner, member of a family which had been moving from the

Frenchman's

100 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Bend neighborhood into Jefferson for the past twenty years, in sections; a

family of enough ramifications to have elected him to the legislature

without recourse to a public polling.

He sat quite still, the cold pipe in his hand. He rose and went forward

through the day coach, then into the smoker. Snopes was in the aisle, his

thigh draped over the arm of a seat where four men sat, using the unlighted

cigar to gesture with. Horace caught his eye and beckoned from the

vestibule. A moment later Snopes joined him, the overcoat on his arm.

"How are things going at the capital?" Horace said.

Snopes began to speak in his harsh, assertive voice. There emerged

gradually a picture of stupid chicanery and petty corruption for stupid and

petty ends, conducted principally in hotel rooms into which bellboys

whisked with bulging jackets upon discreet flicks of skirts in swift closet

doors. "Anytime you're in town," he said. "I always like to show the boys

around. Ask anybody in town; they'll tell you if it's there. Cla'ence

Snopes'll know where it is. You got a pretty tough case up home there, what

I hear."

"Cant tell yet," Horace said. "I stopped off at Oxford today, at the

university, speaking to some of my step-daughter's friends. One of her best

friends is no longer in school there. A young lady from Jackson named

Temple Drake."

Snopes was watching him with thick, small, opaque eyes. "Oh, yes; Judge

Drake's gal," he said. "The one that ran away."

"Ran away?" Horace said. "Ran back home, did she? What was the trouble?

Fail in her work?"

"I dont know. When it come out in the paper folks thought she'd run off

with some fellow. One of them companionate marriages."

"But when she turned up at home, they knew it wasn't that, I reckon. Well,

well, Belle'll be surprised. What's she doing now? Running around Jackson,

I suppose?"

"She aint there."

"Not?" Horace said. He could feel the other watching him. "Where is she?"