Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“She’s going to get you in trouble. She’s done already got you in trouble. That’s how come that durn vote-sucking sheriff noseying around out here. His nigger found the horse, with him and the dog both missing, but that was all right until folks begun to remember how she turned up here that same night, with them two kids and that bundle of clothes and blood still running out of her busted mouth until folks couldn’t help but know you had run her out of the house. And even that might have been all right if she hadn’t started in telling everybody that would listen that you never done it. Just a horse with a empty saddle; no body and no blood neither found yet, and here she is trying to help you by telling everybody she meets that you never done something that nobody knows for sure has even been done yet. Why in hell aint you got out of here? Didn’t you have sense enough to do that the first day?”

“On what?” he said.

The cousin had been blinking rapidly at him. Now the little eyes stopped blinking. “On what?” he said. The other did not answer. He had not moved since he entered, small, immobile, in the middle of the floor opposite the entrance, through which the dying sunlight stained him from head to foot with a thin wash like diluted blood. “You mean you aint got any money? You mean to stand there and tell me he never had nothing in his pocket? Because I dont believe it. By God, I know better. I saw inside his purse that same morning. He never carried a cent less than fifty …” The voice ceased, died. Then it spoke in a dawning incredulous amazement and no louder than a whisper: “Do you mean to tell me you never even looked? never even looked?” The other did not answer. He might not have even heard, motionless, looking at nothing while the last of the copper light, mounting like rising water up his body, gathered for an instant in concentrated and dying crimson upon the calm and unwavering and intractable mask of his face, and faded, and the dusk, the twilight, gathered along the ranked shelves and in the shadowy corners and the old strong smells of cheese and leather and kerosene, condensed and thickened among the rafters above his head like the pall of oblivion itself. The cousin’s voice seemed to emerge from it, sourceless, unlocatable, without even the weight of breath to give it volume: “Where did you put him?” and again, the cousin outside the counter now, facing him, almost breast to breast with him, the fierce repressed breathing murmuring on his face now: “By God, he had at least fifty dollars. I know. I seen it. Right here in this store. Where did you—”

“No,” he said.

“Yes.”

“No.” Their faces were not a foot apart, their breathing steady and audible. Then the other face moved back, larger than his, higher than his, beginning to become featureless in the fading light. " width="1ht="0em" width="1em" align="justify">“All right,” the cousin said. “I’m glad you dont need money. Because if you come to me expecting any, you’d just have to keep on expecting. You know what Will Varner pays his clerks. You know about how much any man working for Will Varner’s wages could get ahead in ten years, let alone two months. So you wont even need that ten dollars your wife’s got. So that’ll be just fine, wont it?”

“Yes,” he said. “Where—”

“Staying at Will Varner’s.” He turned at once and went toward the door. As he passed out of it the cousin spoke again out of the shadows behind him: “Tell her to ask Will or Jody to lend her another ten to go with that one she’s already got.”