forward lurching and heaving, by main strength up onto dry ground again, shouting at me: 'Shut it off! Shut it off!' which I did, managed to, and he came and shoved me over and got in under the wheel; he didn't even stop to roll his muddy pants down.
Because the sun was almost down now; it would be nearly dark by the time we reached Ballenbaugh's, where we would spend the night; we went as fast as we dared now and soon we were passing Mr Wyott's—a family friend of ours; Father took me bird hunting there that Christmas—which was eight miles from Jefferson and still four miles from the river, with the sun just setting behind the house. We went on; there would be a moon after a while, because our oil headlights were better to show someone else you were coming rather than to light you where you were going; but suddenly Boon said, 'What's that smell? Was it you?' But before I could deny it he had jerked the automobile to a stop, sat for an instant, then turned and reached back and flung back the lumped and jumbled mass of the tarpaulin which had filled the back of the car. Ned sat up from the floor. He had on the black suit and hat and the white shirt with the gold collar stud without either collar or tie, which he wore on Sunday; he even had the small battered hand grip (you would call it a brief or attache case now) which had belonged to old Lucius McCaslin before even Father was born; I dont know what else he might have carried in it at other times. All I ever saw in it was the Bible (likewise from Great-great-grandmofher McCaslin), which he couldn't read, and a pint flask containing maybe a good double table-spoonful of whiskey. 'I'll be a son of a bitch,' Boon said. 'I wants a trip too,' Ned said. 'Hee hee hee.'
Chapter 4
'I got just as much right to a trip as you and Lucius,' Ned said. 'I got more. This automobile belongs to Boss and Lucius aint nothing but his grandboy and you aint no kin to him a-tall.'
'All right, all right,' Boon said. 'What I'm talking about, you laid there under that tarpollyon all the time and let me get out in the mud and lift this whole car out single-handed by main strength.'
'And hot under there too, mon,' Ned said. 'I dont see how I stood it. Not to mention having to hold off this here sheet-iron churn from knocking my brains out every time you bounced, let alone waiting for that gasoline or whatever you calls it to get all joogled up to where it would decide to blow up too. What did you aim for me to do? That was just four miles from town. You'd make me walk back home.'
'This is ten miles now,' Boon said. 'What makes you think you aint going to walk them back home?'
I said, rapidly, quickly: 'Have you forgot? That was Wyott's about two miles back. We might just as well be two miles from Bay St Louis.'
'That's right,' Ned said pleasantly. 'The walking aint near so fur from here.' Boon didn't look at him long.
'Get out and fold up that tarpollyon where it wont take up no more room than it has to,' he told Ned. 'And air it off some too if we got to ride with it.'
'It was all that bumping and jolting you done,' Ned said. 'You talk like I broke my manners just on purpose to get caught.'
Also, Boon lit the headlights while we were stopped, and now he wiped his feet and legs off on a corner of the tarpaulin and put his socks and shoes on and rolled his pants back down; they were already drying. The sun was gone now; already you could see the moonlight. It would be full night when we reached Ballenbaugh's.
I understand that Ballenbaugh's is now a fishing camp run by an off-and-on Italian bootlegger—off I mean during the one or two weeks it takes each new sheriff every four years to discover the true will of the people he thought voted for him; all that stretch of river bottom which was a part of Thomas Sutpen's doomed baronial dreaim and the site of Major de Spain's hunting camp is now a drainage district; the wilderness where Boon himself in his youth hunted (or anyway was present while his betters did) bear and deer and panther, is tame with cotton and corn now and even Wyott's Crossing is only a name.
Even in 1905 there was still vestigial wilderness, though most of the deer and all the bears and panthers (also Major de Spain and his hunters) were gone; the ferry also; and now we called Wyott's Crossing the Iron Bridge, THE Iron Bridge since it was the first iron bridge and for several years yet the only one we in Yoknapatawpha County had or knew of. But back in the old days, in the time of our own petty Chickasaw kings, IssetibbeJha and Moke-tubbe and the regicide-usurper who called himself Doom, and the first Wyott came along and the Indians showed him the crossing and he built his store and ferry-boat and named it after himself, this was not only the only crossing within miles but the head of navigation too; boats (in the high water of winter, even a small steamboat) came as it were right to Wyott's front door, bringing the whiskey and plows and coal oil and peppermint candy up from Vicks-burg and carrying the cotton and furs back.
But Memphis was nearer than Vicksburg even by mule team, so they built a road as straight from Jefferson to the south bend of Wyott's ferryboat as they could run it, and as straight from the north end of the ferry-boat to Memphis as they could run that. So the cotton and freight began to come and go that way, mule- or ox-drawn; whereupon there appeared immediately from nowhere an ancestryless giant calling himself Ballenbaugh; some said he actually bought from Wyott the small dim heretofore peaceful one-room combined residence and store, including whatever claim he (Wyott) considered he had in the old Chickasaw crossing; others said that Ballenbaugh simply suggested to Wyott that he (Wyott) had been there long enough now and the time had come for him to move four miles back from the river and become a farmer.
Anyway, that's what Wyott did. And then his little wilderness-cradled hermitage became a roaring place indeed: it became dormitory, grubbing station and saloon for the transient freighters and the fixed crews of hard- mouthed hard-souled mule skinners who met the wagons at both edges of the bottom, with two and three and (when necessary) four span of already geared-up mules, to curse the heavy wagons in to the ferry on one side of the river, and from the ferry to high ground once more on the other. A roaring place; who faced it were anyway men. But just tough men then, no more, until Colonel Sartoris (I don't mean the banker with his courtesy title acquired partly by inheritance and partly by propinquity, who was responsible for Boon and me being where we at this moment were; I mean his father, the actual colonel, C.S.A.—soldier, statesman, politician, duelist; the collateral descending nephews and cousins of one twenty-year-old Yoknapatawpha County youth say, murderer) built his railroad in the mid-seventies and destroyed it
But not Ballenbaugh's, let alone Ballenbaugh. The wagon trains came and drove the boats from the river and changed the name of Wyott's Crossing to Ballenbaugh's Ferry; the railroads came and removed the cotton bales from the wagons and therefore the ferry from Ballenbaugh's, but that was all; forty years before, in the modest case of the trader, Wyott, Ballenbaugh snowed himself perfectly capable of anticipating the wave of the future and riding it; now, in the person of his son, mother giant who in 1865, returned with (it was said) his coat lined with uncut United States bank notes, from (he said) Arkansas, where (he said) he had served and been honorably discharged from a troop of partisan rangers, the name of whose commander he was never subsequently able to recall, he showed that he had lost none of his old deftness and skill and omniscience. Formerly, people passed through Ballenbaugh's, pausing for the night; now they travelled to Ballenbaugh's, always at night and often rapidly, to give Ballenbaugh as much time as possible to get the horse or cow concealed in the swamp before the law or the
