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what the passage of words would be and the

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futility of it; how he might have said, 'Go out, Bayard. Go away, boy' and then, 'Draw then. I will allow you to draw' and it would have been the same as if he had never said it. So we did not speak; I just walked steadily toward him as the pistol rose from the desk. I watched it, I could see the foreshortened slant of the barrel and I knew it would miss me though his hand did not trem­ble. I walked toward him, toward the pistol in the rock-like hand, I heard no bullet. Maybe I didn't even hear the explosion though I remember the sudden orange bloom and smoke as they appeared against his white shirt as they had appeared against Grumby's greasy Confederate coat; I still watched that foreshortened slant of barrel which I knew was not aimed at me and saw the second orange flash and smoke and heard no bullet that time either. Then I stopped; it was done then. I watched the pistol descend to the desk in short jerks; I saw him release it and sit back, both hands on the desk, I looked at his face and I knew too what it was to want air when there was nothing in the circumam-bience for the lungs. He rose, shoved the chair back with a convulsive motion and rose, with a queer ducking motion of his head; with his head still ducked aside and one arm extended as though he couldn't see and the other hand resting on the desk as if he couldn't stand alone, he turned and crossed to the wall and took his hat from the rack and with his head still ducked aside and one hand extended he blundered along the wall and passed me and reached the door and went through it. He was brave; no one denied that. He walked down their stairs and out onto the street where George Wyatt and the other six of Father's old troop waited and where the other men had begun to run now; he walked through the middle of them with his hat on and his head up (they told me how someone shouted at him: 'Have you killed that boy too?'), saying no word, staring straight ahead and with his back to them, on to the station where the south-bound train was just in and got on it with no baggage, nothing, and went away from Jeffer­son and from Mississippi and never came back.

I heard their feet on the stairs then in the corridor then in the room, but for a while yet (it wasn't that

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long, of course) I still sat behind the desk as he had sat, the flat of the pistol still warm under my hand, my hand growing slowly numb between the pistol and my forehead. Then I raised my head; the little room was full of men. 'My God!' George Wyatt cried. 'You took the pistol away from him and then missed him, missed him twice?' Then he answered himself—that same rap­port for violence which Drusilla had and which in George's case was actual character judgment: 'No; wait. You walked hi here without even a pocket knife and let him miss you twice. My God in heaven.' He turned, shouting: 'Get to hell out of here! You, White, ride out to Sartoris and tell his folks it's all over and he's all right. Ride!' So they departed, went away; presently only George was left, watching me with that pale bleak stare which was speculative yet not at all ratiocinative. 'Well by God,' he said. '—Do you want a drink?'

'No,' I said. 'I'm hungry. I didn't eat any breakfast.'

'I reckon not, if you got up this morning aiming to do what you did. Come on. We'll go to the Holston House.'

'No,' I said. 'No. Not there.'

'Why not? You ain't done anything to be ashamed of. I wouldn't have done it that way, myself. I'd a shot at him once, anyway. But that's your way or you wouldn't have done it.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I would do it again.'

'Be damned if I would.—You want to come home with me? We'll have time to eat and then ride out there in time for the------' But I couldn't do that either.

'No,' I said. 'I'm not hungry after all. I think I'll go home.'

'Don't you want to wait and ride out with me?'

'No. I'll go on.'

'You don't want to stay here, anyway.' He looked around the room again, where the smell of powder smoke still lingered a little, still lay somewhere on the hot dead air though invisible now, blinking a little with his fierce pale unintroverted eyes. 'Well by God,' he said again. 'Maybe you're right, maybe there has been enough killing in your family without—Come on.' We left the office. I waited at the foot of the stairs and soon Ringo came up with the horses. We crossed the

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square again. There were no feet on the Holston House railing now (it was twelve o'clock) but a group of men stood before the door who raised their hats and I raised mine and Ringo and I rode on.

We did not go fast. Soon it was one, maybe after; the carriages and buggies would begin to leave the square soon, so I turned from the road at the end of the pasture and I sat the mare, trying to open the gate without dis­ mounting, until Ringo dismounted and opened it. We crossed the pasture in the hard fierce sun; I could have seen the house now but I didn't look. Then we were in the shade, the close thick airless shade of the creek bottom; the old rails still lay in the undergrowth where we had built the pen to hide the Yankee mules. Pres­ently I heard the water, then I could see the sunny glints. We dismounted. I lay on my back, I thought Now it can begin again if it wants to. But it did not. I went to sleep. I went to sleep almost before I had stopped think­ing. I slept for almost five hours and I didn't dream anything at all yet I waked myself up crying, crying too hard to stop it. Ringo was squatting beside me and the sun was gone though there was a bird of some sort still singing somewhere and the whistle of the north-bound evening train sounded and the short broken puffs of start­ing where it had evidently stopped at our flag station. Aft& a while I began to stop and Ringo brought his hat full of water from the creek but instead I went down to the water myself and bathed my face.

There was still a good deal of light in the pasture, though the whippoorwills had begun, and when we reached the house there was a mockingbird singing hi the magnolia, the night song now, the drowsy moony one, and again the moon like the rim print of a heel in wet sand. There was just one light in the hall now and so it was all over though I could still smell the flowers even above the verbena hi my coat. I had not looked at him again. I had started to before I left the house but I did not, I did not see him again and all the pictures we had of him were bad ones because a picture could no more have held him dead than the house could have kept his body. But I didn't need to see him again be­cause he was there, he would always be there; maybe

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