That was when Mr Hampton slapped him. “Stop it, Hub!” Uncle Gavin said. “You damned fool!”
“Let him go ahead,” Montgomery Ward said. “Suing his bondsmen is easier than running a magic lantern. Safer too. Where was I? Oh yes. Even if they had been sent through the mail, which they haven’t, that would just be a federal charge, and I dont see any federal dicks around here. And even if you tried to cook up a charge that I’ve been making money out of them, where are your witnesses? All you got is Grover Winbush, and he dont dare testify, not because he will lose his job because he’ll probably do that anyway, but because the God-fearing Christian holy citizens of Jefferson wont let him because they cant have it knowthis is what their police do when they’re supposed to be at work. Let alone the rest of my customers, not to mention any names scattered around in banks and stores and gins and filling stations and farms too two counties wide in either direction—sure: I just thought of this too: come on, put a fine on me and see how quick it will be paid.…” and stopped and said with a kind of hushed amazement: “Sweet Christ.” He was talking fast now: “Come on, lock me up, give me a thousand stamped envelopes and I’ll make more money in three days than I made in the whole two years with that damned magic lantern.” Now he was talking to Mr Hampton: “Maybe that’s what you wanted, to begin with: not the postcards but the list of customers; retire from sheriff and spend all your time on the collections. Or no: keep the star to bring pressure on the slow payers—”
Only this time Uncle Gavin didn’t have to say anything because this time Mr Hampton wasn’t going to hit him. He just stood there with his little hard eyes shut until Montgomery Ward stopped. Then he said to Uncle Gavin:
“Is that right? We’ve got to have a federal officer? There’s nothing on our books to touch him with? Come on, think. Nothing on the city books even?” Now it was Uncle Gavin who said By God.
“That automobile law,” he said. “That Sartoris law,” while Mr Hampton stood looking at him. “Hanging right there in that frame on the wall by your own office door? Didn’t you ever look at it? That you cant drive an automobile on the streets of Jefferson—”
“What?” Montgomery Ward said.
“Louder,” Uncle Gavin said. “Mr Hampton cant hear you.”
“But that’s just inside the city!” Montgomery Ward said. “Hampton’s just County Sheriff; he cant make an arrest on just a city charge.”
“So you say,” Mr Hampton said; now he did put his hand on Montgomery Ward’s shoulder; Uncle Gavin said if he had been Montgomery Ward, he’d just as soon Mr Hampton had slapped him again. “Tell your own lawyer, not ours.”
“Wait!” Montgomery Ward said to Uncle Gavin. “You own a car too! So does Hampton!”
“We’re doing this alphabetically,” Uncle Gavin said. “We’ve passed the H’s. We’re in S now, and S-n comes before S-t. Take him on, Hub.”
So Montgomery Ward didn’t have anywhere to go then, he had run completely out; he just stood there now and Uncle Gavin watched Mr Hampton take his hand off Montgomery Ward and pick up the album of pictures and the envelopes that held the rest of them and carry them to the sink where Montgomery Ward really would develop a film now and then, and tumble them in and then start hunting among the bottles and cans of developer stuff on the shelf above it.
“What are you looking for?” Uncle Gavin said.
“Alcohol—coal oil—anything that’ll burn,” Mr Hampton said.
“Burn?” Montgomery Ward said. “Hell, man, those things are valuable. Look, I’ll make a deal: give them back to me and I’ll get to hell out of your damned town and it’ll never see me again.—All right,” he said. “I’ve got close to a hundred bucks in my pocket. I’ll lay it on the table here and you and Stevens turn your backs and give me ten minutes—”
“Do you want to come back and hit him again?” Uncle Gavin said. “Dont mind me. Besides, he’s already suggested we turn our backs so all you’ll have to do is just swing your arm.” But Mr Hampton just took another bottle down and took out the stopper and smelled. “You cant do that,” Uncle Gavin said. “They’re evidence.”
“All we need is just one,” Mr Hampton said.
“That depends,” Uncle Gavin said. “Do you just want to convict him, or do you want to exterminate him?” Mr Hampton stopped, the bottle in one hand and the stopper in the other. “You know what Judge Long will do to the man that just owns one of these pictures.” Judge Long was the Federal Judge of our district. “Think what he’ll do to the man that owns a wheelbarrow full of them.”
So Mr Hampton put the bottle back and after a while a deputy came with a suitcase and they put the album and the envelopes into it and locked it and Mr Hampton locked the suitcase in his safe to turn over to Mr Gombault, the U. S. marshal, when he got back to town, and they locked Montgomery Ward up in the county jail for operating an automobile contrary to law in the city of Jefferson, with Montgomery Ward cussing a while then threatening a while then trying again to bribe anybody connected with the jail or the town that would take the money. And we wondered how long it would be before he sent for Mr de Spain because of that connection. Because we knew that the last person on earth he would hope for help from would be his uncle or cousin Flem, who had already got shut of one Snopes through a murder charge so why should he balk at getting rid of another one with just a dirty postcard.
So even Uncle Gavin, that Ratliff said made a kind of religion of never letting Jefferson see that a Snopes had surprised him, didn’t expect Mr Flem that afternoon when he walked into the office and laid his new black hat on the corner of the desk and sat there with the joints of his jaws working faint and steady like he was trying to chew without unclamping his teeth. You couldn’t see behind Mr Hampton’s eyes because they looked at you too hard; you couldn’t pass them like you couldn’t pass a horse in a lane that wasn’t big enough for a horse and a man both but just for the horse. You couldn’t see behind Mr Snopes’s eyes because they were not really looking at you at all, like a pond of stagnant water is not looking at you. Uncle Gavin said that was why it took him a minute or two to realise that he and Mr Snopes were looking at exactly the same thing: it just wasn’t with the same eye.
“I’m thinking of Jefferson,” Mr Snopes said.
“So am I,” Uncle Gavin said. “Of that damned Grover Winbush and every other arrested adolescent between fourteen and fifty-eight in half of north Mississippi with twenty-five cents to pay for one look inside that album.”
“I forgot about Grover Winbush,” Mr Snopes said. “He wont only lose his job but when he does folks will want to know why and this whole business will come out.” That was Mr Snopes’s trouble. I mean, that was our trouble with Mr Snopes: there wasn’t anything to see even when you thought he might be looking at you. “I dont know
