“That boy of I. O.’s,” Varner said. “By God, I’ve done everything but put out poison for him.”

  “What?” Ratliff said. He glanced quickly about at the faces; for an instant there was in his own not only bewilderment but something almost like terror. “I thought — the other day you fellows told me —— You said it was a woman, a young woman with a baby —— Here now,” he said. “Wait.”

  “This here’s another one,” Varner said. “I wish to hell he couldn’t walk. Well, Eck, I hear you caught one of your horses.”

  “That’s right,” Eck said. He and the little boy had finished the crackers and cheese and he had sat for some time now, holding the empty bag.

  “It was the one he give you, wasn’t it?” Varner said.

  “That’s right,” Eck said.

  “Give the other one to me, paw,” the little boy said.

  “What happened?” Varner said.

  “He broke his neck,” Eck said.

  “I know,” Varner said. “But how?” Eck did not move. Watching him they could almost see him visibly gathering and arranging words, speech. Varner, looking down at him, began to laugh steadily and harshly, sucking his teeth. “I’ll tell you what happened. Eck and that boy finally run it into that blind lane of Freeman’s, after a chase of about twenty-four hours. They figured it couldn’t possibly climb them eight-foot fences of Freeman’s so him and the boy tied their rope across the end of the lane, about three feet off the ground. And sho enough, soon as the horse come to the end of the lane and seen Freeman’s barn, it whirled just like Eck figured it would and come helling back up that lane like a scared hen-hawk. It probably never even seen the rope at all. Mrs. Freeman was watching from where she had run up onto the porch. She said that when it hit that rope, it looked just like one of these here great big Christmas pinwheels. But the one you bought got clean away, didn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Eck said. “I never had time to see which way the other one went.”

  “Give him to me, paw,” the little boy said.

  “You wait till we catch him,” Eck said. “We’ll see about it then.”

  That afternoon Ratliff sat in the halted buckboard in front of Bookwright’s gate. Bookwright stood in the road beside it. “You were wrong,” Bookwright said. “He come back.”

  “He come back,” Ratliff said. “I misjudged his . . . nerve ain’t the word I want, and sholy lack of it ain’t. But I wasn’t wrong.”

  “Nonsense,” Bookwright said. “He was gone all day yesterday. Nobody saw him going to town or coming back, but that’s bound to be where he was at. Ain’t no man, I don’t care if his name is Snopes, going to let his own blood kin rot in jail.”

  “He won’t be in jail long. Court is next month, and after they send him to Parchman, he can stay outdoors again. He will even go back to farming, ploughing. Of course it won’t be his cotton, but then he never did make enough out of his own cotton to quite pay him for staying alive.”

  “Nonsense,” Bookwright said. “I don’t believe it. Flem ain’t going to let him go to the penitentiary.”

  “Yes,” Ratliff said. “Because Flem Snopes has got to cancel all them loose-flying notes that turns up here and there every now and then. He’s going to discharge at least some of the notes for good and all.” They looked at one another — Ratliff grave and easy in the blue shirt, Bookwright sober too, black-browed, intent.

  “I thought you said you and him burned them notes.”

  “I said we burned two notes that Mink Snopes gave me. Do you think that any Snopes is going to put all of anything on one piece of paper that can be destroyed by one match? Do you think there is any Snopes that don’t know that?”

  “Oh,” Bookwright said. “Hah,” he said, with no mirth. “I reckon you gave Henry Armstid back his five dollars too.” Then Ratliff looked away. His face changed — something fleeting, quizzical, but not smiling, his eyes did not smile; it was gone.

  “I could have,” he said. “But I didn’t. I might have if I could just been sho he would buy something this time that would sho enough kill him, like Mrs. Littlejohn said. Besides, I wasn’t protecting a Snopes from Snopeses; I wasn’t even protecting a people from a Snopes. I was protecting something that wasn’t even a people, that wasn’t nothing but something that don’t want nothing but to walk and feel the sun and wouldn’t know how to hurt no man even if it would and wouldn’t want to even if it could, just like I wouldn’t stand by and see you steal a meat-bone from a dog. I never made them Snopeses and I never made the folks that can’t wait to bare their backsides to them. I could do more, but I won’t. I won’t, I tell you!”

  “All right,” Bookwright said. “Hook your drag up; it ain’t nothing but a hill. I said it’s all right.”

  2

  The two actions of Armstid pl. vs. Snopes, and Tull pl. vs. Eckrum Snopes (and anyone else named Snopes or Varner either which Tull’s irate wife could contrive to involve, as the village well knew) were accorded a change of venue by mutual agreement and arrangement among the litigants. Three of the parties did, that is, because Flem Snopes flatly refused to recognise the existence of the suit against himself, stating once and without heat and first turning his head slightly aside to spit, “They wasn’t none of my horses,” then fell to whittling again while the baffled and helpless bailiff stood before the tilted chair with the papers he was trying to serve.

  “What a opportunity for that Snopes family lawyer this would a been,” Ratliff said when told about it. “What’s his name? that quick-fatherer, the Moses with his mouth full of mottoes and his coat-tail full of them already half-grown retroactive sons? I don’t understand yet how a man that has to spend as much time as I do being constantly reminded of them folks, still can’t keep the names straight. I. O. That he never had time to wait. This here would be probably the one tried case in his whole legal existence where he wouldn’t be bothered with no narrow-ideaed client trying to make him stop talking, and the squire presiding himself would be the only man in company with authority to tell him to shut up.”

  So neither did the Varner surrey nor Ratliff’s buckboard make one among the wagons, the buggies, and the saddled horses and mules which moved out of the village on that May Saturday morning, to converge upon Whiteleaf store eight miles away, coming not only from Frenchman’s Bend but from other directions too since by that time, what Ratliff had called “that Texas sickness,” that spotted corruption of frantic and uncatchable horses, had spread as far as twenty and thirty miles. So by the time the Frenchman’s Bend people began to arrive, there were two dozen wagons, the teams reversed and eased of harness and tied to the rear wheels in order to pass the day, and twice that many saddled animals already standing about the locust grove beside the store and the site of the hearing had already been transferred from the store to an adjacent shed where in the fall cotton would be stored. But by nine o’clock it was seen that even the shed would not hold them all, so the palladium was moved again, from the shed to the grove itself. The horses and mules and wagons were cleared from it; the single chair, the gnawed table bearing a thick bible which had the appearance of loving and constant use of a piece of old and perfectly-kept machinery and an almanac and a copy of Mississippi Reports dated 1881 and bearing along its opening edge a single thread-thin line of soilure as if during all the time of his possession its owner (or user) had opened it at only one page though that quite often, were fetched from the shed to the grove; a wagon and four men were dispatched and returned presently from the church a mile away with four wooden pews for the litigants and their clansmen and witnesses; behind these in turn the spectators stood — the men, the women, the children, sober, attentive, and neat, not in their Sunday clothes to be sure, but in the clean working garments donned that morning for the Saturday’s diversion of sitting about the country stores or trips into the country seat, and in which they would return to the field on Monday morning and would wear all that week until Friday night came round again. The Justice of the Peace was a neat, small, plump old man resembling a tender caricature of all grandfathers who ever breathed, in a beautifully laundered though collarless white shirt with immaculate starch-gleaming cuffs and bosom, and steel-framed spectacles and neat, faintly curling white hair. He sat behind the table and looked at them — at the grey woman in the grey sunbonnet and dress, her clasped and motionless hands on her lap resembling a gnarl of pallid and drowned roots from a drained swamp; at Tull in his faded but absolutely clean shirt and the overalls which his womenfolks not only kept immaculately washed but starched and ironed also, and not creased through the legs but flat across them from seam to seam, so that on each Saturday morning they resembled the short pants of a small boy, and the sedate and innocent blue of his eyes above the month-old corn-silk beard which concealed most of his abraded face and which gave him an air of incredible and paradoxical dissoluteness, not as though at last and without warning he had appeared in the sight of his fellowmen in his true character, but as if an old Italian portrait of a child saint had been defaced by a vicious and idle boy; at Mrs. Tull, a strong, full-bosomed though slightly dumpy woman with an expression of grim and seething outrage which the elapsed four weeks had apparently neither increased nor diminished but had merely set, an outrage which curiously and almost at once began to give the impression of being directed not at any Snopes or at any other man in particular but at all men, all males, and of which Tull himself was not at all the victim but the subject, who sat on one side of her husband while the biggest of the four daughters sat on the other as if they (or Mrs. Tull at least) were not so much convinced that Tull might leap up and flee, as determined that he would not; and at Eck and the little boy, identical save for size, and Lump the clerk in a grey cap which someone actually recognised as being the one which Flem Snopes had worn when he went to Texas last year, who between spells of rapid blinking would sit staring at the Justice with the lidless intensity of a rat — and into the lens-distorted and irisless old-man’s eyes of the Justice there grew an expression not only of amazement and bewilderment but, as in Ratliff’s eyes while he stood on the store gallery four weeks ago, something very like terror.

  “This — —” he said. “I didn’t expect — I didn’t look to see —— . I’m going to pray,” he said. “I ain’t going to pray aloud. But I hope — —” He looked at them. “I wish. . . . Maybe some of you all anyway had better do the same.” He bowed his head. They watched him, quiet and grave, while he sat motionless behind the table, the light morning wind moving faintly in his thin hair and the shadow-stipple of windy leaves gliding and flowing across the starched bulge of bosom and the gleaming bone-buttoned cuffs, as rigid and almost as large as section of six-inch stovepipe, at his joined hands. He raised his head. “Armstid against Snopes,” he said. Mrs. Armstid spoke. She did not move, she looked at nothing, her hands clasped in her lap, speaking in that flat, toneless and hopeless voice:

  “That Texas man said — —”

  “Wait,” the Justice said. He looked about at the faces, the blurred eyes fleeing behind the thick lenses. “Where is the defendant? I don’t see him.”

  “He wouldn’t come,” the bailiff said.

  “Wouldn’t come?” the Justice said. “Didn’t you serve the papers on him?”

  “He wouldn’t take them,” the bailiff said. “He said — —”

  “Then he is in contempt!” the Justice cried.

  “What for?” Lump Snopes said. “Ain’t nobody proved yet they was his horses.” The Justice looked at him.

  “Are you representing the defendant?” he said. Snopes blinked at him for a moment.

  “What’s that mean?” he said. “That you aim for me to pay whatever fine you think you can clap onto him?”

  “So he refuses to defend himself,” the Justice said. “Don’t he know that I can find against him for that reason, even if pure justice and decency ain’t enough?”

  “It’ll be pure something,” Snopes said. “It don’t take no mind-reader to see how your mind is — —”

  “Shut up, Snopes,” the bailiff said. “If you ain’t in this case, you keep out of it.” He turned back to the Justice. “What you want me to do: go over to the Bend and fetch Snopes here anyway? I reckon I can do it.”

  “No,” the Justice said. “Wait.” He looked about at the sober faces again with that bafflement, that dread. “Does anybody here know for sho who them horses belonged to? Anybody?” They looked back at him, sober, attentive — at the neat immaculate old man sitting with his hands locked together on the table before him to still the trembling. “All right, Mrs. Armstid,” he said. “Tell the court what happened.” She told it, unmoving, in the flat, inflectionless voice, looking at nothing, while they listened quietly, coming to the end and ceasing without even any fall of voice, as though the tale mattered nothing and came to nothing. The Justice was looking down at his hands. When she ceased, he looked up at her. “But you haven’t showed yet that Snopes owned the horses. The one you want to sue is that Texas man. And he’s gone. If you got a judgment against him, you couldn’t collect the money. Don’t you see?”

  “Mr. Snopes brought him here,” Mrs. Armstid said. “Likely that Texas man wouldn’t have knowed where Frenchman’s Bend was if Mr. Snopes hadn’t showed him.”

  “But it was the Texas man that sold the horses and collected the money for them.” The Justice looked about again at the faces. “Is that right? You, Bookwright, is that what happened?”

  “Yes,” Bookwright said. The Justice looked at Mrs. Armstid again, with that pity and grief. As the morning increased the wind had risen, so that from time to time gusts of it ran through the branches overhead, bringing a faint snow of petals, prematurely bloomed as the spring itself had condensed with spendthrift speed after the hard winter, and the heavy and drowsing scent of them, about the motionless heads.

  “He give Mr. Snopes Henry’s money. He said Henry hadn’t bought no horse. He said I could get the money from Mr. Snopes tomorrow.”

  “And you have witnesses that saw and heard him?”

  “Yes, sir. The other men that was there saw him give Mr. Snopes the money and say that I could get it — —”

  “And you asked Snopes for the money?”

  “Yes, sir. He said that Texas man taken it away with him when he left. But I would . . .” She ceased again, perhaps looking down at her hands also. Certainly she was not looking at anyone.

  “Yes?” the Justice said. “You would what?”

  “I would know them five dollars. I earned them myself, weaving at night after Henry and the chaps was asleep. Some of the ladies in Jefferson would save up string and such and give it to me and I would weave things and sell them. I earned that money a little at a time and I would know it when I saw it because I would take the can outen the chimney and count it now and then while it was making up to enough to buy my chaps some shoes for next winter. I would know it if I was to see it again. If Mr. Snopes would just let — —”

  “Suppose there was somebody seen Flem give that money back to that Texas fellow,” Lump Snopes said suddenly.

  “Did anybody here see that?” the Justice said.

  “Yes,” Snopes said, harshly and violently. “Eck here did.” He looked at Eck. “Go on. Tell him.” The Justice looked at Eck; the four Tull girls turned their heads as one head and looked at him, and Mrs. Tull leaned forward to look past her husband, her face cold, furious, and contemptuous, and those standing shifted to look past one another’s heads at Eck sitting motionless on the bench.

  “Did you see Snopes give Armstid’s money back to the Texas man, Eck?” the Justice said. Still Eck did not answer nor move, Lump Snopes made a gross violent sound through the side of his mouth.

  “By God, I ain’t afraid to say it if Eck is. I seen him do it.”

  “Will you swear that as testimony?” Snopes looked at the Justice. He did not blink now.

  “So you won’t take my word,” he said.

  “I want the truth,” the Justice said. “If I can’t find that, I got to have sworn evidence of what I will have to accept as truth.” He lifted the bible from the two other books.

  “All right,” the bailiff said. “Step up here.” Snopes rose from the bench and approached. They watched him, though now there was no shifting nor craning, no movement at all among the faces, the still eyes. Snopes at the table looked back at them once, his gaze traversing swiftly the crescent-shaped rank; he looked at the Justice again. The bailiff grasped the bible; though the Justice did not release it yet.

  “You are ready to swear you saw Snopes give that Texas man back the money he took from Henry Armstid for that horse?” he said.

  “I said I was, didn’t I?” Snopes said. The Justice released the bible.

  “Swear him,” he said.

  “Put your left hand on the Book raise your right hand you solemnly swear and affirm — —” the bailiff said rapidly. But Snopes had already done so, his left hand clapped onto the extended bible and the other hand raised and his head turned away as once more his gaze went rapidly along the circle of expressionless and intent faces, saying in that harsh and snarling voice:

  “Yes. I saw Flem Snopes give back to that Texas man whatever money Henry Armstid or anybody else thinks Henry Armstid or anybody else paid Flem for any of them horses. Does that suit you?”

  “Yes,” the Justice said. Then there was no movement, no sound anywhere among them. The bailiff placed the bible quietly on the table beside the Justice’s locked hands, and there was no movement save the flow and recover of the windy shadows and the drift of the locust petals. Then Mrs. Armstid rose; she stood once more (or still) looking at nothing, her hands clasped across her middle.