‘Hell, no, you didn’t make the trouble’ — Mr. Christian lunged to his feet again. ‘That bastard Tolliver made it, and all those bastards behind him, whose names I don’t know, but, by God! I wish I did so I could say ’em over every night. Tolliver and Tolliver’s kind. And don’t tell me you’re gonna sit there right now and suck right along with him. Like you did. My God!’

  Before he went to bed that night, Mr. Munn agreed to join the Free Farmers’ Brotherhood of Protection and Control. Before he finally said, ‘Yes, I’m with you, I reckon,’ he knew that he would do it. He resisted their arguments, and resisted the impulse that grew within himself, clinging to the present with that blind instinct that opposes even desired and expected change and makes a man linger even at the moment when he escapes from an unhappy, though accustomed, scene; or clinging to it that the delay might make all the sweeter his acquiescence, all the greater his relief when he should make the final plunge into certainty. He said, ‘Yes, I’m with you, I reckon,’ and saw Doctor MacDonald, who had never said a word the whole time, looking at him with that same half smile, an expression that seemed to say he had foreknown the entire matter.

  ‘The Free Farmers’ Brotherhood of Protection and Control,’ Mr. Christian commented; ‘now ain’t that something? Protection and control. Professor, you’re a mighty smart man. Now ain’t he, Perse?’

  Mr. Munn replied, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I always said good learning’s a fine thing. It never hurt nobody. And just look’ — and he gestured toward the erect and emaciated figure of Professor Ball — ‘that’s what it’ll do for a man!’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Professor Ball said, and turned and spat into the fireplace. ‘I have a little motto which came into my head for the Brotherhood. In the French tongue,’ he added, clearing his throat slightly. ‘Le bras pour le droit.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Mr. Christian declared. ‘That sounds mighty fine.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Professor Ball answered.

  ‘What does it go on to say?’

  ‘It says’ — and Professor Ball laid the tips of his bandaged fingers together — ‘ “The arm for the right.” ’

  ‘By God!’ Mr. Christian exclaimed, ‘the arm for the right! Professor, you’re a smart man, sure as a dog’s got fleas. Now ain’t he, Perse?’ He turned and slapped Mr. Munn on the shoulder and shook him.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Mr. Munn agreed. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And the doc there, too,’ Mr. Christian said, and waved his arm toward Doctor MacDonald’s chair. ‘The doc, too. He’s a smart man.’ Then he turned directly to him, and urged, ‘Mac, you tell him about the start you made over in your section.’

  The doctor unclenched his pipestem from his teeth, and said in his gentle, drawling voice: ‘Now, it’s nothing much to talk about. We’ve just got three little bands of Free Farmers together and organized already. We call them bands; ten men to a band, and a captain. We calculated that ten men was a good round number. And ten bands would make a company with a commander at the head. Professor Ball here’ — and with his pipestem he indicated his father-in-law — ‘he wanted to call the commander a centurion, but we figured ——’

  ‘In their great days, the Romans,’ Professor Ball interrupted, ‘were a people of sturdy farmers. History teaches us that. Remember Cincinnatus, plowing his four jugera of land. A simple farmer. And what does Cicero say in a similar connection?’

  ‘Durned if I know,’ Mr. Christian said.

  ‘He says’ — and he fixed his gaze severely upon Mr. Christian, and then, in turn, upon the other two men, ‘he says, “a villa in senatum arcessebatur et Curius et ceteri senes, exquo qui eos arcessebant viatores nominati sunt.” ’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ demanded Mr. Christian.

  ‘It is,’ Professor Ball affirmed. ‘And the word “centurion,” to come back ——’

  ‘Yes,’ Doctor MacDonald interrupted, ‘we figured “centurion” might confuse a lot of people over in Hunter County, sounding sort of foreign the way it does, and there being so many foreign tobacco buyers around here.’

  ‘It’s in the Bible,’ Professor Ball said; ‘ “And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way, and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee.” It’s in the Bible.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ Doctor MacDonald granted amiably, ‘yes, sir. But, now, not every man over in Hunter County is as good a Bible scholar as you, Professor, and it might just get a lot of them twisted up. So “commander” looks like it might be better.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Professor Ball said grudgingly.

  ‘And over all the companies there would be a chief. The men in every band would elect their captain, and the captains would elect their commanders, and the chief and his council would direct the policy. That’s the way it would be. And fast, if it’s gonna do any good.’

  ‘But careful,’ Professor Ball warned. ‘Only men of good name. No blackguards and riffraff, only worthy and respectable men with a good name in their community. That’s the kind of men we’ve got joined up over in Hunter County.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Doctor MacDonald said. ‘Only men of good name. And what we want you to do, Mr. Munn, is to give us a few names. And to speak to a few men yourself — sort of sound them out, you know. You might get a few to come in when you do, and take the oath at the same time.’

  ‘The oath?’ Mr. Munn asked. ‘You take an oath?’

  Professor Ball nodded gravely. ‘It would stick in the throat of no honorable man,’ he said. And he added, ‘A sacred oath.’

  ‘We just want you to use your influence a little, now,’ Doctor MacDonald said. ‘And give us a list to be working on.’

  ‘I’ll give you a list,’ Mr. Munn promised, ‘but I won’t speak to anybody until after I’ve joined myself. Until after. I don’t know why, but that’s just the way I feel about it.’

  ‘That’s what you might call a pretty scruple,’ Professor Ball said, nodding. ‘I always respect a man’s scruples, whatsoe’er they be, when he names them and abides by them.’

  ‘But I’ll give you some names. If you’ll let me have something to write with, Mr. Bill.’

  Mr. Christian got a piece of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen out of the tall, scroll-worked rosewood secretary in the corner, the door of which creaked when he opened it. He uncorked the bottle with fingers that seemed too thick and impatient for the task, and set it down near Mr. Munn’s elbow, under the yellow rays of the lamp. The marble of the table-top had faint, yellowish graining, and stains as of a delicate golden rust, which the light emphasized. As Mr. Munn picked up the pen, he noticed the fact, and idly recollected how, when he first entered the house, the light in the hall had given the flesh of Lucille Christian’s face a golden tinge. Like the light on this marble now.

  The ink bottle was almost dry, and was crusted about the neck. Mr. Munn had to tilt it to wet the point of the pen.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Mr. Christian remarked, ‘it’s aggravating now. There ain’t much writing goes on around here. I never was much of a hand to be writing letters and such, but, by God, when the time comes when a man does want to do a little writing, looks like there’d be some ink in the bottle.’

  ‘It’ll do all right,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘It’s aggravating,’ Mr. Christian reiterated.

  Mr. Munn wrote down two names; Joseph Foster, Murray Mill Pike, Bardsville; and Kimball G. Snider, Strawberry Creek Ford, Morganstown Pike, Bardsville.

  ‘I think they’ll come in,’ Mr. Munn reflected. Then he wrote down another name, Aaron Smythe, and held the pen meditatively poised.

  ‘That boy of yours,’ Mr. Christian asked, ‘now, you know — what’s-his-name — the one whose neck you pulled outer the rope?’

  ‘Trevelyan — Bunk Trevelyan.’

  ‘He’s a likely-looking specimen. If he’s got any gratitude and you said a word to him sometime, I bet he’d come in.’

  Mr. Munn shook his head, holding the pen poised over the paper. ‘No, I reckon I won’t say anything to him. Now, or later. He might think he had to join just because I got him off, that I had some sort of hold on him. But you haven’t got any right to force a man into something like this just out of gratitude or because you’ve got a hold on him.’ He wrote the name down, Harris Trevelyan, and looked around at the other men. ‘But you all can speak to him and maybe he’d come in. Only don’t mention my name.’

  ‘We’ll respect your wish, Mr. Munn,’ Professor Ball said.

  ‘I don’t think of any more right off. I’ll think of some more in the next day or two. Some I can recommend all right.’

  ‘We’ve got a lot to go on right now,’ Doctor MacDonald said. ‘Men we’ve talked to have been making recommendations. We’ve got enough names to make up more than twenty bands, right in this section. And we’ve talked to some.’

  ‘Right around here?’ Mr. Munn demanded.

  ‘Yes, sir, and we’ve got names in seven different counties. We’ve got a line on a good many, too.’

  ‘It looks like you’re looking forward to something pretty big,’ Mr. Munn said.

  Doctor MacDonald swung his lanky body up from the rocking chair and leaned toward Mr. Munn, pointing the stem of the unlit pipe at him. ‘Man,’ he said, and his lips drew back from the teeth in that secret half smile, ‘man, you don’t know how big it might be.’ He dropped his arm to his side, slowly. The sleeve was too short for him, and the long, sinewy hand, with its knobby knuckles and clean-looking fingers, hung far out.

  Before he went to sleep that night, Mr. Munn decided that he liked Doctor MacDonald. He liked his good nature, and the hardness that lay just beneath it, you could tell, just as the potentiality of speed and strength seemed to reside, upon second glance, in the slow motions of his lanky frame. Mr. Munn was not excited by the events of the evening. He was not sleepy, but calm and detached, as he lay on his back in the strange bed and stared up at the black ceiling and let the words and faces drift through his mind. He was at peace with himself, he told himself. His decision, his action, seemed so inevitable, like a thing done long before and remembered, like a part of the old, accustomed furniture of memory and being. Then it occurred to him that Senator Tolliver, not Christian and MacDonald and Ball, was really responsible for his decision, if anybody was. If the Senator had never laid a hand on his shoulder, had never leaned confidentially toward him, had not used him and betrayed him, he might never have taken this step. But that seemed part of the pattern, a sure and inevitable part. And the Senator’s face, which, smiling and dignified, flickered across his inward vision, was replaced by another and another, faces of people he knew, faces he had merely seen for a moment and had wondered about, the face of the old man with the purplish wen on his temple, the old man he had tried to tell May about that time, the old man who had been the only one to sign up that time at one of the meetings way out in the sticks, who had walked up to the front, oblivious of the other people as if he had been in an open field, and had said, ‘Boy, if you’ll gimme that-air pen-staff I’ll sign my name,’ and then: ‘I got me a little piece of ground nigh onto thirty years back. All that time ain’t no man said me yea nor nay, nor go nor come. I’m gonna put my name down now, boy, and if you say yea it’s yea, and nay it’s nay. What little crop I got don’t amount to nothing. My crop ain’t a pea in the dish. But I aim to sign.’ The words of the old man with the purplish wen on his temple were as clear to him as if he heard the voice saying them out loud to him that minute. He tried to phrase for himself the effect the recollection of the man always had on him, but he could not. He had never been able to do so. And he had not been able to do so for May, who had sat on his lap listening, or trying to listen, to his insufficient speech. What held him to the old man? He could not say. But what had held him to the Senator, he knew that. His vanity. He had been flattered. The Senator had touched his vanity. What spring of action, more obscure, more profound, had the old man touched? A deeper vanity. A vanity below another surface, which had been peeled away. It did not matter what name a man gave it.

  He rose from the bed, not restlessly as a nervous man does at night when he cannot sleep, but deliberately and comfortably as if the night were the new day. He walked across the room and leaned on the wide ledge of the window and looked over the lawn. There was no moon, but in the swimming starlight the newly springing grass looked pale, except where the shadows of the cedars lay. Those shadows were of inky blackness. He looked across the yard and toward the fields beyond, and thought how night changed everything, even the most accustomed landscape, your own fields. Or the face of somebody you knew and loved.

  As he rode down the narrow gravel road that dipped from the pike toward the creek bottoms, the spring twilight was fading softly out. He tried to remember if he had ever been down this road before. When a boy, perhaps. In those days he had ranged pretty widely over the countryside. He had thrown a line at one time or another into almost every creek in the section — Strawberry, Cold Spring, Elk Horn, Dorris — and at almost every bend for many miles in Black Water River. And he had clambered up brushy hills at night, scratching his face and tearing his clothes in his haste to reach the spot where the dogs had treed. There had been the blood-stirring, hollow sound of the dogs barking for the tree, a sound in the frosty woods that reverberated as in a long cavern, and the hollering of another boy somewhere in the woods. He himself had run like a dog, not caring for the whipping brush, straight toward that tree, where the eyes would shine down from the darkness of the boughs. He had camped on a good many of these creeks, on Strawberry Creek itself, but farther down, he remembered. With boys like little Bill Christian, who was dead now a long time, shot with his own shotgun. Maybe sometimes he had camped at Murray Mill itself with the boys. It would be like all the other old mills, anyhow: the stone dam, hung with moss, across the creek bed; the disintegrating structure of the mill; the two-story dwelling-house beyond in a grove of cedars, or the chimneys where one had burned. At night the motionless water above the dam would look like slick, black metal.

  Anyway, he knew what the country was like up here, for he had been up the main Murray Mill road, many times. The good soil gave out along here. Here the hillsides rose sharply from the creek bottom, nothing but the red clay sticking to bunks of limestone, and cedars with their stringy roots grappling at the fissures in the rock.

  Mr. Munn could hear the sound of the flowing water, and thought of the night in the fall when he had gone to the meeting in the schoolhouse, up Rose Creek section, and how they had waited silently in the schoolhouse for the rain to let up, and how he had ridden back alone through the sodden countryside with the drumming of the rushing stream in his ears. It was much the same kind of place here. The valley was quite dark now, even though when he looked above the undifferentiated mass of the hills, he saw that a little light lingered in the upper air.

  A horseman separated himself from the impenetrable shadow of the cedars by the side of the road, and moved slowly toward Mr. Munn. Mr. Munn drew rein, and waited while the rider slowly approached. The sound of the hoofs of the other horse made a casual, crunching sound on the loose gravel. Mr. Munn’s own mount stood perfectly still, and he listened to the sound of its breathing. He could not tell anything about the appearance of the man, it was so dark, except that he seemed to sit his horse with a natural grace.

  ‘Fair weather,’ the man said in an everyday tone.

  ‘Fairer tomorrow,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘Pass on,’ the man said. He moved back into the darkness of the overhanging cedar boughs.

  Two hundred yards farther, the road made a bend. There the mill was, an irregular, indefinable bulk on the other side of an open space, which was a little lighter than the road had been. Where the road debouched on that open space, he stopped. He could make out the fallen rail fence that bordered what must be an overgrown pasture, and how one fork of the road went down to a ford below the dam. The other fork was quickly lost in the dark shadow that enveloped the mill. The scene was as he had guessed: there the bulk of the mill, and the black, still water above the dam, and over the whole place the calmness of night and long disuse which he had known when he used to go camping at such localities when he was a boy.

  But he felt an almost overmastering impulse to stop in the shadow where he was, not to cross that open space. It was different from what he had expected. He had expected, in so far as he had consciously expected any definite thing, to find people here, men lounging about waiting, their pipes in their mouths, perhaps, talking in low voices as on some country occasion, such as evening services at a crossroad church. But there was nothing here. Absolute stillness, except for the sound of water on the stones, and no movement in the lighter space, where the fallen rail fence was. Then he heard the short whinny of a horse. Well, he said to himself, and lifted his rein, and his mount moved slowly forward into the open, up the road beside the old fence, and then up the fork toward the mill. Some men were standing in the shadow by the loading platform, he discovered when he was almost upon them. He could only make out the whitish blur of their faces.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said.

  The men replied nothing.

  He rode on past them, and tethered his mare to a sapling. They were looking at me all the time I rode across that light place, he thought. He walked back toward them, and took his place, leaning against the loading platform. The men were not in a group, he found, and they were not talking to each other. They were cut off from each other, as it were, each one drawn in upon himself; and yet they were so close that each man could have reached out to touch a neighbor.