Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“He’ll be all right,” Ratliff said. “You just get on away from here.” Grimm got into the wagon and went on. “You can let him go now,” Ratliff said. Armstid flung free of Bookwright and turned toward the garden. “Wait, Henry,” Ratliff said. “Let’s eat supper first. Let’s get our beds into the house.” But Armstid hurried on, limping in the fading light toward the garden. “We ought to eat first,” Ratliff said. Then he let out a long breath like a sigh; he and Bookwright ran side by side to the rear of the sewing-machine box, which Ratliff unlocked, and they snatched out the other shovels and picks and ran down the slope and into the old garden where Armstid was already digging. Just before they reached him he stood up and began to run toward the road, the shovel raised, whereupon they too saw that Grimm had not departed but was sitting in the wagon in the road, watching them across the ruined fence of iron pickets until Armstid had almost reached it. Then he drove on.

They dug all that night, Armstid in one hole, Ratliff and Bookwright working together in another. From time to time they would stop to rest while the summer constellations marched overhead. Ratliff and Bookwright would move about to flex their cramped muscles, then they would squat (They did not smoke; they could not risk showing any light. Armstid had probably never had the extra nickel or dime to buy tobacco with.) and talk quietly while they listened to the steady sound of Armstid’s shovel below them. He would be digging when they stopped; he would still be digging, unflagging and tireless, when they started again, though now and then one of them would remember him and pause to see him sitting on the side of his pit, immobile as the lumps of earth he had thrown out of it. Then he would be digging again before he had actually had time to rest; this until dawn began and Ratliff and Bookwright stood over him in the wan light, arguing with him. “We got to quit,” Ratliff said. “It’s already light enough for folks to see us.” Armstid didn’t pause.

“Let them,” he said. “It’s mine now. I can dig all day if I want.”>

“All right,” Ratliff said. “You’ll have plenty of help then.” Now Armstid paused, looking up at him out of his pit. “How can we dig all night and then set up all day to keep other folks out of it?” Ratliff said. “Come on now,” he said. “We got to eat and then sleep some.” They got the mattress and the quilts from the buckboard and carried them into the house, the hall in whose gaping door-frames no doors any longer hung and from whose ceiling depended the skeleton of what had been once a crystal chandelier, with its sweep of stairs whose treads had long since been prized off and carried away to patch barns and chicken-houses and privies, whose spindles and walnut railings and newel-posts had long ago been chopped up and burned as firewood. The room they chose had a fourteen-foot ceiling. There were the remains of a once-gilt filigree of cornice above the gutted windows and the ribbed and serrated grin of lathing from which the plaster had fallen, and the skeleton of another prismed chandelier. They spread the mattress and the quilts upon the dust of plaster, and Ratliff and Bookwright returned to the buckboard and got the food they had brought, and the two sacks of coins. They hid the two sacks in the chimney, foul now with bird-droppings, behind the mantel in which there were still wedged a few shards of the original marble. Armstid didn’t produce his bag. They didn’t know what he had done with it. They didn’t ask.