Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

‘Then whose is it?’ the Prince says. And the Prince knowed he had him there. In fact, the Prince knowed he had him all the time, ever since they had told him how he had walked in the door with his mouth already full of law; he even leaned over and rung the fire-bell so the old one could be there to see and hear how it was done, then he leaned back on the Throne and looked down at him standing there with his straw suitcase, and says, ‘You have admitted and even argued that I created you. Therefore your soul was mine all the time. And therefore when you offered it as security for this note, you offered that which you did not possess and so laid yourself liable to—

‘I have never disputed that,’ he says.

‘—criminal action. So take your bag and—’ the Prince says. ‘Eh?’ the Prince says. ‘What did you say?’

‘I have never disputed that,’ he says.

‘What?’ the Prince says. ‘Disputed what?’Except that it dont make any noise, and now the Prince is leaning forward, and now he feels that ere hot floor under his knees and he can feel hisself grabbing and hauling at his throat to get the words out like he was digging potatoes outen hard ground. ‘Who are you?’ he says, choking and gasping and his eyes a-popping up at him setting there with that straw suitcase on the Throne among the bright, crown-shaped flames. ‘Take Paradise!’ the Prince screams. ‘Take it! Take it!’ And the wind roars up and the dark roars down and the Prince scrabbling across the floor, clawing and scrabbling at that locked door, screaming.…

BOOK THREE

THE LONG SUMMER

CHAPTER ONE1

Sitting in the halted buckboard, Ratliff watched the old fat white horse emerge from Varner’s lot and come down the lane beside the picket fence, surrounded and preceded by the rich sonorous organ-tone of its entrails. So he’s back to the horse again, he thought. He’s got to straddle his legs at least once to keep on moving. So he had to pay that too. Not only the deed to the land and the two-dollar wedding license and them two tickets to Texas and the cash, but the riding in that new buggy with somebody to do the driving, to get that patented necktie out of his store and out of his house. The horse came up and stopped, apparently of its own accord, beside the buckboard in which Ratliff sat neat, decorous, and grave like a caller in a house of death.