Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

He did not look toward the house again. He went on past it and entered the rotting lattice which enclosed the well and leaned the gun against the wall and removed his shoes and drew a bucket of water and began to wash the shoes. Then he knew that she was behind him. He didn’t look back, sitting on the rotted bench, small, in a faded clean shirt and patched overalls, tipping the bucket over the shoe and scrubbing at it with a corn cob. She began to laugh, harshly and steadily. “I told you this morning,” she said. “I said, if you do, if you left here with that gun, I was going.” He didn’t look up, crouched over the wet shoe into which he had slipped his hand like a shoe-last, scrubbing at it with the cob. “Never you mind where. Dont you worry about where when they come for you.” He didn’t answer. He finished the first shoe and set it down and slipped his hand into the second one and tipped water from the bucket over it and began to scrub it. “Because it wont be far!” she cried suddenly, yet without raising her voice at all. “Because when they come to hang you, I’m going to be where I can see it!” Now he rose. He set the unfinished second shoe carefully down and laid the cob beside it and rose, small, almost a half head shorter than she, barefoot, moving toward her, not fast, sidling a little, his head bent and apparently not even looking at her as she stood in the gaping and broken entrance—the bleached hair darkening again at the roots since it had been a year now since there had been any money to buy more dye, the harshly and steadily laughing face watching him with a curious and expectant glitter in the eyes. He struck her across the mouth. He watched his hand, almost labored, strike aont the face which did not flinch, beneath the eyes which did not even blink. “You damned little murdering bastard,” she said past the bright sudden blood. He struck her again, the blood smearing between mouth and palm and then renewed, striking again with that slow gathering which was not deliberation but extreme and patiently indomitable and implacable weariness, and again. “Go,” he said. “Go. Go.”