Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Ratliff didn’t answer. He looked down at the note where he had laid it on the desk when he returned from the door, with that same faint, quizzical, quiet expression which his face had worn when he looked at his coffee cup in the restaurant four days ago. He took up the note, though he did not look at Snopes yetx201Dx201C;So if I pay him his ten dollars myself, you will take charge of it as his guardian. And if I collect the ten dollars from you, you will have the note to sell again. And that will make three times it has been collected. Well well well.” He took another match from his pocket and extended it and the note to Snopes. “I hear tell you said once you never set fire to a piece of money. This here’s your chance to see what it feels like.” He watched the second note burn too and drift, still blazing, onto the stained sand in the box, curling into carbon which vanished in its turn beneath the shoe.

He descended the steps, again into the blaze of noon upon the pocked quiet dust of the road; actually it was not ten minutes later. Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they aint brave enough to try to cure, he told himself, walking on. The empty road shimmered with mirage, the pollen-roiled chiaroscuro of spring. Yes, he thought, I reckon I was sicker than I knowed. Because I missed it, missed it clean. Or maybe when I have et I will feel better. Yet, alone in the dining room where Mrs Littlejohn had set a plate for him, he could not eat. He could feel what he had thought was appetite ebbing with each mouthful becoming heavy and tasteless as dirt. So at last he pushed the plate aside and onto the table he counted the five dollars profit he had made—the thirty-seven-fifty he would get for the goats, less the twelve-fifty his contract had cost him, plus the twenty of the first note. With a chewed pencil stub he calculated the three years’ interest on the ten-dollar note, plus the principal (that ten dollars would have been his commission on the machine, so it was no actual loss anyway) and added to the five dollars the other bills and coins—the frayed banknotes, the worn coins, the ultimate pennies. Mrs Littlejohn was in the kitchen, where she cooked what meals she sold and washed the dishes too, as well as caring for the rooms in which they slept who ate them. He put the money on the table beside the sink. “That what’s-his-name, Ike. Isaac. They tell me you feed him some. He dont need money. But maybe——”

“Yes,” she said. She dried her hands on her apron and took the money and folded the bills carefully about the silver and stood holding it. She didn’t count it. “I’ll keep it for him. Dont you worry. You going on to town now?”

“Yes,” he said. “I got to get busy. No telling when I will run into another starving and eager young fellow that aint got no way to get money but to cut meat for it.” He turned, then paused again, not quite looking back at her, with that faint quizzical expression on his face that was smiling now, sardonic, humorous. “I got a message I would like to get to Will Varner. But it dont matter especially.”

“I’ll give it to him,” Mrs Littlejohn said. “If it aint too long I will remember it.”

“It dont matter,” Ratliff said. “But if you happen to think of it. Just tell him Ratliff says it aint been proved yet neither. He’ll know what it means.”

“I’ll try to remember it,” she said.

He went out to the buckboard and got into it. He would not need the overcoat now, and next time he would not even have to bring it along. The road began to flow beneath the flickering hooves of the small hickory-tough horses. I just never went far entlej he thought. I quit too soon. I went as far as one Snopes will set fire to another Snopes’s barn and both Snopeses know it, and that was all right. But I stopped there. I never went on to where that first Snopes will turn around and stomp the fire out so he can sue that second Snopes for the reward and both Snopeses know that too. 3