Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Just to be sure, he would circle the house until he could see the ighted upper windows on the other side and had already started around the back when he thought how he might as well look into the other lighted room also while he was this close to it and moved, no less quiet than a shadow and with not much more substance, along the wall until he could stand on tiptoe again and look in the next window, the next room. He saw her at once and knew her at once—a room walled almost to the ceiling with more books than he knew existed, a woman sitting beneath a lamp in the middle of the room reading one, in horn-rim glasses and that single white streak through the center of her black hair that he had heard about in Parchman too. For a second the old helpless fury and outrage possessed him again and almost ruined, destroyed him this time—the rage and fury when, during the first two or three years after he learned that she was back home again apparently for good and living right there in the house with Flem, he would think Suppose she aint deaf a-tall; suppose she’s jest simply got ever body fooled for whatever devilment of her own she’s up to since this—the real truth of whether she was deaf or just pretending—was one gambit which he would not only have to depend on somebody else for, but on something as frail and undependable as second-or third-hand hearsay. Finally he had lied, tricked his way in to the prison doctor but there he was again: daring not to ask what he wanted to know, had to know, find out, learn: only that even the stone-deaf would—could—feel the concussion of the air if the sound were loud enough or close enough. “Like a—” Mink said before he could stop himself. But too late; the doctor finished it for him: “That’s right. A shot. But even if you could make us believe you are, how would that get you out of here?” “That’s right,” Mink said. “I wouldn’t need to hear that bull whip: jest feel it.”