Mr. Munn pushed himself up on one elbow and reached out to clutch at the other man in the darkness. ‘Listen,’ he demanded, ‘what’s become of Turpin?’

  ‘You got him,’ Mr. Campbell said.

  Mr. Munn clutched his arm. ‘Got him?’

  ‘Over the left ear,’ Mr. Campbell went on.

  Mr. Munn’s breath made a sharp sound. He released his grip on the other man’s arm. ‘You mean,’ he said, paused, then proceeded with a steady voice, ‘he’s dead.’

  ‘As a doornail,’ Mr. Campbell told him. ‘I reckoned you knew.’

  Mr. Munn lay back on the blanket. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t any way for me to know. You see’ — he paused, like a man searching his mind for certainty — ‘you see, I didn’t do it.’

  The other man did not answer for a moment. ‘Well,’ he said then, matter-of-factly, ‘it don’t make any difference to me if you did. It don’t ——’

  ‘But I didn’t,’ Mr. Munn denied quietly.

  ‘Somebody shot him out the window of your office. With your rifle. Forty yards, and nailed him clean. It don’t make any difference to me. Or to plenty others round here, I reckon.’

  ‘I went there,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘I wrote a note to the girl that helps me. Then I left. I left the door open, because she’d be coming soon. Somebody else ——’

  ‘Did you see anybody when you came out?’ Mr. Campbell inquired casually.

  ‘I came out the back way. I didn’t see anybody in the alley. Nobody. I went to the hotel, up the back stairs, and there was Isabella Ball standing there, and she said they’d come for me. I hid in the livery stable loft.’

  ‘It’s nothing to me,’ Mr. Campbell said, ‘even if you did do it. It’s just that it ain’t too safe round here now. I wouldn’t even stay at Proudfit’s too long. You oughter get out the country a spell.’

  ‘But it wasn’t me. You see that?’

  ‘Sure,’ Mr. Campbell answered, and shifted his weight so that the boards creaked uneasily under him in the darkness. ‘Sure.’

  Mr. Munn pushed himself up from the blanket, and reached his arm out. But he withdrew it, and sank back down. ‘Well,’ he remarked, ‘I reckon it’ll get MacDonald off.’

  ‘That’s what folks say,’ Mr. Campbell replied.

  The next day Mr. Campbell went off to see the Proudfit fellow. When he got back late at night, he went directly to the barn to talk to Mr. Munn. He said that it was all arranged for him to go, that it was all right with Proudfit. He said he would take him up there, and for him to be trying to figure out a way. Mr. Campbell himself proposed that he could hide in a wagonload of something and get up there that way the next day.

  ‘I can make it by myself,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘I made it here.’ But Mr. Campbell wouldn’t permit it. The next night he took Mr. Munn to Proudfit’s in a buggy. It was a dark night, and they stuck to back roads when they could. Mr. Campbell said he had a cousin up in that section, and if anybody tried to find out what he’d been doing up there, he could say he’d been to see his cousin. He’d tell his cousin something to fix him, he said.

  At first Mr. Munn felt that the Proudfits were disturbed to have him, even though Willie Proudfit, standing on his porch just at dawn the morning of his arrival, had taken his hand and said: ‘Pleased to know you, Mr. Munn. My house, hit’s yore’n to stay in.’ Mr. Munn told himself that in a few days he would go on, as soon as he had rested up a little and got on his feet. But he did not say to himself where he would go. His mind did not really confront the idea of the future. He would say to himself, Now I’d better be deciding, I can’t stay on here. But that was all. The words were meaningless for him. The hatreds, the rancors, and the despair that had filled him as he lay hidden at the Campbell place were gone now. There was only a kind of paralysis, a numbness, not painful but pervasive, that crept over him when he said to himself, I better be going now, I better decide. The words had no meaning to him because the idea of the future had no meaning for him. When he tried to think of the future he was like some blundering insect that tries, again and again, to climb up the smooth wall of a dish into which it had fallen.

  But his feeling about the Proudfits quickly wore away. He discovered the natural aloofness of the man. Something of the first shyness of Adelle Proudfit passed, and then he recognized that her fits of abstraction and her silences were part of her being. Even Adelle Proudfit’s niece, a seemingly frail, dark-eyed girl of about fifteen, who looked much as Adelle Proudfit must have looked, ceased to give him the secret, sidewise, almost suspicious glances in which he sometimes surprised her during the early days of his stay. But later, on days when they did any baking, Sissie would bring up the hill to him two rolls folded in a little square of white cloth.

  What was with Sissie a shyness, and a quietness, was with her brother almost a surliness. The same quality was there in both, as in the aunt, but only as the characteristic structure of bone and feature which belongs to all the members of a family may produce in one the effect of beauty and in another that of ugliness. He was dark, too, and slenderly, though strongly, built. He was pious, withdrawing from the others to read a chapter in his Bible every night before going to bed; but in his piety there was a certain nervous and demanding and vindictive quality, as though he would wring from it a final meaning and satisfaction, once and for all. He worked hard in the field with his uncle, with that same nervousness and vindictiveness, not as though he occupied himself with tasks that were a part of the tissue of his being, but as though he wrestled to trip and strike an enemy. He would come in at noon drenched with sweat and almost gasping with fatigue. He would eat in silence, chewing his food doggedly and without raising his eyes from his plate, and when he had finished he would fling himself down on the porch, not casually and luxuriously like Willie Proudfit, but as though he would seize and conquer by violence the needed rest. ‘You’ll wear yoreself out,’ Willie Proudfit would say to him. ‘I seen men like you, Sylvestus, and maybe they be goen on lak you fer twenty years. And all of a sudden, they seen the world wasn’t no diff’rent, and they’d come nigh a-curse-en hit and theirselves. And from that-air day on, they wouldn’t sweat nuthen but bitter sweat. And eat their vittles in bitterness. Or they’d lay down and die.’

  ‘You ain’t wore out,’ the nephew would say, ‘and I reckin you had it hard as the next man.’

  ‘I seen it hard, off and on, I ain’t deny-en. A man gits in a tight, and he lays holt on what he kin and the Lord help him. But that’s diff’rent, now.’

  ‘Work’s work,’ the nephew would respond, lying on the boards of the porch, not opening his eyes, the sweat drying stiff on the dull blue cloth of his shirt.

  ‘A man labors,’ Willie Proudfit would say, ‘and sun to sun. But he oughter know in his mind one day agin the next day, and not lay up bitterness.’

  ‘Hit’ll be layen up bitterness, and you lose yore place,’ the nephew observed one day. ‘We don’t make this year, and git a price.’ He opened his eyes, and swept his arm upward with a vicious motion of rejection. ‘And you a-talken. That a-way.’

  Willie Proudfit said nothing.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, you lose yore place’ — the nephew spoke with a trace of vindictive pleasure, like a man driving home a long-sought advantage, found suddenly, at last — ‘and what’ll you do? You and Dellie? And Sissie?’

  ‘What the Lord’ll let me,’ the other man answered slowly. ‘Lak I done a-fore.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah! Go and crop on somebody else’s ground. That’s what. And how would you like that, Uncle Willie?’

  For a little while, Willie Proudfit made no answer, lying there, looking up, almost puzzledly, at the pattern of shingles between the rafters of the porch roof. Then he said: ‘I ain’t a-sayen I’d find hit in my heart to lak hit. On nobody else’s ground.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you’ — and the vicious triumph in the nephew’s voice mounted — ‘you wouldn’t lak hit. No more’n pappy did. Fifteen years croppen. His place lost, and fifteen years croppen. Till he died. Naw, you wouldn’t lak hit, Uncle Willie.’

  Mr. Munn already knew the place was mortgaged. Willie Proudfit had told him that he had bought the place when he first came back from the West, some eleven or twelve years before, and had never managed to pay out on it. For several years now he had barely been managing to hang on, he said. ‘I oughter put more in the place in the good years, I reckin,’ he said, ‘but I put hit in me a house, what was extra. We oughter lived in a pole shanty till ever foot was paid. But I wanted Dellie to have her a good house, hit being that a-way with a woman. A woman laks her a parler. And fer young ’uns. We figgered on young ’uns and room fer ’em. But the young ’uns, thar ain’t none. Sissie and Sylvestus, but not our own.’ Then he added: ‘The Lord’s give me more, some ways, than a man kin ask, I reckin. But hit looks lak He holds just one thing back from a man, so a man kin know in his heart He’s the Lord.’

  On another occasion, later, Willie Proudfit had come out of one of his long spells of silence to say: ‘One time, a man could go out West. And maybe git him a good piece of ground. Lak my pappy done, leave-en this country in sixty-one, and goen to North Arkansas. Them days, hit was air man’s country.’

  ‘Oklahoma,’ the nephew had replied, ‘they say a man kin still go to Oklahoma.’

  ‘I’ll lay the good ground’s all took,’ Willie Proudfit said.

  ‘Or somewhere,’ the nephew said, ‘and git me a job. Leave off a-breaken my back in the field.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll be goen to Oklahoma.’ Then, after a little silence, Willie Proudfit added, ‘I ain’t a old man yit.’

  And Mr. Munn remembered how Doctor MacDonald, standing in his cell that day, had said that he was going to clear out and go West. Where the country didn’t stink like the jail did. And when the news came that the trial was over, and that Doctor MacDonald was acquitted, he remembered it again, exactly how Doctor MacDonald had stood that day in the cell, speaking the words. Suddenly, while Willie Proudfit stood there before him saying, ‘The doc, he’s a free man,’ a sense of desolation and betrayal overwhelmed Mr. Munn. Doctor MacDonald would go away now, he and Cordelia. Out West. And leave him here, lost. He fought the feeling down. ‘That’s fine, that’s fine!’ he said to Willie Proudfit, through lips that felt stiff and cold like tallow.

  But only for that moment, for when he lay up by the spring that afternoon, he again felt the same resentment and betrayal when he thought that Doctor MacDonald would go away. He seemed to see, as in the clarity of a vision, Doctor MacDonald standing, with Cordelia at his side — with her hand resting lightly on his arm in that way she had — Doctor MacDonald standing there, showing his teeth in that grin that seemed to come from his secret and unsharable knowledge, and behind him, spread out like a picture, a sunlit plain, or the colors of desert and mountains, or — for the picture changed even as Mr. Munn tried to fix it — the blue waters of the Pacific. Then it was gone. He told himself that Doctor MacDonald would stay here until things settled down. Doctor MacDonald wasn’t the man to go off when his friend was in trouble. He wouldn’t go away as long as there was a chance he could do anything to help. That was something.

  But in the end, and there was no denying the fact, Doctor MacDonald would go. Even standing in his cell, saying, ‘I might get used to the way this country stinks,’ he had been able to seize on and define a future. He carried his future in himself. And Sylvestus, in his bitterness and vindictiveness, could plan a future for himself, away from here, in Oklahoma, or at some job in a city, somewhere. Willie Proudfit, who would probably lose his place and everything he had in it, and who was on past fifty years old, had been able to lie there on the porch that day and say, ‘I ain’t a old man yit.’ But Mr. Munn could not, no matter how hard he tried, think beyond the moment. He did not have the seed of the future in himself, the live germ. It had shriveled up and died, like a sprouting grain of corn that has been washed out of the hill to lie exposed to the sun’s heat.

  He could not tell exactly when it had died. Perhaps it had been dying for a long time, drying and shriveling slowly, and he had only come to know that fact, and to know his isolation, when he lay by the stock pond at the edge of the woods, with his body pressed against the cold mud, and saw the impersonal light grow on the sky, above the dark trees. Perhaps it had died long before, and he had been living, only, on the hope and the meaning there was in other men. But now it was dead; and because the future was dead and rotten in his breast, the past, too, which once had seemed to him to have its meanings and its patterns, began to fall apart, act by act, incident by incident, thought by thought, each item into brutish separateness. Sometime he would try to build up some old scene of happiness or distress, to try to make the image communicate to him again the verity of his past feelings. But it was no use. He could remember some incident, what had happened, even to the minutest detail — May’s face lighted with pleasure as she turned to him; or the face of Bunk Trevelyan’s wife when she had come to his office before his body was found and had said, ‘They taken him off, in the night, and I ain’t seen him, I ain’t seen him, and I come to you’; or the sound of Mr. Christian’s breathing, its harshness, its inhuman drag and rasp, coming from beyond the wall that night when he had stood staring at the shadowy, white door, and had waited vainly for Lucille Christian to come to him — he could remember the slightest detail of such an incident, but he could not torture himself into the old response that had been the lively truth of that moment. There was only the new numbness, the new isolation.

  He was not afraid. He told himself that he was not afraid. He had no intention of letting them catch him. But he was not afraid of them. If they tried to catch him there would be trouble. He felt, without ever phrasing it to himself, that that much, at least, a man owed to himself. The fact that he was hunted and couldn’t show himself to people and had a price on him, that fact was, he was sure, not the fundamental fact for him. Even at the time when Willie Proudfit brought him one of the handbills offering the reward, that fact had not seemed the fundamental thing. His picture was on the handbill. He knew which photograph it had been made from, one he had had taken, a little while before he was married, to give to May. They must have had it from the photographer in Bardsville. Beneath the picture it read: ‘Two thousand dollars reward for the capture of Percy Munn, wanted for murder.’

  ‘Hit looks lak they want you bad,’ Willie Proudfit had remarked.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn had said, ‘it’s a lot of money.’

  ‘They got them handbills ever whar. You better keep lay-en low. Over at Thebes they got ’em all over the settlement, on walls and telephone poles, and lay-en in stores.’

  ‘They didn’t nail Doctor MacDonald,’ Mr. Munn told him. ‘So it’s me. They’re bound to nail somebody.’ Then the bitterness came into his tone. ‘And I didn’t do it. Whatever else I’ve done, I didn’t do that. Somebody else did it ——’

  Willie Proudfit nodded.

  ‘— but I can’t prove it. That’s the trouble. Nobody’ll believe it.’

  ‘I believe hit,’ Willie Proudfit said, ‘but I don’t give a durn. If’n you did do hit.’

  If he had done it, it might have been different now. If he had gone up to his office that morning, and looked out the window and seen, under the leafing trees, that man Turpin being taken toward the courtroom to sit there in the chair, with that heavy, blank look on his face gradually turning into despair as the words came out that he had bargained to say. If he himself had seen Turpin, and had seen the rifle sitting there and the cartridge box there on the shelf of the bookcase, behind the cracked glass door, he might have done it. Near forty yards away, forty yards Mr. Campbell had said — moving in the speckled sunlight under the leafing trees, but the rifle propped to the window-ledge, or the desk. If he had done it, he might now feel something, some sense and order, not this numbness. He would lie on his back by the spring, while the falling water made its constant sound, and stare at the blueness of the sky, or the patches of whitish clouds that hung idly in the brightness, and would try to think himself into that context. The deed, then, would have been his; he could have lived in it; and in its consequence. Certainly, it would have been different from this.

  He would think of that negro man, the one who had had the knife, Trevelyan’s knife. The knife which the negro had found under the corncrib. Where Trevelyan had put it, after he killed Duffy. Where the frog found it — ‘a great-big ole bullfrog a-hoppen along this side that-air branch whar my shoats does they walleren.’ The negro standing there in the pale lamplight, his voice pouring out, saying, ‘— and he kept on a-hoppen and a-hoppen, and I throwed my hat at him and I tried to ketch him, but he kept on a-hoppen — hit wuz that big ole red shoat got him, I seen him when she done hit. She done taken him ——’ The words had poured out, but after they got him on the horse, behind the deputy, he had only mumbled a little and then had said nothing more. They said that he had never said much at his trial, had just sat there. And afterward in the jail, till they hanged him. Mr. Munn tried hard to remember his name. He would lie there, staring at the dazzling depth of the sky, and try to remember the name. It became almost an obsession with him. That man had been born in such a cabin as they found him in that night, dropped unbreathing and foul onto a pallet on the floor, or into a bed that creaked and sagged, with the light coming in at a patched window-pane, gray or bright, or with the light of such a lamp as lighted the cabin the night they took him. He had sucked milk from a breast, and had crawled in the dust before the cabin with the cabin and trees and the fields enormous around him. He had put food into his mouth, and had eaten it, day after day growing stronger. He had worked in the fields, and talked and laughed at night, and lain in the bed there with the woman whose eyes had followed them with that animal questioning about the cabin that night. They had knocked on the door, late at night, and had come in and found the knife, and had taken him away. Mr. Munn tried, day after day, to remember his name. He could see his face, the way it had looked in the lamplight, the gray lips protesting, saying, ‘If’n I knowed that knife was yore’n, I shore would a-brung hit back. I’d a-found whar yore place wuz, and brung hit back, and ——’ But he could not remember the name.