We all heard it at once—the three or maybe four shots and then the sound of horses galloping, except that some of the galloping came from Uncle Buck’s mule, and he had his pistol out now before he turned from the road and into the trees, with the stick jammed under his hurt arm and his beard flying back over his shoulder. But we didn’t find anything. We saw the marks in the mud where the five horses had stood while the men that rode them had watched the road, and we saw the sliding tracks where the horses had begun to gallop, and I thinking quietly, “He still don’t know that that shoe is gone.” But that was all, and Uncle Buck sitting on his mule with the pistol raised in his hand and his beard blown back over his shoulder and the leather thong of the pistol hanging down his back like a girl’s pigtail, and his mouth open and his eyes blinking at me and Ringo.
“What in the tarnation hell!” he said. “Well, let’s go back to the road. Whatever it was has done gone that way too.”
So we had turned. Uncle Buck had put the pistol up and his stick had begun to beat the mule again when we saw what it was, what it meant.
It was Ab Snopes. He was lying on his side, tied hand and foot, and hitched to a sapling; we could see the marks in the mud where he had tried to roll back into the underbrush until the rope stopped him. He had been watching us all the time, lying there with his face in the shape of snarling and not making a sound after he found out he could not roll out of sight. He was watching our mules’ legs and feet under the bushes; he hadn’t thought to look any higher yet, and so he did not know that we could see him; he must have thought that we had just spied him, because all of a sudden he began to jerk and thrash on the ground, hollering, “Help! Help! Help!”
We untied him and got him onto his feet, and he was still hollering, loud, with his face and his arms jerking, about how they had caught and robbed him, and they would have killed him if they hadn’t heard us coming and run away; only his eyes were not hollering. They were watching us, going fast and quick from Ringo to me to Uncle Buck, and then at Ringo and me again, and they were not hollering, like his eyes belonged to one man and his gaped and yelling mouth belonged to another.
“So they caught you, hey?” Uncle Buck said. “A innocent and unsuspecting traveler. I reckon the name of them would never be Grumby now, would it?”
It was like we might have stopped and built a fire and thawed out that moccasin—just enough for it to find out where it was, but not enough for it to know what to do about it. Only I reckon it was a high compliment to set Ab Snopes up with a moccasin, even a little one. I reckon it was bad for him. I reckon he realized that they had thrown him back to us without mercy, and that if he tried to save himself from us at their expense, they would come back and kill him. I reckon he decided that the worst thing that could happen to him would be for us not to do anything to him at all. Because he quit jerking his arms; he even quit lying; for a minute his eyes and his mouth were telling the same thing.
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I admit hit. I reckon everybody does. The question is, what are you fellows going to do about hit?”
“Yes,” Uncle Buck said. “Everybody makes mistakes. Your trouble is, you make too many. Because mistakes are bad. Look at Rosa Millard. She just made one, and look at her. And you have made two.”
Ab Snopes watched Uncle Buck. “What’s them?”
“Being born too soon and dying too late,” Uncle Buck said.
He looked at all of us, fast; he didn’t move, still talking to Uncle Buck. “You ain’t going to kill me. You don’t dast.”
“I don’t even need to,” Uncle Buck said. “It wasn’t my grandmaw you sicked onto that snake den.”
He looked at me now, but his eyes were going again, back and forth across me at Ringo and Uncle Buck; it was the two of them again now, the eyes and the voice. “Why, then I’m all right. Bayard ain’t got no hard feelings against me. He knows hit was a pure accident; that we was doing hit for his sake and his paw and them niggers at home. Why, here hit’s a whole year and it was me that holp and tended Miss Rosa when she never had ara living soul but them chil—” Now the voice began to tell the truth again; it was the eyes and the voice that I was walking toward. He fell back, crouching, his hands flung up.
Behind me, Uncle Buck said, “You, Ringo! Stay back.”
He was walking backward now, with his hands flung up, hollering, “Three on one! Three on one!”
“Stand still,” Uncle Buck said. “Ain’t no three on you. I don’t see nobody on you but one of them children you was just mentioning.” Then we were both down in the mud; and then I couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t seem to find him any more, not even with the hollering; and then I was fighting three or four for a long time before Uncle Buck and Ringo held me, and then I could see him again, lying on the ground with his arms over his face. “Get up,” Uncle Buck said.
“No,” he said. “Three of you can jump on me and knock me down again, but you got to pick me up first to do hit. I ain’t got no rights and justice here, but you can’t keep me from protesting hit.”
“Lift him up,” Uncle Buck said. “I’ll hold Bayard.”
Ringo lifted him; it was like lifting up a half-filled cotton sack. “Stand up, Mr. Ab Snopes,” Ringo said. But he would not stand, not even after Ringo and Uncle Buck tied him to the sapling and Ringo had taken off his and Uncle Buck’s and Ab Snopes’ galluses and knotted them together with the bridle reins from the mules. He just hung there in the rope, not even flinching when the lash fell, saying, “That’s hit. Whup me. Lay hit on me; you got me three to one.”
“Wait,” Uncle Buck said. Ringo stopped. “You want another chance with one to one? You can take your choice of the three of us.”
“I got my rights,” he said. “I’m helpless, but I can still protest hit. Whup me.”
I reckon he was right. I reckon if we had let him go clean, they would have circled back and killed him themselves before dark. Because—that was the night it began to rain and we had to burn Ringo’s stick because Uncle Buck admitted now that his arm was getting bad—we all ate supper together, and it was Ab Snopes that was the most anxious about Uncle Buck, saying how it wasn’t any hard feelings and that he could see himself that he had made a mistake in trusting the folks he did, and that all he wanted to do now was to go back home, because it was only the folks you had known all your life that you could trust, and when you put faith in a stranger you deserved what you got when you found that what you had been eating and sleeping with was no better than a passel of rattlesnakes. But as soon as Uncle Buck tried to find out if it actually was Grumby, he shut up and denied that he had ever even seen him.
They left us early the next morning. Uncle Buck was sick by then; we offered to ride back home with him, or to let Ringo ride back with him, and I would keep Ab Snopes with me, but Uncle Buck wouldn’t have it.
“Grumby might capture him again and tie him to another sapling in the road, and you would lose time burying him,” Uncle Buck said. “You boys go on. It ain’t going to be long now. And catch them!” He begun to holler, with his face flushed and his eyes bright, taking the pistol from around his neck and giving it to me, “Catch them! Catch them!”
So Ringo and I went on. It rained all that day; now it began to rain all the time. We had the two mules apiece; we went fast. It rained; sometimes we had no fire at all; that was when we lost count of time, because one morning we came to a fire still burning and a hog they had not even had time to butcher; and sometimes we would ride all night, swapping mules when we had guessed that it had been two hours; and so, sometimes it would be night when we slept and sometimes it would be daylight, and we knew that they must have watched us from somewhere every day and that now that Uncle Buck was not with us, they didn’t even dare to stop and try to hide.
Then one afternoon—the rain had stopped but the clouds had not broken and it was turning cold again—it was about dusk and we were galloping along an old road in the river bottom; it was dim and narrow under the trees a
nd we were galloping when my mule shied and swerved and stopped, and I just did catch myself before I went over his head; and then we saw the thing hanging over the middle of the road from a limb. It was an old Negro man, with a rim of white hair and with his bare toes pointing down and his head on one side like he was thinking about something quiet. The note was pinned to him, but we couldn’t read it until we rode on into a clearing. It was a scrap of dirty paper with big crude printed letters, like a child might have made them:
Last woning not thret. Turn back. The barer of this my promise and garntee. I have stood all I aim to stand children no children.
G.
And something else written beneath it in a hand neat and small and prettier than Granny’s, only you knew that a man had written it; and while I looked at the dirty paper I could see him again, with his neat little feet and his little black-haired hands and his fine soiled shirt and his fine muddy coat, across the fire from us that night.
This is signed by others beside G., one of whm in particular havng less scruples re children than he has. Nethless undersgnd desires to give both you and G. one more chance. Take it, and some day become a man. Refuse it, and cease even to be a child.
Ringo and I looked at each other. There had been a house here once, but it was gone now. Beyond the clearing the road went on again into the thick trees in the gray twilight. “Maybe it will be tomorrow,” Ringo said.
It was tomorrow; we slept that night in a haystack, but we were riding again by daylight, following the dim road along the river bottom. This time it was Ringo’s mule that shied; the man had stepped out of the bushes that quick, with his fine muddy boots and coat and the pistol in his little black-haired hand, and only his eyes and his nose showing between his hat and his beard.
“Stay where you are,” he said. “I will still be watching you.”
We didn’t move. We watched him step back into the bushes, then the three of them came out—the bearded man and another man walking abreast and leading two saddled horses, and the third man walking just in front of them with his hands behind him—a thick-built man with a reddish stubble and pale eyes, in a faded Confederate uniform coat and Yankee boots, bareheaded, with a long smear of dried blood on his cheek and one side of his coat caked with dried mud and that sleeve ripped away at the shoulder, but we didn’t realize at once that what made his shoulders look so thick was that his arms were tied tight behind him. And then all of a sudden we knew that at last we were looking at Grumby. We knew it long before the bearded man said, “You want Grumby. Here he is.”
We just sat there. Because from then on, the other two men did not even look at us again. “I’ll take him now,” the bearded man said. “Get on your horse.” The other man got on one of the horses. We could see the pistol in his hand then, pointed at Grumby’s back. “Hand me your knife,” the bearded man said.
Without moving the pistol, the other man passed his knife to the bearded man. Then Grumby spoke; he had not moved until now; he just stood there with his shoulders hunched and his little pale eyes blinking at me and Ringo.
“Boys,” he said, “boys—”
“Shut your mouth,” the bearded man said, in a cold, quiet, almost pleasant voice. “You’ve already talked too much. If you had done what I wanted done that night in December, you wouldn’t be where you are now.” We saw his hand with the knife; I reckon maybe for a minute Ringo and I and Grumby, too, all thought the same thing. But he just cut Grumby’s hands loose and stepped back quick. But when Grumby turned, he turned right into the pistol in the bearded man’s hand.
“Steady,” the bearded man said. “Have you got him, Bridger?”
“Yes,” the other man said. The bearded man backed to the other horse and got on it without lowering his pistol or ceasing to watch Grumby. Then he sat there, too, looking down at Grumby, with his little hooked nose and his eyes alone showing between the hat and the ink-colored beard. Grumby began to move his head from side to side.
“Boys,” he said, “boys, you ain’t going to do this to me.”
“We’re not going to do anything to you,” the bearded man said. “I can’t speak for these boys there. But since you are so delicate about children, maybe they will be delicate with you. But we’ll give you a chance though.” His other hand went inside his coat too fast to watch; it had hardly disappeared before the other pistol flicked out and turned once and fell at Grumby’s feet; again Grumby moved, but the pistols stopped him. The bearded man sat easy on the horse, looking down at Grumby, talking in that cold, still, vicious voice that wasn’t even mad:
“We had a good thing in this country. We would have it yet, if it hadn’t been for you. And now we’ve got to pull out. Got to leave it because you lost your nerve and killed an old woman and then lost your nerve again and refused to cover the first mistake. Scruples,” he said. “Scruples. So afraid of raising the country that there ain’t a man, woman or child, black or white, in it that ain’t on the watch for us. And all because you got scared and killed an old woman you never saw before. Not to get anything; not for one single Confed bank note. But because you got scared of a piece of paper on which someone had signed Bedford Forrest’s name. And you with one exactly like it in your pocket now.”
He didn’t look at the other man, Bridger; he just said, “All right. Ease off. But watch him. He’s too tenderhearted to turn your back on.”
They backed the horses away, side by side, the two pistols trained on Grumby’s belly, until they reached the underbrush. “We’re going to Texas. If you should leave this place, I would advise you to go at least that far also. But just remember that Texas is a wide place, and use that knowledge. Ride!” he shouted.
He whirled the mare. Bridger whirled too. As they did so, Grumby leaped and caught the pistol from the ground and ran forward, crouching and shouting into the bushes, cursing. He shot three times toward the fading sound of the horses, then he whirled back to face us. Ringo and I were on the ground, too; I don’t remember when we got down nor why, but we were down, and I remember how I looked once at Ringo’s face and then how I stood there with Uncle Buck’s pistol feeling heavy as a firedog in my hand. Then I saw that he had quit whirling; that he was standing there with the pistol hanging against his right leg and that he was looking at me; and then all of a sudden he was smiling.
“Well, boys,” he said, “it looks like you have got me. Durn my hide for letting Matt Bowden fool me into emptying my pistol at him.”
And I could hear my voice; it sounded faint and far away, like the woman’s in Alabama that day, so that I wondered if he could hear me: “You shot three times. You have got two more shots in it.”
His face didn’t change, or I couldn’t see it change. It just lowered, looking down, but the smile was gone from it. “In this pistol?” he said. It was like he was examining a pistol for the first time, so slow and careful it was that he passed it from his right to his left hand and let it hang again, pointing down again. “Well, well, well. Sholy I ain’t forgot how to count as well as how to shoot.” There was a bird somewhere—a yellowhammer—I had been hearing it all the time; even the three shots hadn’t frightened it. And I could hear Ringo, too, making a kind of whimpering sound when he breathed, and it was like I wasn’t trying to watch Grumby so much as to keep from looking at Ringo. “Well, she’s safe enough now, since it don’t look like I can even shoot with my right hand.”
Then it happened. I know what did happen, but even now I don’t know how, in what order. Because he was big and squat, like a bear. But when we had first seen him he was a captive, and so, even now he seemed more like a stump than even an animal, even though we had watched him leap and catch up the pistol and run firing after the other two. All I know is, one second he was standing there in his muddy Confederate coat, smiling at us, with his ragged teeth showing a little in his red stubble, with the thin sunlight on the stubble and on his shoulders and cuffs, on the dark marks where the braid had been ripped away; and the next second there were two br
ight orange splashes, one after the other, against the middle of the gray coat and the coat itself swelling slow down on me like when Granny told us about the balloon she saw in St. Louis and we would dream about it.
I reckon I heard the sound, and I reckon I must have heard the bullets, and I reckon I felt him when he hit me, but I don’t remember it. I just remember the two bright flashes and the gray coat rushing down, and then the ground hitting me. But I could smell him—the smell of man sweat, and the gray coat grinding into my face and smelling of horse sweat and wood smoke and grease—and I could hear him, and then I could hear my arm socket, and I thought “In a minute I will hear my fingers breaking, but I have got to hold onto it” and then—I don’t know whether it was under or over his arm or his leg—I saw Ringo, in the air, looking exactly like a frog, even to the eyes, with his mouth open, too, and his open pocketknife in his hand.
Then I was free. I saw Ringo straddle of Grumby’s back, and Grumby getting up from his hands and knees, and I tried to raise the pistol, only my arm wouldn’t move.
Then Grumby bucked Ringo off like a steer would and whirled again, looking at us, crouched, with his mouth open, too; and then my arm began to come up with the pistol, and he turned and ran. He shouldn’t have tried to run from us in boots.
It took us the rest of that day and part of the night to reach the old compress. But it didn’t take very long to ride home, because we had the two mules apiece to change onto now. [It would have taken less time than it did, only we found an old iron pot that we could use and so we stopped and built the fire there. There was a piece of machinery at the compress that we could have used. But we didn’t stay there that long. There used to be a book at home about Borneo, that told how headhunters did it. But the book was burned up now, even if we had waited until we got home, and all I could remember was something about tree gum. So we got some pine resin, and we had a lot of salt that we wouldn’t need now, and Ringo thought about making some lye ashes and we did it. And then we went on.]