‘It didn’t hurt much,’ Benton Todd said detachedly. Mr. Munn did not recognize the voice. ‘But I didn’t know it was going to bleed so much.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, boy, don’t you worry,’ the man cutting off the trousers uttered, ‘we’ll get it off, we’ll get you fixed up in no time. No time a-tall.’

  Benton Todd seemed to be paying no attention, now, to the men about him. He was looking upward, beyond the torch and the clustered faces enclosed in that fading bulb of light of which the torch was the center, and beyond the cedar boughs. The torch flame was reflected tinnily in his eyes.

  ‘Gimmie a knife, I can’t get it off,’ the man at the boot complained peevishly; ‘it’s all stuck up and I can’t get it off.’ Another man pushed him aside, and began cutting at the leather. The man who had been working at the boot raised his own hands into the torchlight, covered with blood and muck, and with an expression of distrust and solicitude inspected them, as though they, too, were wounded.

  ‘I think ———’ Benton Todd said, somewhat tiredly, not looking at the men, ‘you better try to stop it.’

  They were putting a belt around the wounded thigh, which was now naked. The blood welled out of the small puncture there, and flowed darkly, but glintingly, over the white flesh. They drew the belt as tight as possible, and they packed handkerchiefs on top, and under the wound beneath, where the bullet had entered. Two of the men had taken off their shirts and were tearing them into strips. The handkerchiefs soaked up the blood, soggily.

  ‘Bent, Bent,’ Mr. Munn called, leaning. ‘Hey, Bent! Listen here ——’

  Laboriously, Benton Todd directed his gaze upon Mr. Munn. Then Benton Todd moved his lips, dully. ‘That blood,’ he said, ‘it came out of me.’

  Mr. Munn could not remember what he had intended to say. Benton Todd’s remote, incurious, gnomic gaze withdrew, left him, sought again the darkness of the cedar boughs above.

  Benton Todd bled to death while they leaned over him and watched him. They could not stop the blood, which seemed to well prodigally and inexhaustibly from that small aperture.

  One of the men held his hand to Benton Todd’s chest. He straightened up, and said, ‘He’s a goner.’ He looked at Mr. Munn.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Mr. Munn rejoined, as though irritably.

  ‘It’ll be tough tiddy for the Captain,’ one of the men remarked.

  The men crowded around the body, and leaned over it, and peered down at it. The torch was guttering out. For a moment or two no one spoke.

  ‘Tough tiddy,’ another man said, then ‘and no denying.’

  Mr. Munn shook himself as though rousing from a sleep. ‘Listen,’ he directed, ‘some of you all get a buggy. Get the first one you can find. It don’t matter whose. And start on toward Captain Todd’s place. That left road down at the church will take you across to his pike. We’ll catch you.’

  ‘Catch us?’ somebody echoed, inquiringly.

  ‘I’ll be glad to have as many as want to come with me,’ Mr. Munn offered. ‘I’m not ordering anybody, understand. I want those who come of their own free will.’

  ‘You aiming to chase ’em?’

  ‘Cut them off,’ Mr. Munn said shortly. ‘We can cut them off before they hit town. The road this lane here joins, we can take it, and hit the pike before they make town.’

  No one answered, for a moment. Then a voice: ‘Dammit, you didn’t want to bushwhack ’em back there on the pike when it might-er done some good. Now it won’t do no good, and you want-er go and fight.’

  ‘I just want those who come of their own free will,’ Mr. Munn answered.

  ‘Durn if you don’t beat me,’ the voice exclaimed.

  ‘Now,’ Mr. Munn added.

  ‘All right,’ the voice said fatalistically, ‘all right, I’ll go.’

  Just before the first signs of dawn, Mr. Munn and seven other men lay behind a tumbled stone wall beside the pike, considerably less than a mile out of town, and fired carefully into a mass of mounted men on the pike. The men had been riding slowly along, idly lounging in their saddles and laughing and joking with each other. At the first volley, the mounted men, some thirty of them, broke and fled down the pike toward town. Two bodies were left lying in the middle of the pike. Later, when the panic wore off, the men returned from town and got the bodies of the two dead men. Three other men had been wounded, but not so badly they could not sit their horses.

  Mr. Munn, alone, for the other men who had lain behind the stone wall with him had now gone home, overtook the party that was escorting the buggy with the corpse of Benton Todd. He overtook them a few hundred yards south of the entrance to the Todd place. They had had a hard time getting a buggy, they told him, and they asked what had happened.

  ‘We had a little brush with them,’ he said.

  ‘Did you all hit any of ’em?’ Mr. Allen demanded.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn answered abstractedly, riding alongside the buggy and watching the bare foot, which protruded from the blanket-wrapped bundle propped in the seat, jog uneasily with the motion of the vehicle.

  When they got to the gate, Mr. Munn said that he would ride on ahead. The men looked at each other relievedly, but answered nothing. He grasped the pull-rope that worked the gate, and the gate swung open, and he urged his tired mare forward up the slight rise toward the house. Just back of the house, over the woodlot, a saffron light streaked the lowest clouds.

  Mr. Munn leaned against the doorpost, and knocked. The mare stood in the yard, her forefeet wide apart, and her head drooping. He looked at her, and waited for the sound of steps within. His clothes felt like lead weighing upon his shoulders.

  Captain Todd, wearing trousers and a coat, which he held together under his chin with one hand, stood in the open doorway and looked at him.

  ‘Benton,’ Mr. Munn managed. Then: ‘Benton, he ——’

  ‘He isn’t staying here,’ Captain Todd said. ‘He hasn’t been staying here for several weeks. I can’t precisely say where you’d find him ——’ His gaze passed beyond Mr. Munn. Then, slowly, he fixed his eyes upon Mr. Munn’s face, and as he stared, his head twitched, almost imperceptibly, from side to side. Mr. Munn, with an effort of will, turned, and saw the approaching buggy and the horsemen. He saw them quite clearly in the new light that was rapidly suffusing those pastures and fields and bringing into familiar certainty the features of all the landscape beyond.

  Chapter twelve

  THE troops came on a special train that reached the Bardsville depot late in the afternoon. For two hours before the arrival, a gradually increasing crowd congested the waiting-rooms and lounged along the platforms of the depot. It was an unusually mild afternoon for even so late in January, and many of the men did not wear overcoats. Those who did wear overcoats let them hang loosely unbuttoned or thrust them jauntily back, and stood on their heels with their hands in the pockets of their trousers. The sun shone brightly, making the double set of tracks along the platform gleam like burnished silver, and flashing on the wings of the white pigeons that wove familiarly back and forth against the blue clarity of the sky or lighted on the gravel beside the platform to peck, with a dignified condescension, at the grains of popcorn which people threw to them. When the children who played along the tracks ran past them, they scarcely noticed, not taking wing, and merely eyed the disturbers.

  A child, a little boy of some six or seven, first observed the approaching train. He stood in the middle of the tracks, with his right arm rigidly pointing northward, and screamed, ‘The soldiers, the soldiers, the soldiers!’ until a woman came and drew him to the platform, and slapped him sharply on both cheeks. She was a pale, thin, poorly dressed woman, and when her son had ceased his screams of excitement and only whimpered, she looked around at the nearest people and said in an explanatory, apologetic tone: ‘It looks like he just will get all worked up like that and carry on. It looks like children, the more ——’ But her voice trailed off, for no one was listening to her. Everyone was straining to see the train. The other children had congregated on the tracks, staring northward, where the little plume of black smoke hanging above the cut seemed to come no nearer; then, reluctantly, at the sound of the still-distant whistle, they merged into the expectant crowd on the platform.

  At last, flecking off steam like spittle, roaring and grinding on the polished steel of the rails, shaking the boards of the platform with the vibrations of its mass, scattering the pigeons in a crazy, tumultuous flock, the locomotive pulled past, and there, drawing to a stop, were the coaches, and within them, pressed to the glass of the windows, those peering, inquisitive faces that seemed, all of them, all alike under the brown, wide-brimmed hats. The train stopped. The conductor descended, somewhat warily, with his eyes fixed on the crowd. Then, as though reassured, he planted his feet firmly, wide apart, on the gravel, and surveyed the faces. But no one was watching him. The people were watching a large, red-faced man, in uniform, who seemed oblivious to them while he descended the steps, as though the descent required infinite care, as though it required all of his energies and attention to trundle down, successfully, that enormous belly, over which the tan cloth was buttoned and buckled to bursting. Just as his foot touched the gravel, and he raised his eyes, blinkingly and unresponsively, toward the people, the small brass band at the far end of the platform drove into the initial strains of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Blinkingly, the large man saluted, and the younger man descending behind him paused on the last step and saluted.

  As the music exploded on its last note, a man separated himself from the crowd and rushed toward the officer, his hand extended in greeting and his smile exposing the liberal amount of gold among his prominent teeth.

  ‘Major Pottle?’ he inquired loudly.

  The large man nodded, and said, ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’m the mayor,’ the other man explained, ‘Mayor Alton, to be exact, and I welcome you and your men.’ They shook hands, and the mayor, leaning confidentially and insinuatingly toward the large red-faced man, began to talk earnestly into his ear, but in so subdued a tone that the nearest persons in the crowd, no matter how hard they strained, could not understand a word. The major looked straight ahead of him unseeingly, as though he heard nothing and were absorbed in his own inward processes, and slowly blinked his pale blue, protruding eyes.

  The men climbed down from the coaches and were formed in company front on the open stretch at the south end of the platform. There were two companies of infantry. The stock cars with the cavalry horses were switched to a siding, and the cavalry men began unloading. All the while the band was playing. The train pulled out; the soldiers remaining on it leaned from the windows and waved back. They were on their way to Morganstown. The next day one of the companies of infantry and a squadron of cavalry from the force at Bardsville were to be marched to French Springs, eleven miles away, where there was no railroad.

  Mayor Alton, clutching Major Pottle by the arm, steered him toward a baggage truck at the south end of the platform, the officer’s unwieldy bulk moving slowly, but unprotestingly, almost somnambulantly, as though in the grip of a superior will. The mayor, with a kind of creaking and exaggerated nimbleness, clambered onto the baggage truck, and extended a hand to assist Major Pottle. But Major Pottle ignored the hand. He clutched the edge of the truck with both hands, placed one foot on the tongue of the truck, and with his neck reddening above the collar and his pale eyes bulging, heaved himself upward. He rose to his feet asthmatically, and stood beside Mayor Alton, who at that moment extended his arms to still the music, and began to speak.

  ‘Friends and fellow citizens,’ he began, ‘to say that peace is returned to our distracted community, is today my happiness. If — and I say this with both sadness and pride — my request for military assistance had been granted that sad and fateful morning when we awoke to find in ruins the properties and investments of those great business organizations which, more than any other factor, contribute to the happiness and prosperity of our thriving community; if my judgment had been heeded, if then ——’

  ‘Shut yore mouth ’fore you fall in hit,’ a voice called from the crowd.

  ‘If then,’ Mr. Alton proceeded, ‘my request had been granted, our sister communities, which likewise have suffered from the torch of the accursed vandals ——’

  Mr. Christian laid his hand on Mr. Munn’s shoulder, and leaned toward his ear. ‘By God,’ he whispered, ‘I do believe that snaggle-toothed bastard is talking about me.’

  ‘— would have been spared the tragic blows that befell them. But now we can see that peace has returned to us. Now the loved ones of those two gallant lads who gave their young lives to avenge the fair name of their city will feel that the sacrifice will not have been offered up in vain. And the man who is bringing us peace now stands beside me. He is Major Pottle. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you Major Pottle, who will say a few words.’

  ‘Old Tub-o’-guts!’ a voice yelled from the back of the crowd. ‘Let old Tub-o’-guts talk!’

  Mr. Alton waved his arms furiously and screamed: ‘Get that man, get him! Arrest him!’ The two policemen, who had been lounging at the edge of the platform, tried to thrust their way into the crowd, but it was impossible. ‘Get him!’ Mr. Alton screamed, and waved his arms in the direction of the troops. There the troops stood, motionless, erect, their rifles grounded, the bright sunshine falling upon them. They did not move.

  The policemen were swallowed up in the crowd.

  All the while Major Pottle gave no sign. He might have been alone, staring owlishly at nothing, puffing his slow breath out between his meaty lips. When the disturbance had subsided, he said that he appreciated the hospitality of Bardsville and he wanted to thank the good people and he was sure he and his men would enjoy their stay in such a fine little city. He stopped speaking suddenly, almost in the middle of a sentence, as though he had merely been thinking aloud and now the thoughts were grinding on, slowly and ponderously, inside his head while he blinked at some object far away beyond the people.

  Mr. Alton was gesturing and beckoning to someone in the crowd below him. The crowd wavered and parted there, and Senator Tolliver was assisted to mount the baggage truck. He shook hands with Mr. Alton and with Major Pottle. Mr. Alton thanked Major Pottle for his kind words and said that now he would call for a few appropriate remarks from a distinguished citizen who in the recent distressing situation had, as always, taken a firm stand in favor of law and truth and right.

  ‘The skunk,’ Mr. Christian said, scarcely bothering to whisper.

  Mr. Alton waved his arm in the direction of the Senator.

  ‘Which one?’ Mr. Munn demanded.

  ‘Take your pick,’ Mr. Christian replied glumly.

  Senator Tolliver was speaking, but Mr. Munn hardly attended to what he was saying. He was, instead, comparing that man who now stood there on the baggage truck, somewhat stooped, sallow, graying splotchily, with the man who had stood on the platform, under the bright bunting and the brilliant sunshine, that day of the first rally. When Senator Tolliver had first got up there on the baggage truck, Mr. Munn had felt, looking at him, the firmness of the hatred within himself. With relish, he had been aware of it, it was still there, strong and solid and sure within, something he could depend on and cling to, something real, the same thing which he had held in his mind, cherishingly, on waking at night, as one fingers a token or a keepsake, which is nothing in itself, but which means the reality of one’s past, the truth of one’s feelings, the fact of one’s identity. The hatred was there now, perfect and safe within, something to hold to.

  For a moment or two the Senator’s voice would rise, full and sonorous and compelling as it had been that August afternoon; then it would falter. He was afraid. Mr. Munn, looking at him, was sure he was afraid. He could no longer look out over the massed faces and master them. Instead, he cringed before them, fawning for a momentary favor, grateful, and showing that he was grateful, for a respite. Or he was, an instant later, suspicious of them, and almost sullen, anxious to be done and gone. Or he tried to bully them. Or worse — and Mr. Munn was almost embarrassed as he listened — he tried to vindicate himself, saying he had always followed the best interest, or what he took to be the best interest, of his section as his guiding star, that if he had made mistakes, the mistakes had come from loyalty and zeal — that he wished to be understood, and to be clear before all men. Clear in my office, he said.

  ‘You ain’t got no office!’ somebody yelled.

  The crowd was restless. Feet scraped on the boards and on the gravel. My God, Mr. Munn thought, he’s not the same man, it’s a different man. The crowd was stirring uneasily. And I, Mr. Munn thought suddenly, with a shocking clarity, not hearing that voice nor noticing the people, I’m not the same man.

  He hung poised on the brink of that thought, as on the brink of a blackness. It seemed to draw him, intoxicatingly, as with a new surety. But slowly, with an effort of will almost, he recoiled from its fascination. He forced himself to look at the objects about him. At the back of the man’s head in front of him, at Mr. Christian’s flushed, heavy-jowled face, now sullen and brooding. And to listen to that voice. To its cringing, its fawning, its bullying, its lying, its hopelessness, its fear. All of those things were in the voice, and in the sallow face and stooped shoulders and nervous gestures.

  The crowd wavered, while that voice went on. The crowd wavered, and to the man leaning over it, talking to it hurriedly and uncertainly, it must have been like the earth along some precipitous trail, the earth, usually so firm and comfortable, that under the frightened foot stirs treacherously, twitching like the hide of a somnolent beast that may wake to leap. Like the beast or like the landslide. Both were there, Mr. Munn felt, in the crowd.