Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

his ears ringing as if someone had fired a shotgun just over his head. In fact he had expected the rage too and now, in solitude and privacy, was the best possible time to let it exhaust itself. Because he knew now he had anticipated something like what had happened and he would need his wits about him. He had known by instinct that his own outrageous luck would invent something like this, so that even the fact that going to Varner, the justice of the peace, for a paper for the constable to serve on Houston to recover the cow would cost him another two dollars and a half, was not really a surprise to him: it was simply them again, still testing, trying him to see just how much he could bear and would stand.

So, in a way, he was not really surprised at what happened next either. It was his own fault in a way: he had simply underestimated them: the whole matter of taking the eight dollars to Houston and putting the rope on the cow and leading it back home had seemed too simple, too puny for Them to bother with. But he was wrong; They were not done yet. Varner would not even issue the paper; whereupon two days later there were seven of them, counting the Negro—himself, Houston, Varner and the constable and two professional cattle buyers—standing along the fence of Houston’s feed lot while the Negro led his cow out for the two experts to examine her.

“Well?” Varner said at last.

“I’d give thirty-five,” the first trader said.

“Bred to a paper bull, I might go to thirty-seven and a half,” the second said.

“Would you go to forty?” Varner said.

“No,” the second said. “She might not a caught.”

“That’s why I wouldn’t even match thirty-seven and a half,” the first said.

“All right,” Varner said—a tall, gaunt, narrow-hipped, heavily moustached man who looked like what his father had been: one of Forrest’s cavalrymen. “Call it thirty-seven and a half then. So we’ll split the difference then.” He was looking at Mink now. “When you pay Houston eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents, you can have your cow. Only you haven’t got eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents, have you?”

He stood there, his raw-red wrists which the slicker did not cover lying quiet on the top rail of the fence, his eyes quite blind again and his ears ringing again as though somebody had fired a shotgun just over his head, and on his face that expression faint and gentle and almost like smiling. “No,” he said.

“Wouldn’t his cousin Flem let him have it?” the second trader said. Nobody bothered to answer that at all, not even to remind them that Flem was still in Texas on his honeymoon, where he and his wife had been since the marriage last August.

“Then he’ll have to work it out,” Varner said. He was talking to Houston now. “What have you got that he can do?”

“I’m going to fence in another pasture,” Houston said. “I’ll pay him fifty cents a day. He can make thirty-seven days and from light till noon on the next one digging post holes and stringing wire. What about the cow? Do I keep her, or does Quick” (Quick was the constable) “take her?”

“Do you want Quick to?” Varner said.

“No,” Houston said. “She’s been here so long now she might get homesick. Besides, if she’s here Snopes can see her every day and keep his spirits up about what he’s really working for.”

“All right, all right,” Varner said quickly. “It’s settled now. I don’t want any more of that now.”

That was what he had to do. And his pride still was that he would not be, would never be, reconciled to it. Not even if he were to lose the cow, the animal itself to vanish from the entire equation and leave him in what might be called peace. Which—eliminating the cow—he could have done himself. More: he could have got eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents for doing it, which, with the eight dollars Houston had refused to accept, would have made practically twenty-seven dollars, more cash at one time than he had seen in he could not remember when, since even with the fall sale of his bale or two of cotton, the subtraction of Varner’s landlord’s share, plus his furnish bill at Varner’s store, barely left him that same eight or ten dollars in cash with which he had believed in vain that he could redeem the cow.

In fact, Houston himself made that suggestion. It was the second or third day of digging the post holes and setting the heavy locust posts in them; Houston came up on the stallion and sat looking down at him. He didn’t even pause, let alone look up.

“Look,” Houston said. “Look at me.” He looked up then, not pausing. Houston’s hand was already extended; he, Mink, could see the actual money in it. “Varner said eighteen seventy-five. All right, here it is. Take it and go on home and forget about that cow.” Now he didn’t even look up any longer, heaving onto his shoulder the post that anyway looked heavier and more solid than he did and dropping it into the hole, tamping the dirt home with the reversed shovel handle so that he only had to hear the stallion turn and go away. Then it was the fourth day; again he only needed to hear the stallion come up and stop, not even looking up when Houston said,

“Snopes,” then again, “Snopes,” then he said, “Mink,” he—Mink—not even looking up, let alone pausing while he said:

“I hear you.”

“Stop this now. You got to break your land for your crop. You got to make your living. Go on home and get your seed in the ground and then come back.”

“I aint got time to make a living,” he said, not even pausing. “I got to get my cow back home.”

The next morning it was not Houston on the stallion but Varner himself in his buckboard. Though he, Mink, did not know yet that it was Varner himself who was suddenly afraid, afraid for the peace and quiet of the community which he held in his iron usurious hand, buttressed by the mortgages and liens in the vast iron safe in his store. And now he, Mink, did look up and saw money in the closed fist resting on Varner’s knee.

“I‘ve put this on your furnish bill for this year,” Varner said. ?I just come from your place. You aint broke a furrow yet. Pick up them tools and take this money and give it to Jack and take that damn cow on home and get to plowing.”

Though this was only Varner; he could pause and even lean on the post-hole digger now. “Have you heard any complaint from me about thatere cow court judgment of yourn?” he said.

“No,” Varner said.