Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

When he reached home, it was not even midnight yet. Now he removed not only the shoes but the overalls too which had not passed his knees in seventy-two hours, and lay down on the pallet. But at once he knew he was not going to sleep, not because of the seventy-two hours’ habit of reversed days and nights, not because of any twitching and jerking of spent and ungovernable nerves and muscles, but because of that silence which the first gunshot had broken and the second one had made whole again. So he lay again, rigid and composed on his back, his arms at his sides and his eyes open in the darkness and his head and lungs filled with that roaring silence across which the random and velvet-shod fireflies drifted and winked and beyond which the constant frogs pulsed and beat, until the rectangle of sky beyond the oblique door of the room and the open end of the hallway began to turn gray and then primrose, and already he could see three buzrds soaring in it. Now I must get up, he told himself; I will have to start staying up all day if I aim to begin sleeping again at night. Then he began to say, Wake up. Wake up, until he waked at last, with the yellow square of window-shaped sun lying once more on the floor where each unvarying afternoon it would lie. Resting upon the quilt not an inch from his face was a folded scrap of brown paper; when he rose, he found in the dust at the doorsill the print of the little boy’s naked foot. The note was in pencil, on a scrap torn from a paper sack, unsigned: Come on in here your wifes got some money for you He stood, unshaven, in his shirt, blinking at it. Now I can go, he thought, and something began to happen in his heart. He raised his head, blinking almost painfully, looking for the first time in three days beyond the desolate and foodless cabin which symbolised the impasse his life had reached, into the limitless freedom of the sunny sky. He spoke aloud. “Now I can—” he said. Then he saw the buzzards. At dawn he had seen three. Now he might possibly have counted them, though he did not. He just watched the black concentric spiraling as if they followed an invisible funnel, disappearing one by one below the trees. He spoke aloud again. “It’s the dog,” he said, knowing it was not the dog. And it didn’t matter. Because I’ll be gone then, he thought. It was not that something lifted from his heart; it was as though he had become aware for the first time of the weight which lay on it.

It was almost sunset when, shaved and with the shoes and overalls washed again, he mounted to the empty gallery and entered the store. His kinsman was behind the open candy case, in the act of putting something into his mouth.

“Where—” he said.

The cousin closed the case, chewing. “You durned fool, I sent word to you two days ago to get away from there before that pussel-gutted Hampton come prowling around here with that surrey full of deputies. A nigger grabbling in that slough found that durn gun before the water even quit shaking.”

“It’s not mine,” he said. “I have no gun. Where—”

“Hell fire, everybody knows it’s yours. There aint another one of them old hammer-lock ten-gauge Hadleys in this country but that one. That’s why I never told no lie about it, let alone that durn Hampton sitting right out there on that bench when the nigger come up the steps with it. I says, ‘Sure it’s Mink’s gun. He’s been hunting for it ever since last fall.’ Then I turns to the nigger. ‘What the hell you mean, you black son of a bitch,’ I says, ‘borrowing Mr Snopes’s gun last fall to go squirl hunting and letting it fall in that ere slough and claiming you couldn’t find it?’ Here.” The cousin stooped beneath the counter and rose and laid the gun on the counter. It had been wiped off save for a patch of now-dried mud on the stock.

He did not even look at it. “It’s not mine,” he said. “Where is—”

“But that’s all right now. I fixed that in time. What Hampton expected was for me to deny it was yours. Then he would a had you. But I fixed that. I throwed the suspicion right onto the nigger fore Hampton could open his mouth. I figger about tonight or maybe tomorrow night I’ll take a few of the boys and go to the nigger’s house with a couple of trace chains or maybe a little fire under his feet. And even if he dont confess nothing, folks will hear that he has done been visited at night and there’s too many votes out here for Hampton to do nothing else but take him on in and send him to the penitentiary, even if he cant quite risk hanging him, and Hampton knows it. So that’s all right. Besides, what I sent you that first message for was about your wife.”

“Yes,” he said. “Where—”