'Now,' Grandfather said.
'Drink it,' Colonel Linscomb said. 'You may need it.' So Ned took the drink and swallowed it at one gulp and sat holding the empty glass, still not looking at Grandfather.
'Now,' Grandfather said. 'Begin—'
'Wait,' Mr van Tosch said. 'How did you make that horse run?'
Ned sat perfectly still, the empty glass motionless in his hand while we watched him, waiting. Then he said, addressing Grandfather for the first time: 'Will these white gentlemen excuse me to speak to you private?'
'What about?' Grandfather said.
'You will know,' Ned said. 'If you thinks they ought to know too, you can tell them.'
Grandfather rose. 'Will you excuse us?' he said. He started toward the door to the hall.
'Why not the gallery?' Colonel Linscomb said. 'It's dark there; better for conspiracy or confession either.' So we went that way. I mean, I was already up too. Grandfather paused again. He said to Ned:
'What about Lucius?'
'He used it too,' Ned said. 'Anybody got a right to know what his benefits is.' We went out onto the gallery, into the darkness and the smell of the roses and the honeysuckle too, and besides the mockingbird which was in a tree not far away, we could hear two whippoorwills and, as always at night in Mississippi and so Tennessee wasn't too different, a dog barking. 'It was a sour dean,' Ned said quietly.
'Dont lie to me,' Grandfather said. 'Horses dont eat sardines.'
'This one do,' Ned said. 'You was there and saw it. Me and Lucius tried him out beforehand. But I didn't even need to try him first. As soon as I laid eyes on him last Sunday, I knowed he had the same kind of sense my mule had.'
'Ah,' Grandfather said. 'So that's what you and Maury used to do to that mule.'
'No sir,' Ned said. 'Mr Maury never knowed it neither. Nobody knowed it but me and that mule. This horse was just the same. When he run that last lap this evening, I had the sour dean waiting for him and he knowed it.'
We went back inside. They were already looking at us. 'Yes,' Grandfather said. 'But it's a family secret. I wont withhold it if it becomes necessary. But will you let me be the judge, under that stipulation? Of course, Van Tosch has the first claim on it.'
'In that Case, I'll either have to buy Ned or_sell you Coppermine,' Mr van Tosch said. 'But shouldn't all this wait until your man Hogganbeck is here too?'
'You dont know my man Hogganbeck,' Grandfather said. 'He drove my automobile to Memphis. When I take him put of jail tomorrow, he will drive it back to Jefferson. Between those two points in time, his presence would have been missed no more than his absence is.' Only this time he didn't have to even start to tell Ned to begin.
'Bobo got mixed up with a white man,' Ned said. And this time it was Mr van Tosch who said Ah. And that was how we began to learn it: from Ned and Mr van Tosch both. Because Mr van Tosch was an alien, a foreigner, who hadn't lived in our country long enough yet to know the kind of white blackguard a young country-bred Negro who had never been away from home before, come to a big city to get more money and fun for the work he intended to do, would get involved with. It was probably gambling, or it began with gambling; that would be their simplest mutual meeting ground. But by this time, it was more than just gambling; even Ned didn't seem to know exactly what it was—unless maybe Ned did know exactly what it was, but it was in a white man's world. Anyway, according to Ned, it was by now so bad—the money sum involved was a hundred and twenty-eight dollars—that the white man had convinced Bobo that, if the law found out about it, merely being fired from his job with Mr van Tosch would be the least of Bobo's troubles; in fact, he had Bobo believing that his real trouble wouldn't even start until after he no longer had a white man to front for him. Until at last, the situation, crisis, so desperate and the threat so great, Bobo went to Mr van Tosch and asked for a hundred and twenty-eight dollars, getting the answer whichvhe had probably expected from the man who was not only a white man and a foreigner, but settled too, past the age when he could remember a young man's passions and predicaments, which was No. That was last fall—
'I remember that,' Mr van Tosch said. 'I ordered the man never to come on my place again. I thought he was gone.' You see what I mean. He—Mr van Tosch—was a good man. But he was a foreigner. —Then Bobo, abandoned by that last hope, which he had never really believed in anyway, 'got up' as he put it (Ned didn't know how either or perhaps he did know or perhaps the way in which Bobo 'got it up' was such that he wouldn't even tell a member of his own race who was his kinsman too) fifteen dollars and gave it to the man, and bought with it just what you might expect and what Bobo himself probably expected. But what else could he do, where else turn? only more threat and pressure, having just proved that he could get money when driven hard enough— 'But why didn't he come to me?' Mr van Tosch said.
'He did,' Ned said. 'You told him No.' They sat quite still. 'You're a white man,' Ned said gently. 'Bobo was a nigger boy.'
'Then why didn't he come to me,' Grandfather said. 'Back where he should never have left in the first place, instead of stealing a horse?'
'What would you a done?' Ned said. 'If he had come in already out of breath from Memphis and told you, Dont ask me no questions: just hand me a hundred and a few extra dollars and I'll go back to Memphis and start paying you back the first Saturday I gets around to it?'
'He could have told me why,' Grandfather said, 'I'm a McCaslin too.'
'You're a white man too,' Ned said.
'Go on,' Grandfather said. —So Bobo discovered that the fifteen dollars which he had thought might save him, had actually ruined him. Now, according to Ned, Bobo's demon gave him no rest at all. Or perhaps the white man began to fear Bobo—that a mere dribble, a few dollars at a time, would take too long; or perhaps that Bobo, because of his own alarm and desperation, plus what the white man doubtless considered the natural ineptitude of Bobo's race, would commit some error or even crime which would blow everything up. Anyway, this was when he —the white man—began to work on Bobo to try for a one-stroke killing which would rid him of the debt, creditor, worry and all. His first idea was to have Bobo rifle Mr van Tosch's tack room, load into the buggy or wagon or whatever it would be, as many saddles and bridles and driving harnesses as it would carry, and clear out; Bobo of course would be suspected at once, but the white man would be safely away by then; and if Bobo moved fast
