woe to the peripatetic Semiramis if she be run to earth. Here, in company with a number of other bachelors—clerks, mechanics and such— the book-keeper Snopes lives.
And here he repaired when the bank day was finished. The afternoon was a replica of the morning. Then at three o’clock the green shades were drawn upon door and windows, and Snopes and the cashier went about striking a daily balance. At 3:30 young Bayard arrived in his car and old Bayard stalked forth and got in it and was driven away. Presently thereafter the janitor, an ancient, practically incapacitated negro called Doctor Jones, came in and doddered futilely with a broom. By 4:30 he was done, and the cashier locked the vault and switchedon the light above it, and he and the book-keeper emerged and locked the front door, and the cashier shook it experimentally.
Snopes crossed the square and passed through the courthouse and entered a street It was a tawdry street; lined with shabby and odorous stores. Into one of these he turned. This was a restaurant, a concrete-floored space bounded by a wooden counter polished by eating elbows and lined with a row of backless and excruciating stools, It was owned and operated by a cousin Snopes, and here he purchased fifteen cents’worth of gaudy stale candy.
He recrossed the square and entered the Beard hotel. The hall was empty; it smelled of damp, harsh soap, and its linoleum floor covering gleamed, still wet From the rear came the unmistakable sounds of Mrs. Beard’s ceaseless and savage activity, and he followed these sounds and she ceased mopping and looked across her gray shoulder at him, sweeping her lank hair aside with a reddened forearm.
“Evening Miz Beard,” he said. “Virgil come home yet?’’
“He was through here a minute ago,” she answered. “If he ain’t out front, I reckon he ain’t fur. You got some mo’ work ferhim?”‘
“Yessum. You don’t know which-a-way he went?”
“Call him in the back yard. He don’t usually go fur away;” She dragged her dank hair aside again; shaped long to labor, her muscles were restive under inaction. She grasped the mop again.
He thanked her and went on, and stood on the kitchen steps above a yard barren of grass and containing a chicken pen also grassless, in which a few fowls huddled or moved about in forlorn distraction in the dust. On one hand was a small kitchen gardenin orderly, tended rows. In the corner of the fence was an outhouse of some sort, of weathered boards.
“Virgil,” he called. The yard was desolate with ghosts; ghosts of discouraged weeds, of food in the shape of tin cans, broken boxes and barrels, a pile of stove wood and a chopping block across which lay an axe whose helve had been mended with rusty wire amateurishly wound. Presently he descended into it, and the chickens remarked him and raised a discordant clamor, anticipating food, doubtless.
“Virgil.”
Sparrows found sustenance of some sort in the dust among the fowls, but the fowls, perhaps with a foreknowledge of doom, huddled back and forth along the wire, discordant and distracted, watching him with predatory importunate eyes. He was about to turn and reenter the kitchen when the boy appeared silently and innocently from the outhouse, with his straw-colored hair and his bland eyes. His mouth was pale and almost sweet, but secretive at the corners. His chin was negligible.
“Hi, Mr. Snopes, you calling me?”
“Yes, if you ain’t doin’ anything special,” Snopes answered, and they reentered the house and passed the room where the boy’s mother labored with drab fury, and mounted a stairs carpeted too with linoleum fastened to each step by a treacherous sheet-iron strip treated to resemble brass and scuffed and scarred by tired or careless feet. Snopes’ room contained a bed, a chair, a dressing table and a wash-stand with a slop-jar beside it. The floor was covered with straw matting frayed in places. The single light hung unshaded from a greenish-brown cord; upon the wall above the paper-filled fireplace a framed lithograph of an Indian maiden in immaculate buckskin leaned her naked bosom above a formal moonlit pool of Italian marble. She held a guitar and a rose, and dusty sparrows sat on the window ledge and watched them brightly through the dusty screen.
The boy entered politely; nevertheless his pale eyes took in the room and its contents at a comprehensive glance. He said: “That air gun ain’t come yet, has it, Mr. Snopes?”
“No, it ain’t,” Snopes answered. “It’ll be here soon, though.”
“You ordered off after it a long time, now.”
“That’s right. But it’ll be here soon. Maybe they haven’t got one in stock, right now.” He crossed to the dresser and took from a drawer a few sheets of foolscap and laid them on the dresser top, and drew the chair up and dragged his suitcase from beneath the bed and set it in the chair. Then he took a fountain pen from his pocket and uncapped it and laid it beside the paper. “It ought to be here any day, now.”
The boy seated himself on the suitcase and took up the pen. “They got ‘em at Watts’ hardware store,” he suggested.
“If the one we ordered don’t come soon, we’ll git one there” Snopes said. “When did we order it anyway?”
“Week ago Tuesday,” the boy answered glibly “I wrote it down.”
“Well, it’llbe here soon. You ready?”
The boy squared himself before the paper. “Yes, sir “Snopes took a folded paper from the top pocket of his trousers and spread it open.
“Code number forty-eight. Mister Joe Butler, Saint Louis, Missouri,” he read, then he leaned over the boy’s shoulder, watching the pen. “That’s right: up close to the top,” he commended. “Now.” The boy dropped down the page about two inches, and asSnopes read, he transcribed in his neat, copybook hand, pausing only occasionally to inquire as to the spelling of a word.
“’I thought once I would try to forget you. But I cannot forget you because you cannot forget me. I saw my letter in your hand satchel today. Every day I can put my hand out and touch you you do not know it. Just to see you walk down the street To know what I know what you know. Some day we will both know together when you got use to it. You kept my letter but you do not answer. That is a good sign you do—” The boy had reached the foot of the page. Snopes removed it, leaving the next sheet ready. He continued to read in his droning, inflectionless voice:
“ —not forget me you would not keep it. I think of you at night the way you walk down the street like I
