Unvanquished

holler again.

'Him, Grumby?' he hollered. 'Ab Snopes? Ab Snopes? By Godfrey, if he was Grumby, if it was Ab Snopes that shot your grandmaw, I'd be ashamed to have it known. I'd be ashamed to be caught catching him. No, sir. He ain't Grumby; he's better than that.' He sat sideways on his mule with the sack over his head and his beard jerking and wagging out of it while he talked. 'He's the one that's going to show us where Grumby is. They just hid them horses here because they thought this would be the last place you boys would think to look for them. And now Ab Snopes has went off with Grumby to get some more, since your grandmaw has gone out of business, as far as he is concerned. And thank Godfrey for that. It won't be a house or a cabin they will ever pass as long as Ab Snopes is with them, that he won't leave an indelible signature, even if it ain't nothing to capture but a chicken or a kitchen clock. By Godfrey, the one thing we don't want is to catch Ab Snopes.'

And we didn't catch him that night. We went back to the road and went on, and then we came in sight of the house. I rode up to Uncle Buck. 'Give me the pistol,' I said.

'We ain't going to need a pistol,' Uncle Buck said. 'He ain't even here, I tell you. You and that nigger stay back and let me do this. I'm going to find out which a way to start hunting. Get back, now.'

'No,' I said, 'I want------'

He looked at me from under the crokersack. 'You want what? You want to lay your two hands on the

126

THE UNVANQUISHED

man that shot Rosa Millard, don't you?' He looked at me. I sat there on the mule in the slow gray cold rain, in the dying daylight. Maybe it was the cold. I didn't feel cold, but I could feel my bones jerking and shaking. 'And then what you going to do with him?' Uncle Buck said. He was almost whispering now. 'Hey? Hey?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Yes.'

'Yes. That's what. Now you and Ringo stay back.

I'll do this.'

It was just a cabin. I reckon there were a thousand of them just like it about our hills, with the same canted plow lying under a tree and the same bedraggled chickens roosting on the plow and the same gray twi­light dissolving onto the gray shingles of the roof. Then we saw a faint crack of fire and a woman's face looking at us around the crack of the door.

'Mr. Snopes ain't here, if that's what you want,' she said. 'He's done gone to Alabama on a visit.'

'Sho, now,' Uncle Buck said. 'To Alabama. Did he leave any word when to expect him home?'

'No,' the woman said.

'Sho, now,' Uncle Buck said. 'Then I reckon we better get on back home and out of the rain.'

'I reckon you had,' the woman said. Then the door

closed.

We rode away. We rode back toward home. It was like it had been while we waited at the old compress; it hadn't got darker exactly, the twilight had just thick­ened.

'Well, well, well,' Uncle Buck said. 'They ain't in Alabama, because she told us so. And they ain't toward Memphis, because there are still Yankees there yet. So I reckon we better try down toward Grenada first. By Godfrey, I'll bet this mule against that nigger's pocket knife that we won't ride two days before we come on a mad woman hollering down the road with a handful of chicken feathers in her hand. You come on here and listen to me. By Godfrey, we're going to do this thing but by Godfrey we're going to do it right.'

VENDEE

127

so we didn't get Ab Snopes that day. We didn't get him

for a lot of days, and nights too—days in which we

rode, the three of us, on relays of Granny's and Ringo's

Yankee mules along the known roads and the unknown

(and sometimes unmarked) trails and paths, in the

wet and the iron frost, and nights when we slept in the

same wet and the same freeze and (once) in the snow,

beneath whatever shelter we found when night found us.

They had neither name nor number. They lasted from

that December afternoon until late February, until one

night we realised that we had been hearing geese and

ducks going north for some time. At first Ringo kept a

pine stick and each night he would cut a notch in it,

with a big one for Sunday and two long ones which

meant Christmas and New Year's. But one night when

the stick had almost forty notches in it, we stopped in

the rain to make camp without any roof to get under and