Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

“Fifty goats,” the other roared. “I’ve heard of a man paying a dime to get shut of two or three, but I never in my life heard of a man buying fifty.”

“He’s smart,” Ratliff said. “If he bought fifty of anything he knowed beforehand he was going to need exactly that many.”

“Yes, he’s smart. But fifty goats. Hell and sulphur. I still got a passel left, bout one hen-hcuse full, say. You want them?”

“No,” Ratliff said. “It was just them first fifty.”

“I’ll give them to you. I’ll even pay you a quarter to get the balance of them outen my pasture.”

“I thank you,” Ratliff said. “Well, I’ll just charge this to social overhead.”

“Fifty goats,” the other said. “Stay and eat dinner.”

“I thank you,” Ratliff said. “I seem to done already wasted too much time eating now. Or sitting down doing something, anyway.” So he returned to the village—that long mile then the short one, the small sturdy team trotting briskly and without synchronization. The roan horse still stood before the store and the men still sat and squatted about the gallery, but Ratliff did not stop. He went on to Mrs Littlejohn’s and tied his team to the fence and went and sat on the veranda, where he could see the store. He could smell food cooking in the kitchen behind him and soon the men on the store’s gallery began to rise and disperse, noonward, though the saddled roan still stood there. Yes, he thought, He has passed Jody. A man takes your wife and all you got to do to ease your feelings is to shoot him. But your horse.

Mrs Littlejohn spoke behind him: “I didn’t know you were back. You going to want some dinner, aint you?”

“Yessum,” he said. “I want to step down to the store first. But I wont be long.” She went back into the house. He took the two notes from his wallet and separated them, putting one into his inside coat pocket, the other into the breast pocket of his shirt, and walked down the road in the March noon, treading the noon-impacted dust, breathing the unbreathing suspension of the meridian, and mounted the steps and crossed the now deserted gallery stained with tobacco and scarred with knives. The store, the interior, was like a cave, dim, cool, smelling of cheese and leather; it needed a moment for his eyes to adjust themselves. Then he saw the gray cap, the white shirt, the minute bow tie. The face looked up at him, chewing. “You beat me,” Ratliff said. “How much?” The other turned his head and spat into the sand-filled box beneath the cold stove.

“Fifty cents,” he said.

“I paid twenty-five for my contract,” Ratliff said. “All I aim to get is seventy-five. I could tear the contract up and save hauling them to town.”

“All right,” Snopes said. “What’ll you give?”

“I’ll trade you this for them,” Ratliff said. He drew the first note from the pocket where he had segregated it. And he saw it—an instant, a second of a new and completer stillness and immobility touch the blank face, the squat soft figure in the chair behind the desk. For that instant even the jaw had stopped chewing, though it began again almost at once. Snopes took the paper and looked at it. Then he laid it on the desk and turned his head and spat into the sand-box.

“You figure this note is worth fifty goats,” he said. It was not a question, it was a statement.

“Yes,” Ratliff said. “Because there is a message goes with it. Do you want to hear it?”