Unvanquished

ammunition wagon while Gavin Breckbridge was just Brasilia's fiance) was there in the eyes, yet beyond that was the incorrigibly individual woman: not like so many men who return from wars to live on Govern­ment reservations like so many steers, emasculate and empty of all save an identical experience which they can­not forget and dare not, else they would cease to live

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at that moment, almost interchangeable save for the old habit of answering to a given name.

'Now I must tell Father,' I said.

'Yes,' she said. 'You must tell him. Kiss me.' So again it was like it had been before. No. Twice, a thou­sand times and never like—the eternal and symbolic thirty to a young man, a youth, each time both cumula­tive and retroactive, immitigably unrepetitive, each wherein remembering excludes experience, each wherein experience antedates remembering^ the skill without weariness, the knowledge virginal to surfeit, the cun­ning secret muscles to guide and control just as within the wrists and elbows lay slumbering the mastery of horses: she stood back, already turning, not looking at me when she spoke, never having looked at me, already moving swiftly on hi the dusk: 'Tell John. Tell him to­night.'

I intended to. I went to the house and into the office at once; I went to the center of the rug before the cold hearth, I don't know why, and stood there rigid like sol­diers stand, looking at eye level straight across the room and above his head and said 'Father' and then stopped. Because he did not even hear me. He said, 'Yes, Bayard?' but he did not hear me although he was sit­ting behind the desk doing nothing, immobile, as still as I was rigid, one hand on the desk with a dead cigar in it, a bottle of brandy and a filled and untasted glass beside his hand, clothed quiet and bemused in whatever triumph it was he felt since the last overwhelming return of votes had come in late in the afternoon. So I waited until after supper. We went to the diningroom and stood side by side until Aunt Jenny entered and then Dru-silla, in the yellow ball gown, who walked straight to me and gave me one fierce inscrutable look then went to her place and waited for me to draw her chair while Father drew Aunt Jenny's. He had roused by then, not to talk himself but rather to sit at the head of the table and reply to Brasilia as she talked with a sort of feverish and glittering volubility—to reply now and then to her with that courteous intolerant pride which had lately become a little forensic, as if merely being in a political contest filled with fierce and empty

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oratory had retroactively made a lawyer of him who was anything and everything except a lawyer. Then Brasilia and Aunt Jenny rose and left us and he said, 'Wait' to me who had made no move to follow and directed Joby to bring one of the bottles of wine which he had fetched back from New Orleans when he went there last to borrow money to liquidate his first private railroad bonds. Then I stood again like soldiers stand, gazing at eye level above his head while he sat half-turned from the table, a little paunchy now though not much, a little grizzled too in the hair though his beard was as strong as ever, with that spurious forensic air of lawyers and the intolerant eyes which in the last two years had acquired that transparent film which the eyes of carnivorous animals have and from behind which they look at a world which no ruminant ever sees, perhaps dares to see, which I have seen before on the eyes of men who have killed too much, who have killed so much that never again as long as they live will they ever be alone. I said again, 'Father,' then I told him.

'Hah?' he said. 'Sit down.' I sat down, I looked at him, watched him fill both glasses and this time I knew it was worse with him than not hearing: it didn't even matter. 'You are doing well in the law, Judge Wilkins tells me. I am pleased to hear that. I have not needed you in my affairs so far, but from now on I shall. I have now accomplished the active portion of my amis in which you could not have helped me; I acted as the land and the tune demanded and you were too young for that, I wished to shield you. But now the land and the time too are changing; what will follow will be a matter of consolidation, of pettifogging and doubtless chicanery in which I would be a babe in arms but in which you, trained in the law, can hold your own—our own. Yes, I have accomplished my aim, and now I shall do a little moral house-cleaning. I am tired of killing men, no matter what the necessity nor the end. Tomor­row, when I go to town and meet Ben Redmond, I shall be unarmed.'

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we reached home just before midnight; we didn't have to pass through Jefferson either. Before we turned hi the gates I could see the lights, the chandeliers—hall, parlor, and what Aunt Jenny (without any effort or perhaps even design on her part) had taught even Ringo to call the drawing room, the light falling out­ward across the portico, past the columns. Then I saw the horses, the faint shine of leather and buckle-glints on the black silhouettes and then the men too—Wyatt and others of Father's old troop—and I had forgot that they would be there. I had forgot that they would be there; I remember how I thought, since I was tired and spent with strain, Now it will have to begin tonight. I won't even have until tomorrow in which to begin to re­sist. They had a watchman, a picquet out, I suppose, because they seemed to know at once that we were hi the drive. Wyatt met me, I halted the mare, I could look down at him and at the others gathered a few yards behind him with that curious vulture-like formality which Southern men assume in such situations. 'Well, boy,' George said.

^ 'Was it—' I said. 'Was he-------'

''It was all right. It was in front. Redmond ain't no coward. John had the derringer inside his cuff like al­ways, but he never touched it, never made a move to­ward it.' I have seen him do it, he showed me once: the pistol (it was not four inches long) held flat inside his left wrist by a clip he made himself of wire and an old clock spring; he would raise both hands at the same time, cross them, fire the pistol from beneath his left hand almost as if he were hiding from his own vision what he was doing; when he killed one of the men he shot a hole through his own coat sleeve. 'But you want to get on to the house,' Wyatt said. He began to stand aside, then he spoke again: 'We'll take this off your hands, any of us. Me.' I hadn't moved the mare yet and I had made no move to speak, yet he continued quickly, as if he had already rehearsed all this, his speech and mine, and knew what I would say and only

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spoke himself as he would have removed his hat on entering a house or used 'sir' in conversing with a stran­ ger: 'You're young, just a boy, you ain't had any ex­perience in this kind of thing. Besides, you got them two ladies in the house to think about. He would under­stand, all right.'

'I reckon I can attend to it,' I said.

'Sure,' he said; there was no surprise, nothing at all in his voice because he had already rehearsed this: 'I reckon we all knew that's what you would say.' He stepped back then; almost it was as though he and not I bade the mare to move on. But they all followed, still * with that unctuous and voracious formality. Then I saw Drusilla standing at the top of the front steps, hi the light from the open door and the windows like a theatre scene, in the yellow ball gown and even from here I believed that I could smell the verbena in her hair, standing there motionless yet emanating something louder than the two shots must have been—something voracious too and passionate. Then, although I had dis­mounted and someone had taken the mare, I seemed to be still in the saddle and to watch