The Senator was saying: ‘— and I say this to you, my friends, for you are my friends, and I count no higher privilege than the privilege of saying to this body of people now before me, you are my friends — I say this to you, my friends ——’ Mr. Munn thought: He has no friends, not even the people who bought him out, body and soul, lock, stock, and barrel. Nobody up there in that big house now. Not those people from Louisville and Washington, any more. Just a few slimy, lickspittle suck-tails who would hang round saying, yes, Senator — yes, sir, Senator, for a couple of drinks and a ten-cent cigar.

  ‘— there is no finer thing than friendship, friendship and loyalty, loyalty to one’s friends, loyalty to one’s ideals. When I am dead — but I hope and trust our Almighty Father to grant me further years of service to the people of my section — open my heart, and in the words of the poet, you will find graven upon it ——’

  The bastard, Mr. Munn thought. Then, the poor bastard.

  That night, the night following the afternoon of the arrival of the troops at Bardsville, the two warehouses at French Springs were dynamited and burned, and the long, old, wooden-covered bridge over the river there was dynamited. Some people said that it had been mined to be blown up when the troops came over the next day from Bardsville, and that the explosion that night was an accident. They said it was God’s providence, saving the lives of all those soldiers, and a lot of them not much older than schoolboys, and hog-friendly if you’d let them.

  The bridge had not been mined. It was blown up by ten sticks of dynamite, two packages of five sticks each, attached to the lower part of the central stone pier. At the blast the pier had toppled over, the old stonework disintegrating into a heap of rubble, about which the waters, when the last echoes had died away between the high banks, lapped lullingly. The wooden superstructure, as it lay crumpled up on its side, had been fired. It burned slowly, but to the water’s edge, like an abandoned hulk, no longer seaworthy. But while the men had been out in a skiff preparing to affix the two charges of dynamite to the pier, Doctor MacDonald, on horseback at a gap in the timber and heavy growth that lined the steep banks, had looked down at the undulating blackness of the water and at the long, poised, undifferentiated mass of the bridge stretching across to be lost in the darkness of the farther bank, and had musingly said, ‘It wouldn’t be hard, you know, to figure out some way.’

  ‘Some way to do what?’ a man had demanded.

  ‘To do it when they were coming over,’ Doctor MacDonald had answered, still musingly. ‘A man could figure it out, all right.’

  No one had answered.

  ‘I wasn’t really suggesting anything,’ Doctor MacDonald had said, and had laughed once, briefly, in the darkness. ‘I was just sorter figuring.’

  Looking down the bank, Mr. Munn had thought, yes, and there’s good cover along here. It got so a man’s mind ran that way.

  The roar of the explosion up at the settlement a half-mile away had come. The men from the skiff had clambered up the bank. Doctor MacDonald and the others had lifted their reins. With a boom, and a sound of grinding that filled the air, the bridge had heaved upward, and over. It had not taken more than a couple of minutes to fire the superstructure. Behind them, slowly, the flames had mounted as they galloped up the pike.

  That night, also, Monclair, the home of Senator Tolliver, was burned to the ground. The men who fired it were unknown. When Doctor MacDonald heard the news by telephone the next morning, his surprise was complete. Deliberately, he replaced the receiver upon its hook, but as he turned from the instrument, his face was drawn and white with fury, and his hands, hanging from the corded wrists, clenched and unclenched.

  Monclair was the first dwelling-house to be burned. The Munn place was the second. Despite the threatening letters which he had received and which Mr. Murdock and Mr. Sills had received, Mr. Munn had not anticipated the act. Others, he guessed, had also received such letters and had said nothing about them. He had never mentioned the letters which he himself had received. Not a week before that night at Professor Ball’s academy, the night when Doctor MacDonald read aloud the letter to Mr. Murdock, Mr. Munn had received such a letter. That letter had directed him to take no negro tenants for the coming year. Sitting in his office, at his desk, he had read the scrawled words. The paper was torn and dirty, a scrap of wrapping paper, apparently. The writing was smeared, as though the paper had been carried loose in a pocket. The letter had been mailed, the postmark indicated, from Morganstown. Sitting there, Mr. Munn had, for a moment, tried to visualize the man who might have written the letter: a man gripping the cracked stub of a penny pencil, hunching over a kitchen table under a tin lamp, twisting his face in the painful and awkward concentration. But he had not been able to visualize that face, a face, he had been sure, like so many of those faces which he might see on the street on a Saturday afternoon, long, bony, red like dried clay, or sallow, a face like faces which he had seen staring up at him at the organization meetings of the Association. It had been, in his imagination, like all those faces. But he had not been able to fix it and be sure of it, for the true face would not be like any other face; it would be different from all those other faces, individual, positive, unique, full of its own life, its own cunning, its own hope, bitterness, appetite, and hatred. Slowly, he had torn the sheet of paper into small bits, and had dropped them into the basket beside his desk.

  The third and last letter he found in the mailbox at his farm. It read: ‘We done told you twict to throw them niggers off yore place and put some white min on like we said and you aint done it. Instid you go and git shet of a white man which is named Grimes and put on a nigger in his place. We give you thre days to git shet of them black bastuds.’ Mr. Munn read the letter, straining to make it out in the failing light, and then looked up the long drive across the meadow to the grove where the house was. The grove, except for the dark masses of the cedars, was leafless now, and the upper part of the house was visible.

  For five nights he slept with a loaded rifle propped at the head of the bed. At first he considered getting one of the men to come up and stay at the house with him, one of them who had been on the place a long time, one he could depend on, but he dismissed the idea. It wasn’t their trouble, he decided; and decided that, after all, nobody would bother him, that the letters were a meaningless threat. He did, however, put one of the dogs in the house each night, giving it the run of the front hall, the back hall, and the kitchen, for if anybody tried to fire the house he would probably begin with the porches, the only wooden parts exposed. The dog inside would certainly notice any prowler who got that close to the house, even if the dog outside were disposed of before giving an alarm.

  During those five nights Mr. Munn would wake, thinking that a sound had disturbed him. He would take the rifle and creep to a window to peer out over the dark-dappled yard, where the trees were, toward the open ground of the meadow. There would be nothing, or nothing but those sounds which were so much a part of the night that they were nothing. Then he would go back and climb into the big bed, and try to go to sleep. He could not go back to sleep readily, no matter how tired he had been upon first getting to bed. Things would come to his mind, faces and speculations and events from the past that crowded through his head with a clamorous and independent vigor above his will, crowding devouringly and aimlessly like a mob breaking at last into a locked mansion. Those things, it seemed to him, must go on and on living their independent realities over and over, forever in new combinations and couplings and with new variations. They must go incessantly on like the distracted water of the sea, shifting and retreating and approaching and shattering itself and rejoining, while he slept or while his attention was torn from them by the demands of the day. He would think of May. He rarely thought of her when he was elsewhere, but here in this room, often. She was part of this room, more of a part of it than he was now; for he had grown away from it; he felt like a stranger in it now except at those unstable moments when the past flooded obliteratingly over the present. Once, upon waking and sitting up in bed, he seemed, by some trick of the light or trick of the mind, to see her there sleeping. How small she had been sleeping, with her life withdrawn deeply within her, small and curled up, like a child almost, and with her pale hair out on the pillow.

  The sixth and seventh nights after receiving the last letter of warning, he slept in town at the hotel, for court was in session, and he had a case coming to trial. Both mornings, immediately after getting up, he telephoned his place, but nothing had happened. If they had been going to carry out the threat, he began to feel, they would have done it already. He spent the eighth night at the Christian place. That night his house was burned down.

  That night the jangling of the telephone bell over and over drew him from the light doze into which he had fallen. As he tried to decipher the sequence of the rings, Lucille Christian suddenly laid her hand on his shoulder and said, ‘Two longs and three shorts, that’s our ring.’ She sat up in bed.

  ‘Wonder what it is?’ he said.

  ‘Be quiet,’ she ordered. ‘Papa’s getting up.’

  Motionless, they listened to the sounds in the next room, the sudden rasping of a chair on the floor, then steps, and the creaking of a door.

  ‘I better try to get back,’ she whispered to Mr. Munn. Her fingers were tight on his shoulder, pressing into the flesh.

  ‘Wait till he gets downstairs,’ he said.

  ‘The telephone’s just at the foot of the steps,’ she answered. ‘If he’s looking this way he’ll see me.’

  She slipped out of bed, put on her kimono, and hurriedly tied the big sash. Leaning toward the door, she said, ‘He’s talking now, I can hear him.’

  Mr. Munn got out of bed.

  Then, there was the heavy sound of Mr. Christian’s feet hurrying up the stairs, and his voice calling, ‘Perse! Perse!’

  The girl stood rigidly in the middle of the room, then she motioned toward the door. ‘Go to the door,’ she ordered, ‘stop him. I can’t get out,’ and she darted toward the corner of the room between the door and the windows, and flattened herself there against the wall in the deepest shadow. Mr. Munn, moving toward the door, caught a glimpse of her face, a whiteness there in the corner, but he could not make out its expression.

  Mr. Christian was beating on the door and calling, ‘Perse! Perse!’

  Mr. Munn opened the door.

  ‘The telephone,’ Mr. Christian exclaimed, ‘they want you on the telephone, your house, they say ——’

  Mr. Munn seized Mr. Christian by the arm and drew him into the hall. ‘All right,’ he said, and ran down the stairs toward the telephone. Mr. Christian stood at the head of the stairs looking down at him. With his eyes fixed on Mr. Christian’s figure there above him, Mr. Munn picked up the dangling receiver, and spoke into the telephone. ‘Yes?’ he demanded.

  It was one of the negroes from his place, breathless and gasping as from running and incoherent with excitement. The house, the negro managed to say, was burning up. It was almost gone now. He had run as hard as he could over to Mr. Goodwood’s place to call up. But the house was about gone.

  He ran into his room, seized his clothes and boots, and came back to the door to block Mr. Christian just at the sill. Out of the corner of his eye he had caught sight of Lucille Christian still pressed against the wall in her corner. He dressed standing there at the doorway, blocking it, while Mr. Christian waited in the hall.

  ‘My house is burning up,’ he told Mr. Christian.

  ‘How was it?’ Mr. Christian demanded.

  ‘They tried to make me get rid of the negro croppers on my place,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘I wouldn’t do it, so they burned the house down.’

  ‘You want me to come with you?’

  ‘No,’ Mr. Munn replied. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Or me, either, I reckon. But’ — and he looked up an instant from lacing his boot — ‘let me find out who it was and ——’ His voice trailed off. He tied the laces.

  ‘Let me find out,’ Mr. Christian said.

  Mr. Christian followed him halfway down the stairs. Very loudly, Mr. Munn called, ‘You’re going to lock up after me, aren’t you?’ That, he thought, would give Lucille Christian her chance.

  ‘No,’ Mr. Christian answered, ‘it don’t need it.’

  As he rode away, Mr. Munn cursed himself for his stupidity in not letting Mr. Christian come with him. That might have made it easy for Lucille Christian. Or again, it might not. Mr. Christian might have wanted to go to her room to tell her he was leaving. Then he thought he should have asked Mr. Christian to saddle his mare for him. That would have worked it. But Mr. Christian would go on back to bed, now. That would fix everything.

  It was near sun when he reached his place. The flames had been down for a considerable time, but the heap of smouldering timbers still winked palely in the gathering dawn. One of the cedars nearest the house had caught fire and had burned to a blackened spike from which rose a thin trail of smoke, straight upward. Over at one side a group of negroes were standing about, looking at the ruins. On the other side, two men held the bridles of some saddled horses, and closer to the ruins a group of men stood. They were cavalrymen. The lieutenant who was in charge introduced himself. He was named Prentiss, he said, and he just wanted to find out if Mr. Munn had any idea about the burning and if he had had any threats or anything like that. Mr. Munn said no, there had been no threats, that the whole matter might be an accident. The lieutenant said that that wasn’t likely, that it was night riders all right, because one of the negroes had seen three or four men riding off across the meadow, lickety-split.

  Mr. Munn shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ he said.

  After a while some of the negroes began to move off. The children had grown sleepy and querulous after their excitement. One child began to cry. Mr. Munn looked at the stuff the negroes had managed to save, only a few pieces of furniture from the downstairs, the sofa, a couple of chairs, a picture off the wall. When the first man had waked up, at the sound of a dog barking, they said, the fire was already coming out the upstairs windows.

  A good part of the walls of the house were still standing. The walls toward the corner where his bedroom had been were almost intact. Looking up at them, he thought, aimlessly, of himself and of other people before him sleeping in that room, protected by those walls, cut off by those walls from the weather and the night outside, and the world. Those walls had made a little world inside. That world was gone now. It was gone, liberated and absorbed into the air outside, dissipated in the flame and smoke. He was not sad at the fact. Now that it was a fact, now that the thing was done, it was like something done a long time before, something he had grown used to. He had not realized before, before he stood there to observe the gray ash flake off the smouldering timbers and a last few wisplike flames flutter outward, and then withdraw, how tenuous had grown the threads that tied him to the life, and the lives, that had been in that house.

  The young lieutenant came over to stand beside him. ‘Tough luck,’ the lieutenant remarked, ‘losing your house like that.’ He looked meditatively at the ruins. ‘And a right nice house too, it looks like.’ He paused again, then asked, ‘Were you raised here?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘The crummy bastards,’ the lieutenant exclaimed, ‘burning a man’s house down.’

  ‘I reckon so,’ Mr. Munn remarked.

  ‘I’m sorry we didn’t get here in time to do any good.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Mr. Munn replied.

  ‘We got to be pulling out,’ the lieutenant observed. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and offered his hand. Mr. Munn shook hands with him. He hadn’t noticed the fellow’s face before. It struck him as vaguely familiar. ‘Good-bye,’ he answered.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ the lieutenant said. ‘You must feel tough.’

  The cavalrymen mounted and rode off across the meadow. Mr. Munn watched them go. No, he decided, the lieutenant was wrong. He didn’t feel tough. That was not it. There was no word to name it with, exactly.

  He went down to Old Mac’s cabin, and sat on the chunk of limestone that was the step, while Mac’s wife cooked him some breakfast. After a while she called him in and gave him three eggs fried up with some side meat, and some hoecake and coffee. He ate with a good enough appetite. While he ate he remembered how the young lieutenant had reminded him of somebody. He turned that over in his mind. Then he had the answer. The fellow reminded him a little of the way Benton Todd had looked. That was it.

  When he got through eating, he rode on back to town. There was nothing else he could do out at his place, and, besides, he had the case coming up. When he got to his office, the girl there said for him to call the Christian place right away, that they had been calling for him all morning. He reckoned that Mr. Christian wanted to get the news about the burning. He had trouble getting on the line, and when he did get on he had to wait a long time before the negro cook out there called somebody to the telephone. Lucille Christian came. Her father, she said when she finally came to the telephone, had had a stroke, and she was afraid he was going to die. The voice that spoke to him out of the black tube which he pressed coldly against his ear was alien to him.

  But Mr. Christian did not die — not soon. He lay beneath the high, carved headboard of his bed, inert as a log almost, and without sound except for the dry rasp of his measured and grudging breath. His face, now splotchy in its color, was frozen in a pained and inquiring grimace, and his glance was fixed.

  But Mr. Munn did not see him when he went out to the Christian place. He was never to see him again after that night when he left him standing halfway down the stairs, barefooted, his nightshirt wadded into his trousers.

  When he got out to the Christian house that next morning, Lucille Christian met him in the hall. Her face was chalk-white, and her eyes, no longer blue, seemed dark and sunken.