a crick jest under the ridge, and when Colonel sailed over the rise and come in sight of the crick, thar was a comp’ny of Yankee cavalry with their hosses picketed and their muskets stacked, eatin’ dinner by the bridge. Colonel says they was a-settin’thar gapin’ at the rise when he come over hit, holdin’ cupsofcaw-fee and hunks of bread in their hands and their muskets stacked abo’ forty foot away buggin’ their eyes and mouths at him.
“It was too late fer him to turn back, anyhow, but I don’t reckon he would ef they’d been time. He jest spurred down the ridge and in amongst ‘em, scatterin’ cook-fires and guns and men, shoutin’‘Surround ‘em, boys! Ef you move, you are dead men.’ One or two of ‘em made to break away, but Colonel drawed his pistols and let ‘em off, and they come back and scrouged in amongst the others, and thar they set’still a-holdin’ their cups and dinner, when Zeb come up. And that was the way we found ‘em when we got thar ten minutes later.” Old man Falls spat again, neatly and brownly, and he chuckled. His eyesshone like periwinkles, “That cawfeewas sho’ mighty fine,” he said.
“And thar we was, with a passel of prisoners we didn’t have no use fer. We held ‘em all that day and et their grub; and when night come we taken and throwed their muskets into the crick and taken their ammunition and the rest of the grub and put a guard on their hosses, then the rest of us laid down. And all that night we laid thar in them fine Yankee blankets, listenin’ to them prisoners sneakin’ away one at a time, slippin’ down the bank into the crick and wadin’ off. Time to time one would slip or make a splash ersomething, then they’d all git right still fer a spell. But pretty soon we’d hear ‘em at it again,crawlin’ through the bushes to’ds the crick, and us layin’ with blanket aidges held to our mouths. Hit was nigh dawn‘fore the last one had snuck off in a way that suited him.
“Then Colonel from whar he was a-layin’ let out a yell them pore critters could hear fer a mile.
“‘Go it Yank,’ he says, ‘and look out fer moccasins!’ ”
“Next mawnin’ we saddled up and loaded our plunder and ever’ man taken him a hoss, and lit out fer home. We’d been home two weeks and Colonel had his cawn laid by, when we heard ‘bout Van Dorn ridin’ into Holly Springs and burnin’ Grants sto’s. Seems like he never needed no help from us, noways.” He chewed his tobacco for a time, quietly retrospective, reliving in the company of men now dust with the dust for which they had, unwittingly perhaps, fought, those gallant, pinch-bellied days into which few who now trod that earth and. drew breath, could enter into with him.
Old Bayard shook the ash from his cigar. “Will,” he said, “what the devil were you folks fighting about, anyhow?”
“Bayard,” old man Falls answered, “damned ef I ever did know.”
After old man Falls had departed with his small parcel and his innocently bulging cheek, old Bayard sat and smoked his cigar. He knew now a sense of finality, of peace; like that of the man who has made his final cast with the dice and from whom all initiative is lifted, leaving him no more than a vegetable until they cease rolling, let them show what they may. He had crossed the Rubicon...but had he? He raised his hand and touched the wen again, but lightly, recalling old man Falls’ parting stricture; and recalling this, the thought that it might not yet be too late, that he might yet remove the paste with water, followed.
He rose and crossed to the lavatory in the corner of the room. Above it was fixed a small cabinet with a mirror in the door, and in it he examined the black spot on his face, touching it again with his fingers, then staring at his hand. Yes, it might still come off...But be damned if he would; be damned to a man who didn’t know his own mind. And Will Falls, too; Will Falls, hale and sane and sound asa dollar; Will Falls who, as he himself had said, was too old to have any reason for injuring anyone. He flung his cigar away and quitted the room and tramped through the lobby toward the door where his chair sat. But before he reached the door he stopped and turned and came up to the teller’s window, behind which the cashier sat in a green eyeshade.
“Res,” he said.
The cashier looked up. “Yes, Colonel?”
“Who is that damn boy that hangs around here, looking through that window all the time?” old Bayard demanded, lowering his voice within a pitch or so of an ordinary conversational tone.
“What boy, Colonel?” Old Bayard pointed, and the cashier raised himself on his stool and peered over the partition and saw without the indicated window a boy of ten or twelve watching him with an innocently casual air. “Oh. That’s Will Beard’s boy, from up at the boarding house,” he shouted. “Friend of Byron’s, I think.”
“What’s he doing, then? Every time I walk through here, there he is looking in that window. What does he want?”
“Maybe he’s a bank robber,” the cashier suggested.
“What?” Old Bayard cupped his ear fiercely in his palm.
“Maybe he’s a bank robber,” the other shouted, leaning forward on his stool. Old Bayard snorted and tramped violently away and slammed his chair back against the door. The cashier sat lumped and shapeless on his stool, rumbling deep within his gross body. He said, without turning his head: “Colonel’s let Will Falls treat that thing on his face with that salve.” The Snopes at his desk made no reply; did not raise his head. After a time the boy moved, and drifted casually and innocently away.
Virgil Beard now possessed, besides the air rifle, a pistol that projected a stream of ammoniac water excruciatingly painful to the eyes, a small magic lantern, and an ex-candy showcase in which he kept birds’ eggs and an assortment of insects that had died slowly on pins, and a modest hoard of nickels and dimes and quarters. With a child’s innocent pleasure he divulged to his parents the source of this beneficence, and his mother took Snopes to her gray heart, fixing him special dishes and performing trifling acts to increase his creature comfort with bleak and awkward gratitude.
At times the boy, already dressed and with his bland shining face, would enter his room and waken him from his troubled sleep and sit on a chair while Snopes donned his clothing, talking politely and vaguely of certain things he aimed to do, and of what he would require to do them successfully with. Or if not this, he was on hand at breakfast while his harried gray mother and the slatternly negress bore dishes back and forth from the kitchen, quiet but proprietorial; blandly and innocently portentous.
And all during the banking day (it was summer now, and school was out) Snopes never knew when he would look over his shoulder and find the boy lounging without the plate glass window of the bank; watching him with profound and static patience. Presently he would take himself away, and for a short time Snopes would be able to forget him until, wrapped in his mad unsleeping dream, he mounted the boarding house veranda at supper time and found the boy sitting there and waiting patiently his return; innocent and bland, steadfast and unassertive as a minor but chronic disease. “Got another business letter to write tonight, Mr. Snopes?”
And sometimes after he had gone to bed and his light was out; he lay in the mad darkness against his sleepless desire moiled in obscene images and shapes, and heard presently outside his door secret, rat-like sounds; and lay so tense in the dark, expecting the door to open and, preceded by breathing above him sourceless and invisible: “Going to write another letter, Mr. Snopes?” And he waked sweating from dreams in which her image lived and moved and thwarted and mocked him, with the pillow crushed against his mean, half-insane face, while the words produced themselves in his ears: “Got air other letter to write yet, Mr. Snopes?”
So he changed his boarding house. He gave Mrs. Beard an awkward, stumbling explanation; vague,
