Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“So we didn’t get into town until after dinner time. We went straight to Pat’s camp and druv in with that horse of Beasley’s laying into the collar now sho enough, with its eyes looking nigh as wild as Ab’s and foaming a little at the mouth where Ab had rubbed the saltpeter into its gums and a couple of as pretty tarred bobwire cuts on its chest as you could want, and another one where Ab had worked that fish hook under its hide where he could touch it by drooping one rein a little, and Pat’s nigger running up to catch the head-stall before the horse run right into the tent where Pat slept and Pat hisself coming out with that ere cream-colored Stetson cocked over one eye and them eyes the color of a new plow point and just about as warm and his thumbs hooked into his waist band. ‘That’s a pretty lively horse you got there,’ he says.

“ ‘You damn right,’ Ab says. ‘That’s why I got to get shut of it. Just consider you done already trimmed me and give me something in place of it I can get back home without killing me and this boy both.’ Because that was the right system: to rush right up and say he had to trade instead of hanging back for Pat to persuade him. It had been five years since Pat had seen the horse, so Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago. And Ab wasn’t trying to beat Pat bad. He just wanted to recover that eight dollars’ worth of the honor and pride of Yoknapatawpha County horse-trading, doing it not for profit but for honor. And I believe it worked. I still believe that Ab fooled Pat, and that it was because of what Pat aimed to trade Ab and not because Pat recognised Beasley’s horse, that Pat refused to trade any way except team for team. Or I dont know: maybe Ab was so busy fooling Pat that Pat never had to fool Ab at all. So the nigger led the span of mules out and Pat standing there with his thumbs in his pants-top, watching Ab and chewing tobacco slow and gentle, and Ab standing there with that look on his face that was desperate but not scared yet, because he was realising now he had got in deeper than he aimed to and that he would either have to shut his eyes and bust on through, or back out and quit, get back in the wagon and go on before Beasley’s horse even give up to the fish hook. And then Pat Stamper showed how come he was Pat Stamper. If he had just started in to show Ab what a bargain he was getting, I reckon Ab would have backed out. But Pat didn’t. He fooled Ab just exactly as one first-class burglar would fool another first-class burglar by purely and simply refusing to tell him where the safe was at.

“ ‘I already got a good mule,’ Ab says. ‘It’s just the horse I dont want. Trade me a mule for the horse.’

“ ‘I dont want no wild horse neither,’ Pat says. ‘Not that I wont trade for anything that walks, provided I can trade my way. But I aint going to trade for that horse alone because I dont want it no more than you do. What I am trading for is that mule. And this here team of mine is matched. I aim to get about three times as much for them as a span as I would selling them single.’

“ ‘But you would still have a team to trade with,’ Ab says.

“ ‘No,’ Pat says. ‘I aim to get more for them from you than I would if the pair was broken. If it’s a single mule you want, you better try somewhere else.’

“So Ab looked at the mules again. They looked just exactly right. They didn’t look extra good and they didn’t look extra bad. Neither one of them looked quite as good as Ab’s mule, but the two of them together looked just a little mite better than just one mule of anybody’s. And so he was doomed. He was doomed from the very minute Hugh Mitchell told him about that eight dollars. I reckon Pat Stamper knowed he was doomed the very moment he looked up and seen that nigger holding Beasley’s horse back from running into the tent. I reckon he knowed right then he wouldn’t even have to try to trade Ab: all he would have to do would be just to say No long enough. Because that’s what he done, leaning there against our wagon bed with his thumbs hooked into his pants, chewing his tobacco and watching Ab go through the motions of examining them mules again. And even I knowed that Ab had done traded, that he had done walked out into what he thought was a spring branch and then found out it was quicksand, and that now he knowed he couldn’t even stop long enough to turn back. ‘All right,’ he says. “I’ll take them.’