Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Though Mr Snopes wasn’t there. He was busy being a banker now and a deacon in the Baptist church, living in solitary widowerhood in the old De Spain house which he had remodeled into an antebellum Southern mansion; he wasn’t there to meet them. It was Dink Quistenberry. He had married one of Mr Snopes’s sisters or nieces or something out at Frenchman’s Bend and when Mr Snopes sent I.O. Snopes back to the country the Quistenberrys came in to buy or rent or anyway run the Snopes Hotel, which wasn’t the Snopes Hotel any more now but the Jefferson Hotel though the people that stayed there were still the stock traders and juries locked up by the Circuit Court. I mean, Dink was old enough to be Mr Snopes’s brother-in-law or whatever it was but he was the kind of man it just didn’t occur to you to say Mister to.

He was there; I reckon Mr Snopes sent him. And when he saw them I reckon he felt just like we did when we saw them, and like the conductor and the flagman and the porter all looked like they had been feeling ever since the train left New Orleans, which was evidently where they got on it. Because they didn’t look like people. They looked like snakes. Or maybe that’s too strong too. Anyway, they didn’t look like children; if there was one thing in the world they didn’t look like it was children, with kind of dark pasty faces and black hair that looked like somebody had put a bowl on top of their heads and then cut their hair up to the rim of the bowl with a dull knife, and perfectly black perfectly still eyes that nobody in Jefferson (Yoknapatawpha County either) ever afterward claimed they saw blink.

I dont know how Dink talked to them because the conductor had already told everybody listening (there was a good crowd by that time) that they didn’t talk any language or anything else that he had ever heard of and that to watch them because one of them had a switch knife with a six-inch blade, he didn’t know which one and he himself wasn’t going to try to find out. But anyway Dink got them into his car and the train went on.

Maybe it was the same thing they used in drugstores or at least with Skeets McGowan in Christian’s because it wasn’t a week before they could go into Christian’s, all four of them (it was always all four of them, as if when the medicine man or whoever it was separated each succeeding one from the mother, he just attached the severed cord to the next senior child. Because by that time we knew who they were: Byron Snopes’s children out of a Jicarilla Apache squaw in Old Mexico), and come out two minutes later all eating icecream cones.

They were always together and anywhere in town or near it at any time of day, until we found out it was any time of night too; one night at two oclock in the morning when Otis Harker caught them coming in single file from behind the Coca-Cola bottling plant; Otis said he didn’t know how in the world they got into it because no door was open nor window broken, but he could smell warm Coca-Cola syrup spilled down the front of the little one’s nightshirt or dressing-sacque or whatever it was from five or six feet away. Because that was as close as he got; he said he hollered at them to go on home to the Snopesean the Jefferson Hotel but they just stood there looking at him and he said he never intended anything: just to get them moving since maybe they didn’t understand what he meant yet. So he sort of flung his arms out and was just kind of jumping at them, hollering again, when he stopped himself just in time, the knife already in one of their hands with the blade open at least six inches long; so fast that he never even saw where it came from and in the next minute gone so fast he still didn’t even know which one of the three in overalls —the girl or the two boys—had it; that was when Mr Connors went to Dink Quistenberry the next morning and told him he would have to keep them off the streets at night.

“Sure,” Dink said. “You try it. You keep them off the streets or off anywhere else. You got my full permission. You’re welcome to it!”