'Leave the gal alone,' the old man said again.
The old man, a hard-looking customer, didn't look up again until he had finished skinning the possum. All Roscoe could do was stand around uneasily. The silence was heavy. Roscoe almost wished he had ridden on and spent the night sitting up against a tree. The level of civilization in Texas definitely wasn't very high if the old man was an example of it.
'Come get the varmint,' the old man said to the girl.
She slipped out and took the bloody carcass without a word. In the dusk it was hard to make out much about her except that she was thin. She was barefoot and had on a dress that looked like it was made from part of a cotton sack.
'I gave twenty-eight skunk hides for her,' the old man said suddenly. 'You got any whiskey?'
In fact, Roscoe did have a bottle that he had bought off the soldiers. He could already smell frying meat-the possum, no doubt-and his appetite came back. He had nothing in his stomach and could think of little he would rather eat than a nice piece of fried possum. Around Fort Smith the Negroes kept the possums thinned out; they were seldom available on the tables of white folks.
'I got a bottle in my bag,' Roscoe said. 'You're welcome to share it.'
He assumed that such an offer would assure him a place at the table, but the assumption was wrong. The old man took the whiskey bottle when he offered it, and then sat right on the stump and drank nearly all of it. Then he got up without a word and disappeared into the dark cabin. He did not reappear. Roscoe sat on the stump-the only place there was to sit-and the darkness got deeper and deeper until he could barely see the cabin fifteen feet away. Evidently the old man and the girl had no light, for the cabin was pitch-dark.
When it became plain he was not going to be invited for supper, Roscoe ate the two biscuits he had saved. He felt badly treated, but there was little he could do about it. When he finished the biscuits he pitched his bedroll up against the side of the cabin. As soon as he stretched out, the moon came up and lit the little clearing SO brightly it made it hard to sleep.
Then he heard the old man say, 'Fix the pallet.' The cabin was crudely built, with cracks between the logs big enough for a possum to crawl through, it seemed to Roscoe. He heard the old man stumbling around. 'Goddamn you, come here,' the old man said. Roscoe began to feel unhappy that he had stopped at the cabin. Then he heard a whack, as if the old man had hit the girl with a belt or a razor strap or something. There was a scuffle which he couldn't help but hear, and the strap landed a couple more times. Then the girl began to whimper.
'What's that?' Roscoe said, thinking that if he spoke up the old man might let be. But it didn't work. The scuffling continued and the girl kept whimpering. Then it seemed they fell against the cabin, not a foot from Roscoe's head. 'If you don't lay still I'll whup you tomorrow till you'll wisht you had,' the old man said. He sounded out of breath. Roscoe tried to think of what July would do in such a situation. July had always cautioned him about interfering in family disputes-the most dangerous form of law work, July claimed. July had once tried to stop a woman who was going after her husband with a pitchfork and had been wounded in the leg as a result.
In this case, Roscoe didn't know if it was even a family dispute that he was hearing. The old man had just said he bought the girl, though of course slavery had been over for years, and in any case the girl was white. The girl seemed to be putting up a good fight, despite her whimpering, for the old man was breathing hard and cursing her when he could get his breath. Roscoe wished more than ever that he had never spotted the cabin. The old man was a sorry customer, and the girl could only be having a miserable life with him.
The old man soon got done with the girl, but she whimpered for a long time-an unconscious whimpering, such as a dog makes when it is having a bad dream. It disturbed Roscoe's mind. She seemed too young a girl to have gotten herself into such a rough situation, though he knew that in the hungry years after the war many poor people with large families had given children to practically anyone who would take them, once they got of an age to do useful work.
Roscoe woke up soaked, though not from rain. He had rolled off his blanket in the night and been soaked by the heavy dew. As the sun rose water sparkled on the grass blades near his eyes. In the cabin he could hear the old man snoring loudly. There was no sound from the girl.
Since there was no likelihood he would be offered breakfast, Roscoe mounted and rode off, feeling pretty sorry for the girl. The old man was a rascal who had not even thanked him for the whiskey. If Texans were all going to be like him, it could only be a sorry trip.
A mile or two along in the day, Memphis began to grow restive, flicking his ears and looking around. Roscoe looked, but saw nothing. The country was pretty heavily wooded. Roscoe thought maybe a wolf was following them, or possibly some wild pigs, but he could spot nothing. They covered five or six miles at a leisurely pace.
Roscoe was half asleep in the saddle when a bad thing happened. Memphis brushed against a tree limb that had a wasp's nest on it. The nest broke loose from the limb and fell right in Roscoe's lap. It soon rolled off the saddle, but not before twenty or thirty wasps buzzed up. When Roscoe awoke, all he could see was wasps. He was stung twice on the neck, twice on the face, and once on the hand as he was battling them.
It was a rude awakening. He put Memphis into a lope and soon outran the wasps, but two had got down his shirt, and these stung him several more times before he could crush them to death against his body. He quickly got down from his horse and took off his shirt to make sure no more wasps were in it.
While he was standing there, smarting from yellow-jacket stings, he saw the girl-the same skinny girl who had been in the cabin, wearing the same cotton-sack dress. She tried to duck behind a bush but Roscoe happened to look up just at the right second and see her. Roscoe hastily put his shirt back on, though the wasp stings were stinging like fire and he would have liked to spit on them at least. But a man couldn't be rubbing spit on himself with a girl watching.
'Well, come on out, since you're here,' Roscoe said, thinking it interesting that the girl had easily kept up with Memphis for six miles. For all he knew the old man had sent her to request more whiskey, or something.
The girl came slowly to him, shy as a rabbit. She was still barefoot and her legs were scratched from all the rough country. She stopped twenty feet away, as if not sure how close she was supposed to come. She was rather a pretty girl, Roscoe thought, although her brown hair was dirty and she had bruises on her thin arms from the old man's rough treatment.
'How come you to follow?' Roscoe asked. It was the first good look he had had at her-she seemed not more than fourteen or fifteen.
The girl just stood, too shy to talk.
'I didn't get your name,' Roscoe said, trying to be polite.
'Ma called me her Janey,' the girl said. 'I run off from old Sam.'
'Oh,' Roscoe said, wishing that the wasps had picked another time to sting him, and also that the girl named Janey had picked another time to run off.
'I near kilt him this morning,' the girl said. 'He used me bad and I ain't really his anyway, it's just he give Bill some skunk pelts for me. I was gonna take the ax and kill him but then you come by and I run off to go with you.'
The girl had a low husky voice, lower than a boy's, and once over her first moment of shyness wasn't loath to talk.
'I seen you get stung,' she said. 'There's a creek just along there. Mud poultices are the best for them yellow- jacket stings. You mix 'em with spit and it helps.'
That of course was common knowledge, though it was thoughtful of the girl to mention it. The running-away business he thought he better deal with at once.
'I'm a deputy sheriff,' Roscoe said. 'I'm headed down to Texas to find a man. I must travel fast, and I've got but one horse.'
He stopped, feeling sure the girl would take the hint. Instead, something like a smile crossed her face for an instant.
'You call this fast travelin'?' she asked. 'I could have been two miles ahead of you just running on foot. I done already walked all the way here from San Antone, and I guess I can keep up with you unless you lope.'
The remark almost swayed Roscoe in the girl's favor. If she had been to San Antonio, she might know how to get back. He himself had been plagued from the start by a sense of hopelessness about finding his way, and would have welcomed a guide.
But a runaway girl was not the sort of guide he had in mind. After all, the only reason he was looking for July was to report on a runaway woman. How would it look if he showed up with another? July would think it highly
