Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Sholy,” Ratliff said. He was already out of the buckboard. “You wait here and hold the team.” Armstid swung his leg back into the buckboard, not invisible even in the moonless August darkness, but on the contrary, because of his faded overalls, quite distinct against the buckboard’s dark upholstery; it was only his features beneath his hatbrim which could not be distinguished. Ratliff handed him the reins and turned past the metal mailbox on its post in the starlight, toward the gate beyond it and the mellow uproar of the dogs. When he was through the gate he could see them—a yelling clump of blackness against the slightly paler earth which broke and spread fanwise before him, braced, yelling, holding him bayed—three black-and-tan hounds whose tan the starlight had transposed to black too so that, not quite invisible but almost and without detail, they might have been the three intact carbons of burned newspaper-sheets standing upright from the earth, yelling at him. He shouted at them. They should have recognised him already by smell. When he shouted, he knew that they already had, because for perhaps a second they hushed, then as he moved forward they retreated before him, keeping the same distance, baying. Then he saw Bookwright, pale too in overalls against the black house. When Bookwright shouted at the hounds, they did hush.

“Git,” he said. “Shut up and git.” He approached, becoming black in his turn against the paler earth, to where Ratliff waited. “Where’s Henry?” he said.

“In the buggy,” Ratliff said. He turned back toward the gate.

“Wait,” Bookwright said. Ratliff stopped. The other came up beside him. They looked at one another, each face invisible to the other. “You aint let him persuade you into this, have you?” Bookwright said. “Between having to remember them five dollars every time he looks at his wife maybe, and that broke leg, and that horse he bought from Flem Snopes with it he aint even seen again, he’s plumb crazy now. Not that he had far to go. You aint just let him persuade you?”

“I dont think so,” Ratliff said. “I know I aint,” he said. “There’s something there. I’ve always knowed it. Just like Will Varner knows there is something there. If there wasn’t, he wouldn’t never bought it. And he wouldn’t a kept it, selling the balance of it off and still keeping that old house, paying taxes on it when he could a got something for it, setting there in that flour-barrel chair to watch it and claiming he did it because it rested him to set there where somebody had gone to all that work and expense just to build something to sleep and eat and lay with his wife in. And I knowed it for sho when Flem Snopes took it. When he had Will Varner just where he wanted him, and then he sold out to Will by taking that old house and them ten acres that wouldn’t hardly raise goats. And I went with Henry last night. I saw it too. You dont have to come in, if you feel uncertain. I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

“All right,” Bookwright said. He moved on. “That’s all I wanted to know.” They returned to the buckboard. Henry moved to the middle of the seat and they got in. “Dont let me crowd your leg,” Bookwright said.

“There aint anything wrong with my leg,” Armstid said in that harsh voice. “I can walk as far as you or any man any day.”

“Sholy,” Ratliff said quickly, taking the reins. “Henry’s leg is all right now. You cant even notice it.”

“Let’s get on,” Bookwright said. “Wont nobody have to walk for a while, if that team can.”

“It’s shorter through the Bend,” Ratliff said. “But we better not go that way.”

“Let them see,” Armstid said. “If anybody here is afraid, I dont need no help. I can—”

“Sholy,” Ratliff said. “If folks sees us, we might have too much help. That’s what we want to dodge.” Armstid hushed. He said no more from then on, sitting between them in an immobility which was almost like a temperature, thinner, as though it had not been the sickness (after being in bed about a month, he had got up one day and broken the leg again; nobody ever knew how, what he had been doing, trying to do, because he never talked about it) but impotence and fury which had wasted him.