Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Though he did have his one tool, weapon, implement—that nethermost stratum of unfutured, barely solvent one-bale tenant farmers which pervaded, covered thinly the whole county and on which in fact the entire cotton economy of the county was founded and supported; he had that at least, with running through his head probably all the worn platitudinous saws about the incrementation of the mere enoughs: enough grains of sand and single drops of water and pennies saved. And working underground now. He had always worked submerged each time until the mine was set and then blew up in the unsuspecting face. But this time he actually consorted with the moles and termites—not with Sartorises and Benbows and Edmondses and Habershams and the other names long in the county annals, which (who) owned the bank stock and the ponderable deposits, but with the other nameless tenants and croppers like his first interlocutor who as that one would have put it: “Knowed a rat when he smelt one.”

He didn’t proselytise among them. He was simply visible, depending on that first one to have spread the word, the idea, letting himself be seen going and coming out of the other bank, the Bank of Jefferson, himself biding until they themselves would contrive the accidental encounter for corroboration, in pairs or even groups, like a committee, straight man and clown, like this:

“Mawnin, Mister Snopes. Aint you strayed off the range a little, over here at this bank?”

“Maybe Mister Flem has done got so much money now that jest one bank wont hold it.”

“No, boys, it’s like my old pappy used to say: Two traps will hold twice as many coons as one trap.”

“Did your pappy ever ask that smart old coon which trap he would ruther be in, Mister Snopes?”

“No, boys. All that old coon ever said was, Just so it aint the wrong trap.”

That would be all. They would guffaw; one might even slap the faded blue of his overall knee. But that afternoon (or maybe they would even wait a day or two days or even a week) they would appear singly at the teller’s window of the old long-established Bank of Jefferson, the gnarled warped sunburned hands relinquishing almost regretfully the meagre clutch of banknotes; never to transfer the account by a simple check at the counter but going in person first to the bank which because of a whispered word supported by a clumsy parable they were repudiating, and withdraw the thin laborious sum in its actual cash and carry it across the Square to the other bank which at that same cryptic anonymous sourceless breath they would repudiate in its turn.

Because they were really neither moles nor termites. Moles can undermine foundations and the termites can reduce the entire house to one little pile of brown dust. But these had neither the individual determination of moles nor the communal determination of the termites even though they did resemble ants in numbers. Because like him, Snopes, they simply were trying to save their meagre individual dollars, and he—Flem—knew it: that another breath, word, would alarm them back into the other bank; that if De Spain himself only wanted to, with the judicious planting of that single word he could recover not merely his own old one-bale clients, but the Bank of Jefferson’s entire roster too. Which he nor any other sane banker would want, since it would mean merely that many more Noes to say to the offers of galled mules and wornout farm and household gear as security to make down payments on secondhand and wornout automobiles.