‘He can’t get out,’ the voice said. ‘There’s men all round.’

  The door from the hall swung fully open and a man in uniform stood there. Other men were behind him.

  Looking at the man, Mr. Munn thought: I can stand up now, I can stand up, it’s the natural thing to do now. He stood up and looked at the man.

  ‘All right,’ the man at the door said back over his shoulder, to Professor Ball, ‘we’ll search the house. If you want it that way, you can have it.’ He stepped into the room. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded of Mr. Munn.

  ‘My name’s Munn,’ Mr. Munn said, and heard his voice natural and even.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Do you have a warrant for me?’

  ‘No,’ the man replied.

  ‘All right, then, it’s none of your concern.’

  ‘Well, we will have ’fore long’ — a chunky man with a pockmarked face stepped up even with the officer, and nodded toward Mr. Munn. ‘You’re Percy Munn, I know you. You’re one of ’em, too. They’ll be gitten a warrant for you, all right.’

  ‘I reckon you’re a deputy,’ Mr. Munn said, and looked at the man.

  ‘Yeah,’ the man admitted.

  ‘Well,’ Mr. Munn declared judicially, ‘I’m glad to see the deputies they got over here in Hunter County are as big sons-of-bitches as the deputies we got over at Bardsville.’

  ‘I’ll ——’ The chunky man raised his clenched fist, as though for a blow, and took a step toward Mr. Munn.

  ‘You better be trying to get what you came for,’ the lieutenant said shortly.

  The chunky man lowered his fist. ‘What’s in there?’ he demanded, and nodded toward the closed door across the room.

  Mr. Munn did not answer.

  ‘My daughters are in there,’ Professor Ball, standing at the hall door, told him.

  ‘Well, I reckon they ain’t turned in yet,’ the deputy said, and crossed to jerk open the door.

  The women there, faces raised as though in surprise, were sitting about the lamp, their sewing on their knees.

  ‘I suppose,’ Mr. Munn remarked to the officer, ‘they have to pay you good money to make you get caught out with that’ — and with a nod he indicated the chunky man. ‘Or,’ Mr. Munn added, ‘do you like it?’

  The officer opened his lips as though to speak. Then, after an instant, he asked, ‘What’s out that way?’ And he pointed beyond the room where the women still sat, with their faces raised in question.

  ‘Bedrooms,’ Professor Ball replied, ‘where some boys sleep. Pupils of mine,’ he added.

  The chunky man looked back over his shoulder. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, almost jeeringly, ‘he’s a schoolteacher.’

  ‘Why don’t you start there?’ the officer demanded. Then to the soldiers in the hall: ‘Allen, Forbes, go with him.’

  Two of the soldiers entered the room, lifting their feet in a cautious tread as though on treacherous ice, or as though afraid of smearing the floor with the red mud that was thick on their shoes. One of them, as he passed, glanced apologetically at Mr. Munn.

  The officer stood in the middle of the room, waiting. No one spoke. The dogs on the front porch were now barking intermittently.

  The deputy and the soldiers came back. Then they searched the back of the house and the rooms across the hall. All the while the officer, saying nothing, stood there with Professor Ball and Mr. Munn.

  The deputy returned and stood in the hall door.

  ‘All right,’ the officer said. ‘Let’s look upstairs.’ He went toward the hall, saying to Professor Ball, ‘You better come, too.’ Then to one of the soldiers, ‘You keep an eye on him.’ With a jerk of his thumb, he indicated Mr. Munn.

  The women had entered from the next room. They stood grouped closely together, and looked, as from a painful inquiring distance, at the men.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Mr. Munn said abruptly.

  The officer turned, and looked at him.

  Maybe, Mr. Munn thought, maybe. He was conscious of the eyes of the women upon him. He could not see them, but he was aware of them looking, leaning. He thought, If I make a row, maybe they won’t go up, maybe they’ll just take me and go, and they can’t do anything to me, not to me, they haven’t got anything on me.

  ‘What do you want?’ the officer demanded impatiently.

  To Mr. Munn it seemed as though he had just rediscovered the officer standing there, as though he himself had been lost in some great lag of time, and now, suddenly, had risen again into time, like a diver bursting to the surface.

  ‘Nothing,’ Mr. Munn answered.

  The officer went out, and there was a tramping of feet on the stairs.

  No, Mr. Munn thought, it wouldn’t have worked, it wouldn’t have done any good. He did not look at the women. The feet moved overhead, scrapingly on the bare floors. He heard the sound of doors being opened, then closed. He wondered if he hadn’t made the row with the officer because he was afraid. A coward. Then he thought, No, it wouldn’t have done any good.

  He heard the voices upstairs, suddenly sharp and demanding. Someone was pounding on a door. It was the officer’s voice that was commanding, very loud, ‘Open that door!’

  Mr. Munn moved toward the hall, and the soldier blocked his way.

  ‘It’s Isabella,’ Portia said. ‘It’s Isabella; she won’t let them in.’

  ‘Get away,’ Mr. Munn ordered the soldier, who held his carbine at the port to block the door. He laid his hand on the carbine.

  The soldier’s face, he noticed flickeringly, irrelevantly, was round and unformed, childish. ‘Listen, boy,’ Mr. Munn said, speaking quickly, ‘lay a hand on me and get in trouble. Real trouble. They haven’t got a warrant for me. It’ll be trouble for you. Listen, I’m a lawyer, I know.’

  Mr. Munn did not take his hand from the carbine. The boy gave a little ground.

  ‘Get away,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘All he said was keep an eye on me. Get away.’

  He pushed past the soldier and ran up the steps, the soldier following.

  The officer stood in front of the locked door of the bedroom at the head of the stairs, the deputy on one side and the two soldiers on the other. One of the soldiers held a lamp, the chimney smutted now because the flame had flared and jerked with the motion of being carried about. The light was wavering and uncertain. Professor Ball stood behind the soldiers.

  Mr. Munn stood beside the soldier with the lamp.

  ‘Open that door,’ the officer ordered, loud. Even in the unsure light Mr. Munn could see that his face was flushing with irritation. As he spoke he truculently thrust his head forward.

  ‘No,’ the voice from beyond the door said faintly, ‘you can’t come in. Not in my room. You haven’t any right.’

  The deputy grinned. Nodding confidentially at the soldier who had come up with Mr. Munn, he remarked: ‘She said no man wasn’t come-en her room, didn’t have the right. I just reckon you ain’t the right man, lieutenant.’

  The soldier with the lamp grinned too.

  ‘Oh, she’s a lady, she is,’ the deputy said mincingly.

  ‘Shut up,’ the officer commanded. Then, turning to the door: ‘Miss, you oughter let us in. It’s the law. We won’t bother you. Not a bit.’ His voice was wheedling, cajoling, now. ‘We’ll catch him sooner or later. If he’s hiding in there, you won’t do him any good acting this way ——’

  Covertly, Mr. Munn glanced down the hall. It was shadowy there, almost dark, but the loft ladder, it was not there. Doctor MacDonald was in the loft. He had taken the ladder up. He was not in the room there, with the girl.

  ‘— not a bit of good, Miss. Now, Miss, open up, please.’

  ‘No,’ the girl’s voice replied.

  ‘All right, all right.’ The officer’s voice was loud again, and harsh. ‘All right, Miss, we’re gonna knock the door down.’

  ‘I told you I had a shotgun,’ the girl’s voice said.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ the officer answered. ‘We’re gonna knock it down.’

  ‘She’s got a gun all right,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘There was a gun sitting in the corner. I saw it. Right there’ — and Mr. Munn pointed toward the corner beyond the door. ‘It’s gone now.’

  ‘Listen,’ Professor Ball told the officer, ‘she might shoot somebody. And you’d be responsible. She might do it. She’s the youngest, and headstrong and spoiled, spoiled when she was a child, being the youngest ——’

  ‘Hell,’ the deputy exclaimed, ‘she ain’t got no gun. She’s bluffen. They’re all bluffen.’ But he sidled away from the door a little.

  Bluffing, Mr. Munn thought. She had the gun, all right. But Doctor MacDonald wasn’t in there with her, he was sure of that. Bluffing, yes, she was bluffing. She was trying to bluff them into believing he was in there. She wasn’t thinking beyond that, she was just doing that. What she could.

  With his fist, the officer struck the heavy panel of the door.

  ‘No gentleman,’ Professor Ball complained querulously — ‘no gentleman would go and make a young girl like her shoot somebody.’

  ‘Listen,’ the officer said, addressing the door, ‘we don’t think you’ve got a gun. You’re bluffing. We’re coming in.’

  There was no answer. Then with a small, grating sound, the door swung inward about eight inches. Mr. Munn peered at the aperture.

  ‘I have, you can see it — but don’t come close.’ Her voice was broken, as though she was crying, or trying to keep from crying.

  It was there. Mr. Munn could see in the shadow, not protruding from the room, the muzzle of the shotgun like a small figure eight laid on its side. It was wavering there in the shadow.

  ‘Now, Miss,’ the officer was saying, ‘just gimme that gun. Just pass it out to me, we aren’t gonna bother you.’ He did not reach out for the gun, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. ‘Come on, Miss, you don’t want to make trouble; come on ——’

  The soldier standing closest to the wall, out of range of vision from the interior, leaned slowly toward the door-jamb. The officer drew his feet closer together, the knees flexing a little. ‘Come on, lady, come on, now,’ he kept saying coaxingly.

  Mr. Munn saw the soldier lean toward the door-jamb. He saw his hand stealthily rise. ‘Isabella!’ he shouted warningly, ‘watch ——’ But the soldier behind him chunked him heavily in the ribs with the carbine butt so that he fell to one knee, gasping. And at the instant he fell, the hand reached round the door-jamb and swept down to seize the barrel of the shotgun, and the officer plunged sideways, and the roar of the gun filled the hall.

  ‘I got it,’ the soldier at the door shouted. The shotgun dangled loosely from his grasp.

  Downstairs, one of the women screamed.

  The officer stepped into the room, his pistol drawn. The soldier with the lamp followed, then the deputy.

  Mr. Munn rose slowly to his feet. There, before him on the floor, was the mark where the charge of shot had buried itself in the oak planking.

  The women, calling, were coming up the stairs.

  The girl was sitting on the floor, her head pressed against the door-jamb and her shoulders shaking with sobs. Professor Ball, on his knees beside her, the skirts of his long black coat almost brushing the floor, as when he knelt to pray, was moving his clumsy bandaged hand over her hair with a mechanical gesture of comfort. He was mumbling something, Mr. Munn could not make out what.

  Mr. Munn turned to meet the interrogation and distress on the faces of the women. ‘It’s all right,’ he said.

  As Portia moved quickly toward the doorway, the officer came out, the soldier with the lamp behind him. He looked down at the huddled girl. Professor Ball rose, his tall, thin figure weaving crankily. He put out his hand to the wall to brace himself. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ he told the officer, his voice croaking and distant.

  The officer did not seem to hear him. ‘Miss,’ he said, addressing the girl on the floor, ‘Miss, I sure ——’

  The soldier who still held the shotgun set it against the wall, almost surreptitiously.

  ‘Miss,’ the officer repeated, then stopped.

  There was a slight scraping noise down the hall. Mr. Munn turned in time to see, indistinct in the shadow, the long form of Doctor MacDonald hang for an instant from the edge of the loft door before he dropped to the floor.

  Chapter fourteen

  THE trees were getting on toward leaf, now. But you could still see through their branches, across the square to the courthouse, and beyond. When they were in full leaf, you couldn’t. Then, above the massy depth of the green, you could only see the roof of the courthouse and the squat, square brick tower with the clock. That happened all at once. For a while after the buds began you could see the individual boughs hung with that uncertain, irregular green that in the fading light, as now, seemed gray, or seemed, on the very highest boughs where the last ray of sun struck, a pale gold. For a while, day after day, there would be the boughs, visible and individual, and through them you could see the courthouse, the benches under the trees, and the buildings on the other side of the square; then suddenly, one morning, you could see nothing, or for the first time you realized that you could see nothing, and you were surprised as though it had all happened, at one stroke, that night. The season had turned.

  Mr. Munn kept on looking out of the window of his office at the leafing trees. He was thinking that things were as they were, you thought, and then, even as you looked, were not. There was, for instance, that small pain in the side, a stitch, nothing more, something so familiar that you scarcely noticed it, part of the unvarying, permeating medium in which your being was supported; then it was that no longer, it was cancer, it was death. Death grew in you like the leaves on the trees in spring, gentle and tender and unobtrusive, and then, in the moment of knowledge, was already luxuriant, full-blown, blotting out the familiar objects. If not the small pain in the side, some word you spoke, some careless gesture, some momentary concession to vanity, some burst of pity, or some trivial decision — that was the bud, the leaf swelling toward recognition.

  He shrugged his shoulders, and rose from his chair. Doctor MacDonald had said, ‘Well, a man goes his own gait.’ And that was true.

  He walked idly about the office, in which the light was getting dim. His eyes rested upon the familiar objects: the tall walnut bookcases with the glass in the doors cracked, the stacks of books and papers, dust-covered, in chairs against the wall, the other chair, the chair where Mrs. Trevelyan had sat that day, the filing cabinets, the pictures, the rifle and the shotgun propped in a corner with old envelopes drawn over the muzzles to save them from dust. He had brought the shotgun back from the Christian place, he remembered, after his last bird hunt with Mr. Christian. They had had a good afternoon, that last afternoon, no wind, the sky clear and distant with a tinge of frosty gray, like iron, on the northern horizon as the sun got low, the dogs working in the tawny sagegrass beyond a cedar grove. He had brought the gun back here the next morning, had set it in the corner, and had put the envelope over the muzzle. How long ago that seemed! But he had not used the rifle for more than two years. He had not touched it except to oil it, not since the time he went down to Reelfoot Lake deer-hunting. He had not killed a deer with the rifle that trip. The only deer he had killed had been brought down with a charge of buckshot at less than fifteen paces. He had been leaning against an oak near the run, and the deer had appeared, momentarily motionless, with lifted head, an easy shot. At night the men had sat in a cabin around a stove, their belts loosened and a whisky bottle on the table, warm with the fire and the food and the drink and in the surety of comradeship. But now he could not even remember the name of one of the men. That, too, was a long time back.

  The things you remembered, they were what you were. But every time you remembered them you were different. For a long time you would not notice any difference, as you noticed no difference in the spring when, day after day in the warm nights, the leaves thickened on the boughs, or in the fall slowly dropped away; until the time came when, all at once, there was the difference. Every object in the room, in its familiarity, proclaimed a difference, the shotgun there in the corner, the books he had read, the dusty papers filled with his writing. He had written on those pages for some purpose; the purpose was gone now, but there the writing still was, yellowing out, going too, but outliving the purpose that had guided the pen across the sheets. Over the sights of the shotgun, in the flicker of an instant, he had seen the last quail rise in the whirr of wings against the lemon-colored sky, and his finger had pressed the trigger, and the bird had stumbled, as it were, on the air and plunged downward like a stone. There the shotgun was, as it had been; but the unnamable impulse that had made him lift it and press the trigger that afternoon was gone, exhausted in its fulfillment. The acts remained, irreversible in their consequences and not to be undone, but the impulse, the desire, the purpose, had gone. It was hard sometimes to guess what they had been.

  He stopped moving about the office. To hell with it, he thought. That didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was to see MacDonald out, now. There was, at least, that.

  That was the only thing that mattered, now, for it was the only thing left to matter.

  Five days earlier the board of the Association had voted to sell. Mr. Sills and Mr. Munn had stood out against it. But it had been no use. Some had been hopeless, some had needed cash too desperately, some had been afraid. Looking about the table, Mr. Munn had wondered how many had the threat of an indictment hanging over their heads to force the vote. That’s what the evidence was being used for, to squeeze. And after that it might be used for something else. More than once Mr. Munn had wondered when they would come for him: on the street in broad daylight, some night at the hotel?

  Mr. Sills had stood by him, but it had been no use. After the vote, Mr. Munn had gone down the stairs by himself, ahead of the others. It was over. The other men hadn’t been willing to look at each other. They had known it was over.