‘I don’t know,’ the Captain said. ‘He’s written it.’

  ‘What made him write that down?’ And Mr. Christian tapped the very sentence with his thick forefinger.

  ‘Every man has to go his own gait,’ the Captain answered.

  As Mr. Christian read that sentence aloud, it struck Mr. Munn’s mind, as it had not before, with a force that seemed to graze off tangentially, and lead to a confused darkness of speculations. Mr. Christian was right, it was the key of the letter. It was not like the rest of the letter. It really didn’t belong in the letter, at least not when stated that way. Especially that about the overwhelming majority. It didn’t belong. Not in this letter to them. Then the thought slipped from his mind, to return, but only casually, just before he fell asleep that night, and then again, sharply and fully, the next morning when he sat at breakfast in the hotel dining-room and saw that very sentence in the newspaper.

  There was a big story about the resignation, and the letter was printed in full in the body of the story. It was a Nashville paper. He rose hurriedly from his chair and went into the lobby to get the local paper and the Edgerton Messenger. In both the letter was reprinted in full. The Bardsville Ledger carried, in addition, an editorial under the heading ‘Does Association Betray Farmers’ Interest?’ It began: ‘When a man who has served the people of his section so long and ably as has Senator Edmund Tolliver feels it necessary to resign from the organization he has helped to create, because he feels it is betraying its trust and is leading the community into paths of disorder against the will of the majority, then it is time for all thinking men to stop and reconsider the whole situation.’ It was the same sentence, the very same, transparently re-dressed. All right, Mr. Munn thought, out in the open, the belly-dragging dog. He crushed the paper between his hands, gulped the last of his coffee, which was cold now, and went back into the lobby.

  He telephoned Mr. Sills. When Mr. Sills answered the call, he said: ‘I want to talk to you bad, Mr. Sills, but I don’t want every old woman out your pike hanging on the line listening. Are you going to be in town today? It may be important.’

  Mr. Sills was coming to town. ‘Right away,’ he replied.

  He hurried up to his office, and tried to work until Mr. Sills appeared. But it was little use. The page of the book would blur before his eyes. He thought of the Senator’s words, ‘Well, boy, we did the best we could,’ and of his back as he had seen it that day disappearing down the dark stairs. He slammed his book shut and began to pace about his office. He sent the girl who did his letters and typing out to buy him some matches, even though he had a dozen in his pocket. While she was gone he got the bottle out of his desk and took two moderate drinks. Then, incongruously, while he tried to penetrate to the nature of the Senator’s motives, he thought of May, how sometimes when he looked at her most intently, into the very depth of her eyes, she seemed to be withdrawing from him, fading, almost imperceptibly but surely, into an impersonal and ambiguous distance.

  When he heard steps in the outer room, he rushed to the door, and flung it open. At the sight of Mr. Sills, the impatience and curiosity that had been consuming him suddenly were chilled.

  ‘Well, sir?’ Mr. Sills demanded in his flat voice.

  ‘Did you’ — and Mr. Munn hesitated that last second as one who poises on the brink, not because of failure in decision but because the mechanism of the body registered, as it were, a last blind protest — ‘did you provide any newspaper, or individual, with a copy of Senator Tolliver’s letter of resignation?’

  He knew what the answer would be; he had known all the time. It came like an echo of his knowledge. ‘No, I didn’t,’ Mr. Sills said.

  Mr. Munn handed the papers to him and indicated the reports and the editorial. Mr. Sills read them slowly, and with no show of emotion. When he had finished, he raised his eyes to Mr. Munn, and remarked, ‘Well?’

  ‘My God!’ Mr. Munn exclaimed. ‘In every one. The Louisville paper isn’t here yet, but I bet it’s in there too. He sent copies out, to every paper. That’s why he wrote that letter that way. He wrote it to do the most harm to us all.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr. Sills said.

  ‘But why? What’s he up to?’ Mr. Munn swung on his heel and strode across the office, then swung back toward Mr. Sills with his bony, dark face thrust forward. ‘I don’t see; I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘It’ll all come out soon enough. Time. Time will bring it out.’ Mr. Sills’ eyes blinked unhurriedly behind his spectacles.

  It was almost a month before Mr. Munn was to know even the next step in the process. More than once during that period he had the impulse to go to Monclair and see Senator Tolliver and ask him what his motives were. How could a man behave as he had done? But he had no right, he would conclude. In the end, he scarcely knew Senator Tolliver. The illusion of old intimacy and trust was something which the Senator had created with the touch of his hand on the shoulder and the modulation of his voice. There was no reason to feel, as he did nevertheless feel, that the Senator had betrayed him, personally. But despite his reasoning, that sense of a personal betrayal was his first reaction when, late one afternoon, Mr. Sills telephoned to say that Senator Tolliver and the Dismukes and Brothers Tobacco Company were jointly suing the Association to recover the crop which the Senator had committed to the Association. That night the Nashville papers carried news of the filing of the suit; and the next day in the Bardsville Ledger Senator Tolliver gave out the statement that his conscience would no longer permit him to be party, even passively, to the policies of an organization that had become an enemy of law and order and individual integrity.

  ‘There hasn’t been any trouble lately, not at all,’ Mr. Munn asserted when Mr. Christian thrust the paper with the statement under his eyes; ‘not in over a month. Not since Sullins’ crop was burned. And they’ll probably catch whoever did that.’

  ‘No,’ Mr. Christian said shortly, ‘there ain’t been much trouble, but Edmund Tolliver is shore God getting ready to cause a whole lot of trouble. Bad trouble,’ and he stared probingly into Mr. Munn’s face.

  ‘Trouble,’ Mr. Munn repeated. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean there’s a lot of men don’t take things lying down. You can’t blame ’em. Fire with fire.’

  Mr. Munn looked somberly away, out the window toward the sidewalk, which was empty of all life except for an old negro man sitting on the curb. ‘It’ll wreck us,’ he declared. ‘That’s what we’ve tried to stop. The companies want trouble. I’ll bet half the trouble over in Hunter County was started by blackguards who got paid to start it. You never can tell. It’s the best way to kill the Association. The companies want trouble.’

  ‘And by God!’ Mr. Christian said, ‘they may get their bellyful.’

  As he rode home that afternoon he turned the question over and over in his mind. Did the Senator want power? He assumed that that was the objective. Power. But if Senator Tolliver, who had helped to create the Association, had remained on the board, and the Association had succeeded, then he would have been in a position of power. The Association people would have been behind him, and a good solid farm vote in the section went a long way toward electing a man to anything. But now he was out to break what he had made. To destroy what you create — that was power, the fullest manifestation. Maybe that was it, he thought. The last vanity.

  May was in the side garden, as she had been that afternoon months before, when he had ridden his mare to a lather to get home to tell May that he was to be on the board. But the season was different now. It had been almost fall then, the zinnias dry and rusty, the maple leaves pocked and faded and hanging motionless on the boughs or lying sparsely on the overgrown gravel of the walk, one here, one there. She had been standing there, as she was accustomed to do in the fall, among the ruins of the garden which she had forgotten all summer. He had moved swiftly toward her then, the grass over the gravel carpeting his tread, and had tried to seize on and understand the very essence of her aloneness as she stood there unaware of his approach.

  Now, as then, he moved swiftly toward her, his steps muffled, and his attention poised for the moment when she would turn to discover him. She was kneeling beside the walk. She wore no hat, and her hair was disheveled and slipping from its heavy coils. The pale light that washed through the budding trees accented delicately the yellow of her hair.

  He was almost upon her before she lifted her head.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, and stretched out his hand to help her to her feet. She dropped the trowel with which she had been digging in the flower bed, and stood up to kiss him. ‘Oh, Perse,’ she told him, ‘I’m getting ready to plant some nasturtiums. Along the walk here. Don’t you think that would be nice?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. Her gaze went back to the little patch of black earth and mold which she had turned up from under the cover of last year’s leaves.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘Tolliver is suing the Association. For his tobacco.’

  ‘Oh, Perse, can he do that?’

  ‘He’s doing it,’ he commented. He noticed that she was still looking at the patch of ground. ‘If he wins, it’s all up with us. That’s all.’

  At that she looked at him, and her face assumed an expression of concern. ‘But he won’t,’ she predicted. ‘You all will win, won’t you, Perse?’

  ‘Maybe not. You can’t ever tell, and the Dismukes people are suing jointly. You see, he’s trying to sell his crop to them. Probably we won’t win.’ He had not previously considered the possibility that the Association would lose such a suit. He had not been worried about that particular thing. The damage, the worst damage, was being done in other ways. And even now he had not settled the probabilities in his own mind. But he was saying it, saying that the Association would probably lose. And saying it because he wanted, as he discovered at that moment with a cold sense of satisfaction, to deepen that look of concern on her face, to frighten her, to make her aware of the evil and the instability in the world, to make her suffer. Then, with that discovery, he took a stronger relish even as he ended: ‘Yes, it’s very likely we’ll lose. Then you’ll feel the pinch.’ He enjoyed the moment, postponing consideration of the event, and of the judgment which, he knew, he would later bring to bear bitterly against himself.

  ‘I’m sorry, Perse,’ she said, and laid her hand on his arm. ‘But don’t worry, Perse, don’t worry so much.’

  He stared at her face for an instant, as though he drew a nourishment from the distress which was so obvious upon it. Then he asked: ‘And why shouldn’t I worry? Tell me that.’

  ‘Oh, Perse, don’t be that way,’ she pleaded, and clung to his arm, drawing it against her side. He made no reply, looking away from her, at the young grass over the gravel of the walk.

  ‘I never did like him,’ she said after a minute meditatively. ‘Not a bit. I tried, but I never could.’

  ‘You never said anything,’ he observed.

  ‘No’ — and she hesitated — ‘I didn’t. I didn’t know anything. And you liked him so much and thought so much of him, and looked up to him the way you did. I didn’t want to say anything, when you felt that way. But I never liked him, I don’t know why.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say that now,’ he said bitterly, still not looking at her.

  ‘No, it’s been for a long time. Maybe it was something that day at his house. The way his sister always acted when he was around, the way she never took her eyes off him in a way that made you creepy.’

  ‘You imagined it,’ he said. He was irritated with her story. He did not want to hear it.

  ‘No, and that night when she took me upstairs, I happened to glance at that little picture at the head of the stairs — maybe you saw it, a picture of a woman — and she stopped and held the light close up, and said, “That was his wife.” Then she turned around and looked at him — he was standing in the hall down there, just getting ready to go back to the living-room. She looked at him that way, then she said, “She was an angel.” It made you believe that old story about them, about her.’

  ‘About him driving her to being a dope fiend?’ he demanded. ‘Killing herself with morphine? That’s scandalmongering. She was rich and he got her money, when she died. That made the gossip.’

  ‘I never liked him from the moment I laid eyes on him,’ she declared.

  He drew his arm from her clasp. ‘He’ll ruin us all,’ he said. He looked directly into her face. ‘You and me, too,’ he added, ‘he’ll ruin us.’

  ‘Don’t worry so, Perse,’ she begged, reaching for his arm again. ‘It’ll all be all right. It’s bound to ——’

  ‘Nothing’s bound to,’ he said.

  ‘You mustn’t worry; just try to forget it now.’ She drew him, trying to lead him a step or two down the path, pulling his arm, and reluctantly he followed. ‘I’m going to make another bed here,’ she announced, ‘for some nasturtiums. And cosmos over there.’ She gestured toward the open space beyond which stood the weathered, soft-toned brick wall of the house. ‘And marigolds, they’ll be nice against the house. And around that old stump there’ — she pointed to a thick stump, black with rot, which stood in the middle of a patch of pale, newly springing grass — ‘there is a good place for pansies. The ground ought to be rich there.’ She took a step toward the old stump, and quickly knelt and dug her fingers into the soft, crumbly earth. Then, with her face lighted by pleasure, she looked upward, over her shoulder, at him.

  She rose and came back to him, holding her stained hands toward him and still smiling. They began to move toward the house. ‘But I’ll need somebody to help me,’ she was saying, ‘a man to spade up and all. You’ll let a man come up soon, won’t you, Perse? The next day or two, before ——’

  He stopped still in the middle of the walk, and looked her in the face. ‘No,’ he answered, and heard his own words coming with that impersonal and measured decision, ‘you know every hand on the place is busy right now. It’s a rush season, and I can’t spare one. Not one. You’ve lived on a farm all your life, you ought to know that much.’ He watched the expression of her face change from pleasure to surprise, then from pain to bewilderment; and then he continued: ‘Besides, you don’t really want to have a garden. After a few weeks you never look at it. I’ve noticed that, as long as I’ve known you. It’s just something you do, and then you don’t even take the trouble to direct somebody about keeping it in condition in the summer. Why do you want to start a garden? It’s very unreasonable, you know, under the circumstances. You being the way you are. About things.’

  She had taken a step away from him, but with her face still toward him. She turned, very suddenly, and began to walk away, down the path. Impersonally, he noticed the light falling palely over her and the way her shoulders moved and hunched together a little. She was trying to suppress a sob, he knew.

  His first impulse was to rush after her. But he did not. He stood in the middle of the path, staring after her. Then he looked down at the spot where, before his arrival, she had been digging. There lay the old, rusty trowel, which she had grasped with her small and inadequate fingers. Not four square feet of the soil was turned up, and that had merely been pecked at with the useless instrument. As he looked, a sadness overcame him, more than sadness, a despair that seemed to well from some profound truth that he had never before suspected, and that even now was veiled from his view.

  Mr. Munn had gone down with Captain Todd to the Association warehouse in Bardsville one afternoon a couple of weeks later to inspect an extension that was almost completed, when Mr. Christian came to tell him the whole truth about Senator Tolliver.

  ‘There’s some chance those sheds’ll never be filled,’ the Captain had commented gravely as they left the new section and went back into the pungent gloom of the main warehouse. ‘But even if we could have broken the contract for the new building, to do it would’ve just been a way of saying we were half-licked already.’

  ‘It’s hard,’ Mr. Munn had said, standing there in the middle of the floor under the high, shadowy rafters and beams. ‘It’s hard to know what to do. Where to strike.’

  ‘Win the suit. That’s first.’

  ‘That’s just one thing. If everything could just be brought together at one time, one place, just so you could fight it and have it over’ — he had raised his right fist slowly — ‘so you could get at it, all at once.’ He had brought his fist hard into the palm of his left hand with a solid, smacking sound: ‘Like that.’

  Captain Todd had peered at him in the dim light, and answered: ‘No, Perse. No way in the world. Never a time in a man’s life when everything is like that, so you can just lift up your hand, and win or lose and settle everything. Almost that way, maybe once or twice in a man’s life. But never so you can settle everything. It’s too much to ask.’

  Mr. Munn had thought of Captain Todd lying out that night with his men at the ford, waiting for the next rush; and then, looking at the Captain’s quiet face, he had wondered how much had seemed to come together that night, how much had seemed to be settling itself there for good and all, with almost a single blow. ‘Maybe not,’ Mr. Munn had slowly replied.

  Mr. Christian found them there. As he approached, they could guess, even in the gloom, the rigidity of controlled fury in his stiff-legged stride and in the heavy hunch of his shoulders. He came directly to them and stopped directly in front of them. His jaws were clamped shut as though by an effort of will he kept himself from speech. When he did allow himself to speak, his voice was harsh and measured.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘they got at Tolliver.’

  ‘Sure, they did,’ Mr. Munn replied. ‘Dismukes.’

  ‘Naw, naw’ — Mr. Christian spoke as though with impatience at stupidity. ‘Long before that. They got at him, because he’s broke. Broke, and owes money.’

  Captain Todd whistled softly through his teeth, and lifted his hand to touch his beard.

  ‘Yeah, broke! The bank in Morgansville holds a mortgage for fifteen thousand and something, and God knows how much he owes to the Mercantile National in Louisville. The mortgage in Morgansville was coming due, and they began putting the screws on him. The tobacco people are thick as thieves with the Mercantile National, and the big boys up at the Mercantile just pass on the word to Morgansville.’ He spoke with a sharp expulsion of breath at every word, as though he would spit the words out of his great yellow teeth, from which the lips drew back; but he spoke with a strained and artificial deliberation. ‘And he was to see that the Association sold out, took up all those offers. That was the first thing. No telling what was next on the ticket. But we didn’t sell, and so they decided to play it the other way. The way they are.’