Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“So we went in and give Cain Miz Snopes’s rag and he counted the twenty-four sixty-eight and we got the separator and started back to the wagon, to where we had left it. Because it was still there; the wagon wasn’t the trouble. In fact, it was too much wagon. I mind how I could see the bed and the tops of the wheels where Ab had brought it up close against the loading platform and I could see the folks from the waist up standing in the alley, twice or three times as many of them now, and I was thinking how it was too much wagon and too much folks; it was like one of these here pictures that hald seerinted under them, What’s wrong with this picture? and then Ab begun to say ‘Hell fire, hell fire’ and begun to run, still toting his end of the separator, up to the edge of the platform where we could see under it. The mules was all right too. They was laying down. Ab had snubbed them up pretty close to the same post, with the same line through both bits, and now they looked exactly like two fellows that had done hung themselves in one of these here suicide packs, with their heads snubbed up together and pointing straight up and their tongues hanging out and their eyes popping and their necks stretched about four foot and their legs doubled back under them like shot rabbits until Ab jumped down and cut them down with his pocket knife. A artist. He had give them just exactly to the inch of whatever it was to get them to town and off the Square before it played out.

“So Ab was desperate. I can see him now, backed off in a corner behind Cain’s plows and cultivators, with his face white and his voice shaking and his hand shaking so he couldn’t hardly hand me the six bits outen his pocket. ‘Go to Doc Peabody’s,’ he says, ‘and get me a bottle of whiskey. Hurry.’ He was desperate. It wasn’t even quicksand now. It was a whirlpool and him with just one jump left. He drunk that pint of whiskey in two drinks and set the empty bottle down in the corner careful as a egg and we went back to the wagon. The mules was still standing up this time and we loaded the separator in and he eased them away careful, with folks still telling each other it was that team of Stamper’s. Ab’s face was red instead of white now and the sun was gone but I dont think he even noticed it. And we hadn’t et too, and I dont believe he knowed that either. And I be dog if it didn’t seem like Pat Stamper hadn’t moved either, standing there at the gate to his rope stock pen, with that Stetson cocked and his thumbs still hooked in the top of his pants and Ab sitting in the wagon trying to keep his hands from shaking and the team Stamper had swapped him stopped now with their heads down and their legs spraddled and breathing like a sawmill. ‘I come for my team,’ Ab says.

“ ‘What’s the matter?’ Stamper says. ‘Dont tell me these are too lively for you too. They dont look it.’

“ ‘All right,’ Ab says. ‘All right. I got to have my team. I got four dollars. Make your four-dollar profit and give me my team.’

“ ‘I aint got your team,’ Stamper says. ‘I didn’t want that horse neither. I told you that. So I got shut of it.’

“Ab set there for a while. It was cooler now. A breeze had got up and you could smell the rain in it. ‘But you still got my mule,’ Ab says. ‘All right. I’ll take it.’

“ ‘For what?’ Stamper says. ‘You want to swap that team for your mule?’ Because Ab wasn’t trading now. He was desperate, sitting there like he couldn’t even see, with Stamper leaning easy against the gate post and looking at him for a minute. ‘No,’ Stamper says. ‘I dont want them mules. Yours is the best one. I wouldn’t trade that way, even swap.’ He spit, easy and careful. ‘Besides, I done included your mule into another team. With another horse. You want to look at it?’

“ ‘All right,’ Ab says. ‘How much?’

“ ‘Dont you even want to see it first?’ Stamper says.

“ ‘All right,’ Ab says. So the nigger led out Ab’s mule and a horse, a little dark brown horse; I remember how even with it clouded up and no sun, how that horse shined—a horse a little bigger than the one we had traded Stamper, and hog fat. That’s just exactly how it was fat: not like a horse is fat but like a hog: fat right up to its ears and looking tight as a drum; it was so fat it couldn’t hardly walk, putting its feet down like they didn’t have no weight nor feeling in them at all. ‘It’s too fat to last,’ Ab says. ‘It wont even get me home.’

“ ‘That’s what I think myself,’ Stamper says. ‘That’s why I want to get shut of it.’

“ ‘All right,’ Ab says. ‘I’ll have to try it.’ He begun to get outen the wagon.

“ ‘Try it?’ Stamper says. Ab didn’t answer. He got outen the wagon careful and went to the horse, putting his feet down careful and stiff too, like he never had no weight in his feet too, like the horse. It had a hackamore on and Ab taken the rope from the nigger and started to get on the horse. ‘Wait,’ Stamper said. ‘What are you fixing to do?’