‘How do you know?’ the Captain demanded. ‘Do you know for a fact?’

  ‘For a fact! By God, a fact! There’s a man over in Morgansville named Pottle, works in the bank. And he married a cousin of Sills and he owes Sills money and favors, and he’s been picking up stuff. So Sills got to putting the screws on him, and now he’s scared to death he’ll lose his job, and he will if he don’t keep on playing ball. The egg-sucking dog!’ Mr. Christian spat viciously, then put his booted foot over the spot and ground his heel.

  ‘Can you believe this fellow?’ the Captain asked.

  ‘Hell, I wouldn’t trust the bastard as far as I can fling a Jersey bull by the tail. Not if he’s playing it his way. But, by God, he’s so yellow you can scare the pee outer him with a couple of unkind words. And we worked on him last night, Sills and me’ — he leered with a deep satisfaction — ‘and by God, I mean to say we worked on him. When he got in his buggy long about one o’clock this morning to drive back to town from Sills’ place, he was pale as a man with a three-weeks spell of summer complaint. By God, he was cleaned out.’

  ‘You never can tell,’ the Captain said slowly, ‘what’s in a man’s mind. You never can.’

  ‘Hell, no, and him coming to my house all this winter, and sitting there talking to me and looking me in the eye, and talking pretty, and saying, “Now, Bill, now, Bill” — and knowing all the time how it was with him. Knowing how it was. How he was gonna sell us out, one way or another. Knowing it and just feeling it grow inside him. Sitting there and feeling it grow inside him like a tumor or something. And looking a man straight in the eye. By God ——’ He stopped breathlessly, the quality of his accustomed violence coming back to him and his face reddening, while he waved his arms. Then he swung toward Mr. Munn, and said, ‘And you, Perse, you swallowing him hook, line, and sinker, by God, he was taking you in, you voting right along with him.’

  ‘I know,’ Mr. Munn said gloomily.

  ‘Trying to take us all in,’ Mr. Christian continued, ‘giving a party up there in that big house a dope fiend’s money built, and patting us on the back and pouring out the likker. By God, it makes a man want to puke. What does he think I am? Is a man a hog to come to his holler because he slopped him? I ask you now, am I a whore to unbutton just because I see a five-dollar bill? Hell, no! and it’s all the same whether it’s in a feather bed or behind the barn. Whether he’s rich or poor, it don’t matter to me. And there’s hams in my smokehouse better’n the bastard ever put on his table, and flour in the flour barrel, and whisky on the shelf, and no woman I drove dope-crazy built my house. Hell, no, my folks built it, and ain’t a joist slipped yet, nor a rafter sagged.’

  ‘Good-bye,’ the Captain said, and put out his hand. ‘I think I’ll go out home.’

  They shook hands with him. His face, Mr. Munn noticed, even in the dim light, was pale and drawn. As he walked away toward the bright square of the doorway, his figure seemed to have lost some of its erectness, and his step seemed less firm. Mr. Munn nodded after him, saying, ‘This’ll hurt him. He thought something of Tolliver.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mr. Christian grunted. He was studying Mr. Munn’s face. Then he asked, ‘Well, what are you gonna do now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘I know what to do.’

  ‘What?’ Mr. Munn demanded.

  ‘Naw,’ Mr. Christian said, ‘naw. Not today.’ He suddenly stepped directly in front of Mr. Munn, and seized him by the shoulder, and stared into his face. ‘You come out to my house tomorrow night. And I’ll tell you. You come and spend the night.’

  Mr. Munn nodded slowly, abstractedly.

  Chapter six

  LUCILLE CHRISTIAN admitted Mr. Munn into the hall when he arrived at the Christian place just after dark.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get out for supper,’ he told her. ‘It was nice of you all to ask me. But I had more work than I could get through this afternoon.’

  ‘We were sorry,’ she said. She pushed the door closed, and though it was heavy it swung soundlessly on the hinges. Then she stood there with her hand on the knob, not as though waiting for him to speak or move, but as though he were not there at all, as though she could sink at will into the deep and complete satisfaction of her own being. The light from the lamp on the marble-topped table gave her dark blue, too-large eyes a velvety appearance, and gave the flesh of her face a faint gold tinge, as though an almost infinitesimal amount of light had been captured by the flesh itself and was now released. Mr. Munn glanced at the flesh of her arm under the lace insertion of the sleeve, trying to determine if that golden tinge was caught there too, but he could not tell.

  Actually, she stood there for only an instant, balancing herself at the end of the gesture that had closed the door; but it was long enough to give him that impression of complete stillness, of absorbed repose, which he had discovered, with surprise, that day of the rally when she had stood in the middle of the floor of the shadowy, dull room at the hotel.

  ‘The others are already here,’ she said. ‘In the parlor.’

  The others, he thought wonderingly.

  She moved across the hall briskly and laid her hand on the knob of a closed door. Her waist was small and straight, where the lawn was gathered at the wide, embroidered belt, and her neck rose very straight from the banded lace collar of the guimpe. She pushed open the door with a firm motion. ‘Just go in,’ she told him.

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied, and bowed slightly.

  She made no reply.

  He saw Mr. Christian rising to meet him, and then the two other men. ‘Well, you got here,’ Mr. Christian was saying. ‘Wish you’d had supper with us. We had some right good vittles, if I do say it. Sukie, now, she sets a good table; she keeps the niggers humping round that kitchen.’ He thrust out his big hand at Mr. Munn, and said, ‘Sorry you couldn’t come.’

  ‘I know I missed something,’ Mr. Munn rejoined.

  ‘Maybe he did, didn’t he, Mac?’ Mr. Christian nodded in the direction of one of the two other men, a stranger, a lanky man with coarse, reddish hair.

  ‘He sure did,’ the red-haired man said in a gentle, drawling voice, ‘and I’m a judge.’

  Mr. Christian led Mr. Munn across the room to the other man, who was tall too, and so gauntly rawboned that his long, square-cut black coat hung from his shoulders in apparently empty folds. ‘Well, Professor,’ Mr. Christian said, ‘this is Percy Munn.’ And turning to Mr. Munn: ‘And this is Professor Ball. But I bet you know him. Everybody knows the Professor.’

  ‘I know Mr. Munn,’ the rawboned man responded, and thrust out his hand, ‘but I haven’t seen him in a long time, years, in fact. Tonight is a privilege.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Mr. Munn said, and was about to grasp the offered hand when he saw that it was completely swathed in bandages. Involuntarily he stopped, his glance resting on the carefully wound cloths. Each finger was wrapped separately to make a great, clumsy, club-like glove. Then he remembered.

  ‘It will cause me no pain,’ the Professor assured him, and seized Mr. Munn’s hand. ‘A trifling affliction which time and the ministrations of my learned son-in-law over there’ — and he nodded toward the red-haired man — ‘may serve to remedy. And ——’

  ‘A case of impetigo,’ the red-haired man added, ‘and peculiarly stubborn.’

  ‘Vulgarly known,’ the Professor continued, ‘as the country leprosy. But not Biblical, I rejoice to state —— But, as I was about to say, it is a privilege to shake your hand, if I may say so. A young man who does credit to his community. A privilege for an old man who is about to go from the stage of action to greet the rising Roscius.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘It is my privilege.’ The Professor couldn’t be very old, he noticed, not much more than sixty. His hair was not gray, and there was scarcely any gray in his scraggly, red-brown beard which sprang in tangled tufts from the bony chin and cheeks, like vegetation that hardily finds a foothold on an arid and rocky hillside.

  Mr. Christian introduced him to the lanky, red-haired man. That was Doctor MacDonald, the son-in-law of Professor Ball, and, he added, a native of Louisiana but by way of being an adopted Kentuckian.

  ‘Yes, sir, an adopted Kentuckian,’ the Professor repeated. ‘A good woman will do a lot for a man, now. They’ve saved some from the curse of the bottle. They’ve led some to the light of salvation. And my daughter Cordelia — as I may remark with pardonable paternal pride — has almost made a Kentuckian out of Doctor MacDonald.’

  ‘Now that’s a fact,’ Doctor MacDonald agreed, laughing. He laughed easily and softly, easily like a man who finds the world hung together right and himself at home in it, and softly like a man who finds part of his pleasure always in the privacy of himself. ‘A fact, now,’ he repeated, letting his lanky frame fold back in the big rocking chair, and laying his long, sinewy hands on his knees.

  I wonder what they’re doing here, Mr. Munn thought. They hadn’t just happened in, apparently, for Lucille Christian’s words, ‘The others are already here,’ had implied that they were expected, and presumably that they were expecting him. He knew Professor Ball, all right, even if not much more than by sight. But he hadn’t seen him in years. Had a farm over in Hunter County and wrote letters to the papers about the preservation of fertility and all. Letters full of quotations from Thomas Jefferson and old John Taylor, and from the Latin — Virgil mostly, he remembered. And he ran an academy for boys. But Mr. Munn had never heard of Doctor MacDonald.

  ‘I knew your uncle,’ Professor Ball was saying, ‘over in our section.’

  ‘Uncle Mord?’ Mr. Munn asked.

  ‘Mordecai Munn, and a fine Christian gentleman he was, I can assure you. The happy warrior, for a fact now,

  Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,

  And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!

  Turns his necessity to glorious gain.

  Mordecai Munn, his spitten-image.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘You might say we led forth our flock together, as the poet puts it, for we were in Professor Bowie’s old academy together. Yes, sir, side by side, and I knew him well. Smart as a whip he was, and a spirited boy, but not an apt scholar, I regret to state. Many’s the time he said to me, “Now, Beany” — for they called me by that name, having begun by calling me Beanpole, I always being spare-made, boy as well as man — “Now, Beany, you do my Cicero for me, and I’ll lend you my cap-and-ball when you go squirrel hunting next time.” And I would do it all right, and I like as not never took the loan of his cap-and-ball, never till this day being much of a sporting man, and even then having a love of the beautiful and eloquent word. But Mordecai, you might say he scarce took a sup of the Pierian spring, so to speak. He couldn’t sit still, it seemed like. I’d speak with him and remonstrate sometimes, but he’d say, “You know, Beany, if I just sit still I go to sleep.” And he did, for a fact — sound asleep like a man with that jewel above price, an easy conscience. Yes, sir.’ Professor Ball suddenly leaned forward in his chair and thrust his long neck out, with a quick, viper-like motion, and spat accurately into the dead, gray wood ashes that filled the cold fireplace.

  My God, Mr. Munn thought, is he going to talk all night? Mr. Christian, he observed, was staring gloomily into the empty fireplace, with his head bowed a little so that the lamplight shone on the slick, pink surface of his bald skull; and Doctor MacDonald lay comfortably sprawled in the rocking chair, his legs thrust out before him, and his unlit pipe stuck between his teeth, which were revealed in a kind of secret half smile.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Professor Ball continued, ‘sound asleep, and never a subjunctive to disturb his slumber. But then the war came on, and he said, “Beany, my boy, off I go.” And he did, not nineteen years of age. He bore a charmed life, they all said. And when it was over, he came back, after what you might denominate as feats of superhuman endurance and heroic valor. Then’ — and Professor Ball spat again, with that quick, viper-like forward thrust of the long neck — ‘that man who had been, you might say miraculously, preserved through storms of shot and shell, just stops to light his pipe one morning when he comes out on the front porch to look at the state of the weather, and he stumbles and falls down the front steps and breaks his neck. Before the prime of life, and the porch not very high. Truly, man knoweth not the hour of his going forth.’ Professor Ball slowly raised one of his big, clumsy, club-like bandaged hands in an oracular gesture, then let it subside.

  ‘He died a long time ago,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘I just barely remember him when he’d come to see us sometimes.’

  ‘It was in ’seventy-eight he fell down the steps. Thirty-five years old, I recollect, and just three years older than me. But when we were boys we were together in Professor Bowie’s Academy, because I was forward with my books, if I may be permitted without immodesty to say so. And Mordecai not having the name of an apt scholar.’ He shook his head gravely, then added, ‘But he was a God-fearing gentleman.’

  Mr. Christian got heavily to his feet, and stood by the table where the lamp was. Professor Ball glanced at him, then said: ‘But you must condone my rambling recollections. The vice of approaching age, my boy.’ He stopped a moment, then spoke again. ‘I know we are gathered here for a serious purpose.’ He looked inquiringly at Mr. Christian.

  ‘You’re damned tooting, Professor,’ Mr. Christian returned. ‘You r’ar back and tell him. I believe the boy’s ripe and honing for gospel.’

  ‘It’s a simple proposition,’ Professor Ball said. ‘Very simple.’ He lifted his hands and put the tips of his bandaged fingers together and meditatively tapped them, while his voice assumed an impersonal tone. Just like in his school, Mr. Munn thought.

  ‘Very simple. It unfolded from a few family conversations between my son-in-law here, Doctor MacDonald, and me. Just two things determine the price of any commodity. Supply and demand.’ He gently tapped the bandaged fingers together. ‘Yes, sir. Now, the demand for tobacco, you might say, is constant from one year to the next. Ergo, the supply of tobacco is what determines the price. It is on that principle that the Association is founded.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘But the Association is being attacked by fair means and foul. In the public press and in the courts of justice, by the moneyed interests. These interests walk in darkness and strike the unwary man and rob him of the fruit of his toil. What the Association needs is a means of controlling the supply of tobacco.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ Mr. Munn pointed out, ‘except by getting everybody in the Association. God knows, we’ve tried hard enough.’

  Professor Ball lifted one commanding hand, as though for silence in a schoolroom, and smiled. ‘Let us suppose that there were another Association with the sole aim of controlling supply. But let me digress, if you please, sir. When, I ask, is the tobacco plant most vulnerable? When it is young and tender. In the plant bed before it is set in the field. Then a few strokes of a hoe, and a thousand pounds of leaf have disappeared. Very simple.’

  ‘You mean ——’ Mr. Munn hesitated. He looked at Professor Ball’s palish, preacherish face, with its high, narrow forehead and scraggly beard. ‘You mean, scrape a man’s plant bed?’

  ‘You might go so far as to say it was his own fault,’ Professor Ball said. ‘He’d have a free option. He could join the Association and abide by its rules and regulations, or’ — he looked away from Mr. Munn and fixed his mild gaze on some imaginary spot across the room in the shadow — ‘it would be his own responsibility.’

  Mr. Munn shook his head and rose slowly to his feet. ‘It just isn’t in me, I reckon,’ he admitted. Mr. Christian came quickly to him and put a heavy hand on his shoulder, as though to force him back into his seat, and said, ‘Now, Perse, don’t be going off half-cocked!’ Doctor MacDonald, who had not changed his position, was watching with that same secret half smile on his face and the dead pipe stuck between his bared teeth.

  ‘You’d be surprised what’s in you,’ Professor Ball said quietly, ‘sometimes. Now take me, for instance.’

  Mr. Munn sank slowly into his chair.

  ‘I’m a peaceful man. My hand has never been raised in anger against a fellow creature. When I was young, my weak constitution kept me from following the path of patriotic valor, like your uncle Mordecai. And I often meditated going into the ministry and preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and many’s the night I wrestled with the angel in sweat and prayer to know if I had a clear and certain call. Yes, sir, I’m a man of peace. But it’s surprising to a man what he’ll find in himself sometimes.’

  Mr. Munn shook his head meditatively. ‘No,’ he said.

  But Professor Ball seemed to be paying him no attention. He was not even looking at him. ‘Now what’s the right thing one time, that thing the next time is wrong. It’s in the Bible that way, and the Stagirite. If I peruse him aright. Yes, sir, there is a time. For one thing and another. And a man never knows what he’ll find in himself when the time comes.’ Suddenly he jerked himself forward, toward Mr. Munn, with that same viper-like thrust as when he had spat, but now his whole attenuated body partook of the motion, and he pointed his arm at Mr. Munn, shaking the long, knobby bandage of his forefinger. ‘And now’s the time. Now. Before that case ever gets to a jury. Now.’ The long, bandaged finger flickered and came to rest pointed at Mr. Munn’s chest, like a loaded pistol. ‘There’s trouble in the air and in the hearts of men now, this minute. You won’t be making the trouble. There’s been trouble in Hunter County, and there’ll be worse. You won’t be making it, but you’ll be making it mean something. You can’t stop it. It’s coming. You can’t stop the mountain torrent, but you can make it feed the fruitful plain and not waste itself.’