'Beat that Linscomb horse this time, durn him.'
'We'll try,' Everbe said. 'How much do we owe you?' ''Nothing,' he said. 'You already cured it. Just beat that durn Linscomb horse tomorrow.'
'I want to pay you something for looking at it,' Everbe said. 'For telling us it's all right.'
'No,' he said. He looked at her: the old man's eyes behind the spectacles magnified yet unfocusable, as irreparable as eggs, until you would think they couldn't possibly grasp and hold anything as recent as me and Everbe. 'Yes,' Everbe said. 'What is it?'
'Maybe if you had a extra handkerchief or something . . .' He said: 'Yes, thirty-five years. I had one once, when I was a young man, thirty, thirty-five years ago. Then I got married, and it . . .' He said, 'Yes. Thirty-five years.'
'Oh,' Everbe said. She turned her back to us and bent over; her skirts rustled; it was not long; they rustled again and she turned back. 'Here,' she said. It was a garter. 'Beat that durn horse!' he said. 'Beat him! You can do it!' Now we heard the voices—voice, that is, Butch's— loud in the little hall before we got there:
'What do you know? Sugar Boy wont take a drink no more. All boys together, give and take, never snatch without whistling first, and now he insults me.' He stood grinning at Boon, triumphant, daring. Boon looked really dangerous now. Like Ned (all of us) he was worn out for sleep too. But all the load Ned had to carry was the horse; Everbe and Butch's badge were not his burden. 'Huh, boy?' Butch said; now he was going to slap Boon on the back again with that jovial force which was just a little too hard but not quite.
'Dont do it again,' Boon said. Butch stopped. He didn't retract the motion: he just stopped it, grinning at Boon.
'My name's Mister Lovemaiden,' he said. 'But call me Butch.'
After a while Boon said, 'Lovemaiden.'
'Butch,' Butch said.
After a while Boon said, 'Butch.'
'That's a boy,' Butch said. He said to Everbe: 'Doc fix you up all right? Maybe I ought to warned you about Doc. They claim when he was a young squirt fifty-sixty years ago, he would a had one snatch at your drawers before he even tipped his hat.'
'Come on,' Boon said. 'You paid him?'
'Yes,' Everbe said. We went outside. And that was when somebody said, Where is Otis? No, it was Everbe of course; she just looked once and said, 'Otis!' quite loud, strong, not to say urgent, not to say alarmed and desperate.
'Dont tell me he's scared of horses even tied to a gatepost,' Butch said.
'Come on,' Boon said. 'He's just gone on ahead; he 'aint got nowhere else to go. We'll pick him up.'
'But why?' Everbe said. 'Why didn't he—'
'How do I know?' Boon said. 'Maybe he's right.' He meant Butch. Then he meant Otis: 'For all he's as knowing a little son of a bitch as ever come out of Arkansas or Missippi either for that matter, he's still a arrant coward. Come on.' So we got in the surrey and went on to town. Except that I was on Everbe's side about Otis; when you couldn't see him was a good time to be already wondering where he was and why. I never saw anybody lose public confidence as fast as he could; he would have had a hard time now finding anybody in this surrey to take him to another zoo or anywhere else. And it wasn't going to be much longer before he couldn't have found anybody in Parsham either.
Only we didn't overtake him. He wasn't on the road all the way to the hotel. And Ned was wrong. I mean about the increasing swarm of horse-race devotees we would be running into from now on. Maybe I had expected to mid the entire hotel veranda lined with them, waiting for us and watching us arrive. If so, I was wrong; there was nobody there at all. In the winter of course, during the quail season and especially during the two weeks of the National Trials, it would be different. But in those days, unlike London, Parsham had no summer season; people went elsewhere: to water or mountains: Raleigh, near Memphis, or luka not far away in Mississippi, or to the Ozarks or Cumberlands. (Nor, for that matter, does it have one now, nor indeed does any place else, either winter or summer season; there are no seasons at all any more, with interiors artificially contrived at sixty degrees in summer and ninety degrees in winter, so that mossbacked recidivists like me must go outside in summer to escape cold and in winter to escape heat; including the automobiles also which once were mere economic necessities but are now social ones, the moment already here when, if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize, solidify: there are too many of us; humanity will destroy itself not by fission but by another beginning with f which is a verb-active also as well as a conditional state; I wont see it but you may: a law compelled and enforced by dire and frantic social—not Economic: social—desperation permitting a woman but one child as she is now permitted but one husband.)
But in winter of course (as now), it was different, with the quail season and the Grand National Trials, with the rich money of oil and wheat barons from Wall Street and Chicago and Saskatchewan, and the fine dogs with pedigrees more jealous than princes, and the fine breeding and training kennels only minutes away now by automobile —Red Banks and Michigan City and La Grange and Ger-mantown, and the names—Colonel Linscomb, whose horse (we assumed) we were going to race against tomorrow, and Horace Lytle and George Peyton as magical among bird-dog people as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb among baseball aficionados, and Mr Jim Avant from Hickory Flat and Mr Paul Rainey just a few miles down Colonel Sartoris's railroad toward Jefferson—hound men both, who (I suppose) among these mere pedigreed pointers and setters, called themselves slumming; the vast rambling hotel booming then, staffed and elegant, the very air itself suave and murmurous with money, littered with colored ribbons and cluttered with silver cups.
But there was nobody there now, the quiet street empty with May dust (it was after six now; Parsham would be at home eating—or preparing to eat—supper), vacant even of Otis, though he could be, probably was, inside. And what was even more surprising, to me anyway, vacant also of Butch. He simply drove us up to the door and put us out and drove away, pausing only long enough to give Ev-erbe one hard jeering leer and Boon one hard leering jeer, if anything a little harder than Everbe's, saying, 'Dont worry, boy, I'll be back. If you got any business still hanging, better get it unhung before I get back or something might get tore,' and drove away. So apparently he also had somewhere he had to be occasionally: a home; I was still ignorant and innocent (not as much as I was twenty-four hours ago, but still tainted) but I was on Boon's side, my loyalty was to him, not to mention to Everbe, and I had assimilated enough (whether I had digested all of it yet or not) since yesterday, to know exactly what I meant when I hoped that maybe he had a wife in it—some innocent ravished out of a convent whose friendless avengeless betrayal would add another charge to the final accounting of his natural ruthless baseness; or better: an
