On the third day of his search, Horace found a domicile for the woman and child. It was in the ramshackle house of an old half-crazed white woman who was believed to manufacture spells for negroes. It was on the edge of town, set in a tiny plot of ground choked and massed with waist-high herbage in an unbroken jungle across the front. At the back a path had been trodden from the broken gate to the door. All night a dim light burned in the crazy depths of the house and at almost any hour of the twenty-four a wagon or a buggy might be seen tethered in the lane behind it and a negro entering or leaving the back door.
The house had been entered once by officers searching for whiskey. They found nothing save a few dried bunches of weeds, and a collection of dirty bottles containing liquid of which they could say nothing surely save that it was not alcoholic, while the old woman, held by two men, her lank grayish hair shaken before the glittering collapse of her face, screamed invective at them in her cracked voice. In a lean-to shed room containing a bed and a barrel of anonymous refuse and trash in which mice rattled all night long, the woman found a home.
“You’ll be all right here,” Horace said. “You can always get me by telephone, at—” giving her the name of a neighbor. “No: wait; tomorrow I’ll have the telephone put back in. Then you can—”
“Yes,” the woman said. “I reckon you better not be coming out here.”
“Why? Do you think that would—that I’d care a damn what—”
“You have to live here.”
“I’m damned if I do. I’ve already let too many women run my affairs for me as it is, and if these uxorious.……” But he knew he was just talking. He knew that she knew it too, out of that feminine reserve of unflagging suspicion of all peoples’ actions which seems at first to be mere affinity for evil but which is in reality practical wisdom.
“I guess I’ll find you if there’s any need,” she said. “There’s not anything else I could do.”
“By God,” Horace said, “dont you let them.…Bitches,” he said; “bitches.”
The next day he had the telephone installed. He did not see his sister for a week; she had no way of learning that he had a phone, yet when, a week before the opening of Court, the telephone shrilled into the quiet where he sat reading one evening, he thought it was Narcissa until, across a remote blaring of victrola or radio music, a man’s voice spoke in a guarded, tomblike tone.
“This is Snopes,” it said. “How’re you, Judge?”
“What?” Horace said. “Who is it?”
“Senator Snopes. Cla’ence Snopes.” The victrola blared, faint, far away; he could see the man, the soiled hat, the thick shoulders, leaning above the instrument—in a drugstore or a restaurant—whispering into it behind a soft, huge, ringed hand, the telephone toylike in the other.
“Oh,” Horace said. “Yes? What is it?”
“I got a little piece of information that might interest you.”
“Information that would interest me?”
“I reckon so. That would interest a couple of parties.” Against Horace’s ear the radio or the victrola performed a reedy arpeggio of saxophones. Obscene, facile, they seemed to be quarreling with one another like two dexterous monkeys in a cage. He could hear the gross breathing of the man at the other end of the wire.
“All right,” he said. “What do you know that would interest me?”
“I’ll let you judge that.”
“All right. I’ll be down town in the morning. You can find me somewhere.” Then he said immediately: “Hello!” The man sounded as though he were breathing in Horace’s ear: a placid, gross sound, suddenly portentous somehow. “Hello!” Horace said.
“It evidently dont interest you, then. I reckon I’ll dicker with the other party and not trouble you no more. Goodbye.”
“No; wait,” Horace said. “Hello! Hello!”
“Yeuh?”
“I’ll come down tonight. I’ll be there in about fifteen—”
“ ’Taint no need of that,” Snopes said. “I got my car. I’ll drive up there.”
He walked down to the gate. There was a moon tonight. Within the black-and-silver tunnel of cedars fireflies drifted in fatuous pinpricks. The cedars were black and pointed on the sky like a paper silhouette; the sloping lawn had a faint sheen, a patina like silver. Somewhere a whippoorwill called, reiterant, tremulous, plaintful above the insects. Three cars passed. The fourth slowed and swung toward the gate. Horace stepped into the light. Behind the wheel Snopes loomed bulkily, giving the impression of having been inserted into the car before the top was put on. He extended his hand.
“How’re you tonight, Judge? Didn’t know you was living in town again until I tried to call you out to Mrs Sartorises.”
“Well, thanks,” Horace said. He freed his hand. “What’s this you’ve got hold of?”
Snopes creased himself across the wheel and peered out beneath the top, toward the house.
“We’ll talk here,” Horace said. “Save you having to turn around.”
“It aint very private here,” Snopes said. “But that’s for you to say.” Huge and thick he loomed, hunched, his featureless face moonlike itself in the refraction of the moon. Horace could feel Snopes watching him, with that sense of portent which had come over the wire; a quality calculating and cunning and pregnant. It seemed to him that he watched his mind flicking this way and that, striking always that vast, soft, inert bulk, as though it were caught in an avalanche of cottonseed-hulls.
“Let’s go to the house,” Horace said. Snopes opened the door. “Go on,” Horace said. “I’ll walk up.” Snopes drove on. He was getting out of the car when Horace overtook him. “Well, what is it?” Horace said.
Again Snopes looked at the house. “Keeping batch, are you?” he said. Horace said nothing. “Like I always say,
