Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“And now it’s after midnight. It will be light in six hours. And Hampton and them durn deputies—” The cousin ceased. The other was now standing, looking down at him; the cousin rose quickly. They stared at one another across the table. “Well?” the cousin said. His breath began to make the harsh, tense, rasping sound again, not triumphant yet. “Well?” he said. “Well?” But the other was not looking at him, he was looking down, the face still, wasted, seemingly without life.

“I ask you to go,” the other said. “I ask you to leave me alone.”

“Sholy,” the cousin said, his voice no louder than the other’s. “Quit now? after I done gone through all this?” The other turned toward the door. “Wait,” the cousin said. The other did not pause. The cousin blew out the lamp and overtook the other in the hallway. He was talking again, whispering now. “If you’d just listened to me six hours ago. We’d a done had it and been back, in bed, instead of setting up here half the night. Dont you see how it was tit for tat all the time? You had me and I had you, and couldn’t neither—Where we going?” The other didn’t answer. He went steadily on across the yard, toward the barn, the cousin following; again he heard just behind him the tense, fierce adenoidal breathing, the whispering voice: “Hell fire, maybe you dont want me to have half of it and maybe I dont want nobody to have half of it neither. But hell fire, aint just half of it better than to think of that durn Hampton and them deputies—” He entered the barn and opened the door to the crib and stepped up into it, the cousin stopping just outside the door behind him, and reached down from its nail in the wall a short, smooth white-oak stick eyed at the end with a loop of hemp rope—a twister which Houston had used with his stallion, which Snopes had found when he rented the foreclosed portion of Houston’s farm from the Varners—and turned and struck all in one motion and dropped the cudgel and caught the heavy body as it fell so that its own weight helped to carry it into the crib and all he needed to do was to drag it on in until the feet cleared the door. He unbuckled a hame-string and the check-rein from his plow gear and bound the other’s hands and feet and tore a strip from the tail of his shirt and made a gag with it.

When he reached the bottom, he could not find the tree behind which he had left the axe. He knew what was wrong. It was as though with the cessation of that interminable voice he had become aware not of silence but of elapsed time, that on the instant it had ceased he had retraced and resumed at the moment it began in the store at six oclock in the afternoon, and now he was six hours late. You’re trying too hard, he told himself. You got to slow up. So he held himself still for the space of a hundred, trying to orient o dof by looking back up the slope, to establish whether he was above or below the tree, to the right or left of it. Then he went back halfway through the corn and looked back at the bottom from there, trying to recognise by its shape and position the tree where he had left the axe, standing in the roar not of silence now but of time’s friction. He thought of starting from some point which he knew was below the tree he sought and searching each tree as he came to it. But the sound of time was too loud, so when he began to move, to run, it was toward neither the bottom nor the cabin but across the slope, quartering, out of the corn and on into the road a half mile beyond his house.

He ran for another mile and came to another cabin, smaller and shabbier than his. It belonged to the Negro who had found the gun. There was a dog here, a mongrel terrier, a feice, not much larger than a cat and noisy as a calliope; at once it came boiling out from beneath the house and rushed toward him in shrill hysteria. He knew it and it should know him; he spoke to it to quiet it but it continued to yap, the sound seeming to come from a dozen different points out of the darkness before him until he ran suddenly at it, whereupon the shrill uproar faded rapidly back toward the house. He continued to run, on toward the woodpile which he knew too; the axe was there. As he caught it up a voice said from the dark cabin: “Who there?” He didn’t answer. He ran on, the terrier still yapping behind him though from beneath the house now. Now he was in corn again, better than his. He ran on through it, descending, toward the bottom.

Before entering the bottom, he stopped and took his bearings on a star. He did not expect to find the tree from this point, it was the old sunken road he aimed for; once in that, he could orient himself again. His surest course, even though it would be longer, would be to skirt the bottom until he reached country he knew in the dark and strike in for the tree from there, but when he examined the sky to fix his bearing, he thought, It’s after one oclock.