'I bet aint none of you thought to bring my grip,' Ned said.
'What?' Boon said.
'Where is it?' I said.
'Right there in the kitchen where I set it,' Ned said. 'That gold-tooth high-brown seen it.'
'Miss Corrie'll bring it tonight,' I said. 'Come on.' We went into the depot. Boon bought our tickets and we went out to where the train was waiting, with people already getting on it. Up ahead we could see the boxcar. Sam and the conductor and two other men were standing by the open door; one of them must have been the engineer. You see? not just one casual off-duty flagman, but a functioning train crew.
'You going to run him today?' the conductor said.
'Tomorrow,' Boon said.
'Well, we got to get him there first,' the conductor said, looking at his watch. 'Who's going to ride with him?'
'Me,' Ned said. 'Soon as I can find a box or something to climb up on.'
'Gimme your foot,' Sam said. Ned cocked his knee and Sam threw him up into the car. 'See you in Parsham tomorrow,' he said.
'I thought you went all the way to Washington,' Boon said.
'Who, me?' Sam said. 'That's just the train. I'm going to double back from Chattanooga tonight on Two-O-Nine. Ill be back in Parsham at seven oclock tomorrow morning. I'd go with you now and pick up Two-O-Eight in Parsham tonight, only I got to get some sleep. Besides, you wont need me anyhow. You can depend on Ned until then.'
So did Boon and I. I mean, need sleep. We got some, until the conductor waked us and we stood on the cinders at Parsham in the first light and watched the engine (there was a cattle-loading chute here) spot the boxcar, properly this time, and take its train again and go on, clicking car by car across the other tracks which went south to Jefferson. Then the three of us dismantled the stall and Ned led the horse out; and of course, naturally, materialised from nowhere, a pleasant-looking Negro youth of about nineteen, standing at the bottom of the chute, said, 'Howdy, Mr McCaslin.'
'That you, son?' Ned said. 'Whichaway?' So we left Boon for that time; his was the Motion role now, the doing: to find a place for all of us to live, not just him and me, but Otis and Everbe when they came tonight: to locate a man whose name Ned didn't even know, whom nobody but Ned said owned a horse, and then persuade him to run it, race it—one figment of Ned's imagination to race another figment—in a hypothetical race which was in the future and therefore didn't exist, against a horse it had already beaten twice: (this likewise according only to Ned, or Figment Three), as a result of which Ned intended to recover Grandfather's automobile; all this Boon must do while still keeping clear of being challenged about who really did own the horse. We—Ned and the youth and me —were walking now, already out of town, which didn't take long in those days—a hamlet, two or three stores where the two railroads crossed, the depot and loading chute and freight shed and a platform for cotton bales. Though some of it has not changed: the big rambling mul-tigalleried multistoried steamboatgothic hotel where the overalled aficionados and the professionals who trained the fine bird dogs and the northern millionaires who owned them (one night in the lounge in 1933, his Ohio business with everybody else's under the Damocles sword of the federally closed banks, I myself heard Horace Lytle refuse five thousand dollars for Mary Montrose) gathered for two weeks each February; Paul Rainey also, who liked our country enough—or anyway our bear and deer and panther enough —to use some of the Wall Street money to own enough Mississippi land for him and his friends to hunt them in: a hound man primarily, who took his pack of bear hounds to Africa to see what they would do on lion or vice versa.
'This white boy's going to sleep walking,' the youth said. 'Aint you got no saddle?' But I wasn't going to sleep yet. I had to find out, to ask:
'I didn't even know you knew anybody here, let alone getting word ahead to them.'
Ned walked on as if I had not even spoken. After a while he said over his shoulder: 'So you wants to know how, do you?' He walked on. He said: 'Me and that boy's grandpappy are Masons.'
'Why are you whispering?' I said. 'Boss is a Mason too but I never heard him whisper about it.'
'I didn't know I was,' Ned said. 'But suppose I was. What do you want to belong to a lodge for, unless it's so secret cant hardly nobody else get in it? And how are you gonter keep it secret unless you treat it like one?'
'But how did you get word to him?' I said. 'Let me tell you something,' Ned said. 'If you ever need to get something done, not just done but done quick and quiet and so you can depend on it and not no blabbing and gabbling around about it neither, you hunt around until you finds somebody like Mr. Sam Caldwell, and turn it over to him. You member that. Folks around Jefferson could use some of him. They could use a heap of Sam Caldwells.'
Then we were there. The sun was well up now. It was a dog-trot house, paintless but quite sound and quite neat among locust and chinaberry trees, in a swept yard inside a fence which had all its palings too and a hinged gate that worked, with chickens in the dust and a cow and a pair of mules in the stable lot behind it, and two pretty good hounds which had already recognised the youth with us, and an old man at the top of the gallery steps above them—an old man very dark in a white shirt and galluses and a planter's hat, with perfectly white moustaches and an imperial, coming down the steps now and across the yard to look at the horse. Because he knew, remembered the horse, and so one at least of Ned's figment's vanished. 'You all buy him?' he said. 'We got him,' Ned said. 'Long enough to run him?'
'Once, anyway,' Ned said. He said to me: 'Make your manners to Uncle Possum Hood.' I did so.
'Rest yourself,' Uncle Parsham said. 'You all about ready for breakfast, aint you?' I could already smell it— the ham.
'All I want is to go to sleep,' I said. 'He's been up all night,' Ned said. 'Both of us. Only he had to spend his in a house full of women hollering why and how much whilst all I had was just a quiet empty boxcar with a horse.' But I was still going to help stable and feed Lightning. They wouldn't let me. 'You go with Ly-curgus and get some sleep,' Ned said. 'I'm gonter need you soon, before it gets too hot. We got to find out about this horse, and the sooner we starts, the sooner it will be.' I followed Lycurgus. It was a lean-to room, a bed with a bright perfectly clean harlequin-patched quilt; it seemed to me I was asleep before I even lay down, and that Ned was shaking me before I had ever slept. He had a clean heavy wool sock and a piece of string. I was hungry now. 'You can eat your breakfast afterwards,' Ned said. 'You can learn a horse better on a empty stomach. Here—' holding the sock open. 'Whistle-britches aint showed up yet. It might be better if he dont a-tall. He the sort that no matter how bad you think you need him, you find out afterward you was better off. Hold out your hand.' He meant the bandaged one. He
