Unvanquished. Part 2

"We won't need hit," he said.

"Put it in the wagon," Granny said.

"Nome. We won't need nothing like that. We be in Memphis so quick won't n.o.body even have time to hear we on the road. I speck Ma.r.s.e John got the Yankees pretty well cleant out between here and Memphis anyway."

This time Granny didn't say anything at all. She just stood there holding out the musket until after a while Joby took it and put it into the wagon. "Now go get the trunk," Granny said. Joby was still putting the musket into the wagon; he stopped, his head turned a little.

"Which?" he said. He turned a little more, still not looking at Granny standing on the steps and looking at him; he was not looking at any of us, not speaking to any of us in particular. "Ain't I tole you?" he said.

"If anything ever came into your mind that you didn't tell to somebody inside of ten minutes, I don't remember it," Granny said. "But just what do you refer to now?"

"Nummine that," Joby said. "Come on here, Loosh. Bring that boy with you." They pa.s.sed Granny and went on. She didn't look at them; it was as if they had walked not only out of her sight but out of her mind. Evidently Joby thought they had. He and Granny were like that; they were like a man and a mare, a blooded mare, which takes just exactly so much from the man and the man knows the mare will take just so much and the man knows that when that point is reached, just what is going to happen. Then it does happen: the mare kicks him, not viciously but just enough, and the man knows it was going to happen and so he is glad then, it is over then, or he thinks it is over, so he lies or sits on the ground and cusses the mare a little because he thinks it is over, finished, and then the mare turns her head and nips him. That's how Joby and Granny were and Granny always beat him, not bad: just exactly enough, like now; he and Loosh were just about to go in the door and Granny still not even looking after them, when Joby said, "I done tole um. And I reckin even you can't dispute hit." Then Granny, without moving anything but her lips, still looking out beyond the waiting wagon as if we were not going anywhere and Joby didn't even exist, said, "And put the bed back against the wall." This tune Joby didn't answer. He just stopped perfectly still, not even looking back at Granny, until Loosh said quietly, "Gawn, pappy. Get on." They went on; Granny and I stood at the end of the gallery and heard them drag the trunk out, then shove the bed back where it had been yesterday; we heard them on the stairs with the trunk-the slow, clumsy, coffinsounding thumps. Then they came out onto the gallery.

"Go and help them," Granny said without looking back. "Remember, Joby is getting old." We put the trunk into the wagon, along with the musket and the basket of food and the bedclothing, and got in ourselves- Granny on the seat beside Joby, the bonnet on the exact top of her head and the parasol raised even before the dew had begun to fall-and we drove away. Loosh had already disappeared, but Louvinia still stood at the end of the gallery with Father's old hat on top of her head rag. Then I stopped looking back, though I could feel Ringo beside me on the trunk turning every few yards, even after we were outside the gate and in the road to town. Then we came to the curve where we had seen the Yankee sergeant on the bright horse last summer.

"Hit gone now," Ringo said. "Goodbye, Sartoris; Memphis, how-dy-do!"

The sun was just rising when we came in sight of Jefferson; we pa.s.sed a company of troops bivouacked in a pasture beside the road, eating breakfast. Their uniforms were not gray anymore now; they were almost the color of dead leaves and some of them didn't even have uniforms and one man waved a skillet at us and he had on a pair of blue Yankee pants with a yellow cavalry stripe like Father wore home last summer. "Hey, Miss-ippi!" he shouted. "Hooraw for Arkansaw!"

We left Granny at Mrs. Compson's, to tell Mrs. Compson goodbye and to ask her to drive out home now and then and look after the flowers. Then Ringo and44.

I drove the wagon on to the store and we were just coming out with the sack of salt when Uncle Buck McCaslin came hobbling across the square, waving his stick and hollering, and behind him the captain of the company we had pa.s.sed eating breakfast in the pasture. There were two of them; I mean, there were two Mc-Caslins, Amodeus and Theophilus, twins, only everybody called them Buck and Buddy except themselves. They were bachelors, they had a big bottom-land plantation about fifteen miles from town. It had a big colonial house on it which their father had built and which people said was still one of the finest houses in the country when they inherited it. But it wasn't now, because Uncle Buck and Buddy didn't live hi it. They never had lived in it since their father died. They lived in a two-room log house with about a dozen dogs, and they kept their n.i.g.g.e.rs in the manor house. It didn't have any windows now and a child with a hairpin could unlock any lock hi it, but every night when the n.i.g.g.e.rs came up from the fields Uncle Buck or Uncle Buddy would drive them into the house and lock the door with a key almost as big as a horse pistol; probably they would still be locking the front door long after the last n.i.g.g.e.r had escaped out the back. And folks said that Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy knew this and that the n.i.g.g.e.rs knew they knew it, only it was like a game with rules- neither one of Uncle Buck or Uncle Buddy to peep around the corner of the house while the other was locking the door, none of the n.i.g.g.e.rs to escape in such a way as to be seen even by unavoidable accident, nor to escape at any other tune; they even said that the ones who couldn't get out while the door was being locked voluntarily considered themselves interdict until the next evening. Then they would hang the key on a nail beside the door and go back to their own little house full of dogs and eat supper and play head-and-head poker; and they said how no man in the state or on the River either would have dared to play with them even if they did not cheat, but that in the game as they played it between themselves, betting n.i.g.g.e.rs and wagon-loads of cotton with one another on the turn of a single card, the Lord Himself might have held His own with one of45.

them at a time, but that with both of them even He would have lost His s.h.i.+rt.

There was more to Uncle Buck and Buddy than just that. Father said they were ahead of their tune; he said they not only possessed, but put into practice, ideas about social relations.h.i.+p that maybe fifty years after they were both dead people would have a name for. These ideas were about land. They believed that land did not belong to people but that people belonged to land and that the earth would permit them to live on and out of it and use it only so long as they behaved and that if they did not behave right, it would shake them off just like a dog getting rid of fleas. They had some kind of a system of bookkeeping which must have been even more involved than their betting score against one another, by which all their n.i.g.g.e.rs were to be freed, not given freedom, but earning it, buying it not in money from Uncle Buck and Buddy, but in work from the plantation. Only there were others besides n.i.g.g.e.rs, and this was the reason why Uncle Buck came hobbling across the square, shaking his stick at me and hollering, or at least why it was Uncle Buck who was hobbling and hollering and shaking the stick. One day Father said how they suddenly realised that if the county ever split up into private feuds either with votes or weapons, no family could contend with the McCaslins because all the other families would have only their cousins and kin to recruit from, while Uncle Buck and Buddy would already have an army. These were the dirt farmers, the people whom the n.i.g.g.e.rs called 'white trash'-men who had owned no slaves and some of whom even lived worse than the slaves on big plantations. It was another side of Uncle Buck's and Buddy's ideas about men and land, which Father said people didn't have a name for yet, by which Uncle Buck and Buddy had persuaded the white men to pool their little patches of poor hill land along with the n.i.g.g.e.rs and the McCaslin plantation, promising them in return n.o.body knew exactly what, except that their women and children did have shoes, which not all of them had had before, and a lot of them even went to school. Anyway, they (the white men, the trash) looked on Uncle Buck and Buddy like Deity46.

Himself, so that when Father began to raise his first regiment to take to Virginia and Uncle Buck and Buddy came to town to enlist and the others decided they were too old (they were past seventy), it looked for a while as if Father's regiment would have to fight its first engagement right there in our pasture. At first Uncle Buck and Buddy said they would form a company of their own men in opposition to Father's. Then they realised that this wouldn't stop Father, so then Uncle Buck and Buddy put the thumbscrews on Father sure enough. They told Father that if he did not let them go, the solid bloc of private soldier white trash votes which they controlled would not only force Father to call a special election of officers before the regiment left the pasture, it would also demote Father from colonel to major or maybe only a company commander. Father didn't mind what they called him; colonel or corporal, it would have been all the same to him, as long as they let him tell them what to do, and he probably wouldn't have minded being demoted even to private by G.o.d Himself; it was the idea that there could be latent within the men he led the power, let alone the desire, to so affront him. So they compromised; they agreed at last that one of the McCaslins should be allowed to go. Father and Uncle Buck and Buddy shook hands on it and "they stuck to it; the following summer after Second Mana.s.sas when the men did demote Father, it was the McCaslin votes who stuck with and resigned from the regiment along with Father and returned to Mississippi with him and formed his irregular cavalry. So one of them was to go, and they decided themselves which one it would be; they decided in the one possible manner in which the victor could know that he had earned his right, the loser that he had been conquered by a better man; Uncle Buddy looked at Uncle Buck and said, "All right, 'Philus, you old b.u.t.ter-fingered son of a b.i.t.c.h. Get out the cards."

Father said it was fine, that there were people there who had never seen anything like it for cold and ruthless artistry. They played three hands of draw poker, the first two hands dealt in turn, the winner of the second hand to deal the third; they sat there (somebody had47.

spread a blanket and the whole regiment watched) facing each other with the two old faces that did not look exactly alike so much as they looked exactly like something which after a while you remembered-the portrait of someone who had been dead a long time and that you knew just by looking at him he had been a preacher in some place like Ma.s.sachusetts a hundred years ago; they sat there and called those face-down cards correctly without even looking at the backs of them apparently, so that it took sometimes eight and ten deals before the referees could be certain that neither of them knew exactly what was in the other's hand. And Uncle Buck lost: so that now Uncle Buddy was a sergeant in Tennant's brigade in Virginia and Uncle Buck was hobbling across the square, shaking his stick at me and hollering: "By G.o.dfrey, there he is! There's John Sartoris' boy!"

The captain came up and looked at me. "I've heard of your father," he said.

"Heard of him?" Uncle Buck shouted. By now people had begun to stop along the walk and listen to him, like they always did, not smiling so he could see it. "Who ain't heard about him in this country? Get the Yankees to tell you about him sometime. By G.o.dfrey, he raised the first d.a.m.n regiment in Mississippi out of his own pocket, and took 'em to Ferginny and whipped Yankees right and left with 'em before he found out that what he had bought and paid for wasn't a regiment of soldiers but a congress of politicians and fools. Fools I say!" he shouted, shaking the stick at me and glaring with his watery fierce eyes like the eyes of an old hawk, with the people along the street listening to him and smiling where he couldn't see it and the strange captain looking at him a little funny because he hadn't heard Uncle Buck before; and I kept on thinking about Louvinia standing there on the porch with Father's old hat on, and wis.h.i.+ng that Uncle Buck would get through or hush so we could go on.

"Fools, I say!" he shouted. "I don't care if some of you folks here do still claim kin with men that elected him colonel and followed him and Stonewall Jackson right up to spitting distance of Was.h.i.+ngton without48.

hardly losing a man, and then next year turned around and voted him down to major and elected in his stead a d.a.m.n feller that never even knowed which end of a gun done the shooting until John Sartoris showed him." He quit shouting just as easy as he started but the shouting was right there, waiting to start again as soon as he found something else to shout about. "I won't say G.o.d take care of you and your grandma on the road, boy, because by G.o.dfrey you don't need G.o.d's nor n.o.body else's help; all you got to say is 'I'm John Sartoris' boy; rabbits, hunt the canebrake' and then watch the blue-bellied sons of b.i.t.c.hes fly."

"Are they leaving, going away?" the captain said.

Then Uncle Buck begun to shout again, going into the shouting easy, without even having to draw a breath: "Leaving? h.e.l.l's skillet, who's going to take care of them around here? John Sartoris is a d.a.m.n fool; they voted him out of his own private regiment in kindness, so he could come home and take care of his family, knowing that if he didn't wouldn't n.o.body around here be likely to. But that don't suit John Sartoris because John Sartoris is a d.a.m.ned confounded selfish coward, askeered to stay at home where the Yankees might get him. Yes, sir. So skeered that he has to raise him up another batch of men to protect him every time he gets within a hundred foot of a Yankee brigade. Scouring all up and down the country, finding Yankees to dodge; only if it had been me I would have took back to Ferginny and I'd have showed that new colonel what fighting looked like. But not John Sartoris. He's a coward and a fool. The best he can do is dodge and run away from Yankees until they have to put a priqe on his head, and now he's got to send his family out of the country; to Memphis where maybe the Union Army will take care of them, since it don't look like his own government and fellow citizens are going to." He ran out of breath then, or out of words anyway, standing there with his tobacco-stained beard trembling and more tobacco running onto it out of his mouth, and shaking his stick at me. So I lifted the reins; only the captain spoke; he was still watching me.49.

"How many men has your father got in his regiment?" he said.

"It's not a regiment, sir," I said. "He's got about fifty, I reckon."

"Fifty?" the captain said. "Fifty? We had a prisoner last week who said he had more than a thousand. He said that Colonel Sartoris didn't fight; he just stole horses."

Uncle Buck had enough wind to laugh though. He sounded just like a hen, slapping his leg and holding to the wagon wheel like he was about to fall. "That's it! That's John Sartoris! He gets the horses; any fool can step out and get a Yankee. These two d.a.m.n boys here did that last summer-stepped down to the gate and brought back a whole regiment, and them just- How old are you, boy?" "Fourteen," I said.

"We ain't fourteen yit," Ringo said. "But we will be in September, if we live and nothing happens. ... I reckon Granny waiting on us, Bayard."

Uncle Buck quit laughing. He stepped back. "Git on," he said. "You got a long road." I turned the wagon. "You take care of your grandma, boy, or John Sartoris will skin you alive. And if he don't, I will!" When the wagon straightened out, he began to hobble along beside it. "And when you see him, tell him I said to leave the horses go for a while and kill the blue-bellied sons of b.i.t.c.hes. Kill them!"

"Yes, sir," I said. We went on.

"Good thing for his mouth Granny ain't here," Ringo said. She and Joby were waiting for us at the Comp-sons' gate. Joby had another basket with a napkin over it and a bottle neck sticking out and some rose cuttings. Then Ringo and I sat behind again, and Ringo turning to look back every few feet and saying, "Goodbye, Jefferson. Memphis, how-de-do!" And then we came to the top of the first hill and he looked back, quiet this time, and said, "Suppose they don't never get done fighting."

"All right," I said. "Suppose it." I didn't look back. At noon we stopped by a spring and Granny opened 50 THE UN VANQUISHED.

the basket, and she took out the rose cuttings and handed them to Ringo.

"Dip the roots into the spring after you drink," she said. They had earth still on the roots, in a cloth; when Ringo stooped down to the water, I watched him pinch off a little of the dirt and start to put it into his pocket. Then he looked up and saw me watching him, and he made like he was going to throw it away. But he didn't.

"I reckon I can save dirt if I want to," he said. "It's not Sartoris dirt though," I said. "I know hit," he said. "Hit's closer than Memphis dirt though. Closer than what you got."

"What'll you bet?" I said. He looked at me. "What'U you swap?" I said. He looked at me. "What you swap?" he said.

"You know," I said. He reached into his pocket and brought out the buckle we had shot off the Yankee saddle when we shot the horse last summer. "Gimmit here," he said. So I took the snuff box from my pocket and emptied half the soil (it was more than Sartoris earth; it was Vicksburg too: the yelling was in it, the embattled, the iron-worn, the supremely invincible) into his hand. "I know hit," he said. "Hit come from 'hind the smokehouse. You brung a lot of hit." ^ "Yes," I said. "I brought enough to last." *-We soaked the cuttings every time we stopped and opened the basket, and there was some of the food left on the fourth day because at least once a day we stopped at houses on the road and ate with them, and on the second night we had supper and breakfast at the same house. But even then Granny would not come inside to sleep. She made her bed down in the wagon by the chest and Joby slept under the wagon with the gun beside him like when we camped on the road. Only it would not be exactly on the road but back in the woods a way; on the third night Granny was in the wagon and Joby and Ringo and I were under the wagon and some cavalry rode up and Granny said, "Joby! the gun!" and somebody got down and took the gun away from Joby and they lit a pine knot and we saw the gray.

"Memphis?" the officer said "You can't get to Mem-51.

phis. There was a fight at c.o.c.krum yesterday and the roads are full of Yankee patrols. How in h.e.l.l- Excuse me, ma'am (behind me Ringo said, "Git the soap")- you ever got this far I don't see. If I were you, I wouldn't even try to go back, I'd stop at the first house I came to and stay there."

"I reckon we'll go on," Granny said, "like John- Colonel Sartoris told us to. My sister lives in Memphis; we are going there."

"Colonel Sartoris?" the officer said. "Colonel Sartoris told you?"

"I'm his mother-in-law," Granny said. "This is his son."

"Good Lord, ma'am. You can't go a step farther. Don't you know that if they captured you and this boy, they could almost force him to come in and surrender?"

Granny looked at him; she was sitting up in the wagon and her hat was on. "My experience with Yankees has evidently been different from yours. I have no reason to believe that their officers-I suppose they still have officers among them-will bother a woman and two children. I thank you, but my son has directed us to go to Memphis. If there is any information about the roads which my driver should know, I will be obliged if you will instruct him."

"Then let me give you an escort. Or better still, there is a house about a mile back; return there and wait. Colonel Sartoris was at c.o.c.krum yesterday; by tomorrow night I believe I can find him and bring him to you."

"Thank you," Granny said. "Wherever Colonel Sartoris is, he is doubtless busy with his own affairs. I think we will continue to Memphis as he instructed us."

So they rode away and Joby came back under the wagon and put the musket between us; only, every time I turned over I rolled on it, so I made him move it and he tried to put it in the wagon with Granny, and she wouldn't let him, so he leaned it against a tree and we slept and ate breakfast and went on, with Ringo and Joby looking behind every tree we pa.s.sed. "You ain't going to find them behind a tree we have already pa.s.sed," I said. We didn't. We had pa.s.sed where a52.

house had burned, and then we were pa.s.sing another house with an old white horse looking at us out of the stable door behind it, and then I saw six men running hi the next field, and then we saw a dust cloud coming fast out of a lane that crossed the road.

Joby said, "Them folks look like they trying to make the Yankees take they stock, running hit up and down the big road in broad daylight like that."

They rode right out of the dust cloud without seeing us at all, crossing the road, and the first ten or twelve had already jumped the ditch with pistols in their hands, like when you run with a stick of wood balanced on your palm; and the last ones came out of the dust with five men running and holding to stirrups, and us sitting there hi the wagon with Joby holding the mules like they were sitting down on the whiffletrees and his mouth hanging open and his eyes like two eggs, and I had forgotten what the blue coats looked like.

It was fast-like that-all sweating horses with wild eyes, and men with wild faces full of yelling, and then Granny standing up in the wagon and beating the five men about their heads and shoulders with the umbrella while they unfastened the traces and cut the harness off the mules with pocket knives. They didn't say a word; they didn't even look at Granny while she was. .h.i.tting them; they just took the mules out of the wagon, and then the two mules and the five men disappeared together hi another cloud of dust, and the mules came out of the dust, soaring like hawks, with two men on them and two more just falling backward over the mules' tails and the fifth man already running, too, and the two that were on their backs hi the road getting up with little sc.r.a.ps of cut leather sticking to them like a kind of black shavings in a sawmill. The three of them went off across the field after the mules, and then we heard the pistols away off like striking a handful of matches at one time, and Joby still sitting on the seat with his mouth still open and the ends of the cut reins in his hands, and Granny still standing in the wagon with the bent umbrella lifted and hollering at Ringo and me while we jumped out of the wagon and ran across the road.53.

"The stable," I said. "The stable!" While we were running up the hill toward the house, we could see our mules still galloping in the field, and we could see the three men running too. When we ran around the house, we could see the wagon, too, hi the road, with Joby on the seat above the wagon tongue sticking straight out ahead, and Granny standing up and shaking the umbrella toward us, and even though I couldn't hear her I knew she was still shouting. Our mules had run into the woods, but the three men were still in the field and the old white horse was watching them, too, in the barn door; he never saw us until he snorted and jerked back and kicked over something behind him. It was a homemade shoeing box, and he was tied by a rope halter to the ladder to the loft, and there was even a pipe still burning on the ground.

We climbed onto the ladder and got on him, and when we came out of the barn we could still see the three men; but we had to stop while Ringo got down and opened the lot gate and got back on again, and so they were gone, too, by then. When we reached the woods, there was no sign of them and we couldn't hear anything, either, but the old horse's insides. We went on slower then, because the old horse wouldn't go fast again, anyway, and so we tried to listen, and so it was almost sunset when we came out into a road.

"Here where they went," Ringo said. They were mule tracks. "Tinney and Old Hundred's tracks bofe," Ringo said. "I know um anywhere. They done throwed them Yankees and heading back home."

"Are you sure?" I said.

"Is I sure? You reckon I ain't followed them mules all my life and I can't tell they tracks when I see um? .. . Git up there, horse!"

We went on, but the old horse could not go very fast. After a while the moon came up, but Ringo still said he could see the tracks of our mules. So we went on, only now the old horse went even slower than ever because presently I caught Ringo and held him as he slipped off and then a little later Ringo caught and held me from slipping before I even knew that I had been asleep. We didn't know what tune it was, we didn't care; we only54.

heard after a time the slow hollow repercussion of wood beneath the horse's feet and we turned from the road and hitched the bridle to a sapling; we probably both crawled beneath the bridge already asleep; still sleeping, we doubtless continued to crawl. Because if we had not moved, they would not have have found us. I waked, still believing I dreamed of thunder. It was light; even beneath the close weed-choked bridge Ringo and I could sense the sun though not at once; for the time we just sat there beneath the loud drumming, while the loose planks of the bridge floor clattered and danced to the hooves; we sat there for a moment staring at one another in the pale jonquil-colored light almost before we were awake. Perhaps that was it, perhaps we were still asleep, were taken so suddenly in slumber that we had not time to think of Yankees or anything else; we were out from beneath the bridge and already running before we remembered having begun to move; I looked back one time and (the road, the bridge, was five or six feet higher than the earth beside it) it looked as if the whole rim of the world was full of horses running along the sky. Then everything ran together again as it had yesterday; even while our legs still continued to run Ringo and I had dived like two rabbits into a brier patch, feeling no thorn, and lay on our faces in it while men "shouted and horses crashed around us, then hard hands dragged us, clawing and kicking and quite blind, out of the thicket and onto our feet. Then sight returned-a vacuum, an interval, of amazing and dewy-breathed peace and quiet while Ringo and I stood in a circle of mounted and dismounted men and horses. Then I recognised Jupiter standing big and motionless and pale in the dawn as a mesmerised flame, then Father was shaking me and shouting, "Where's your grandmother? Where's Miss Rosa?" and then Ringo, in a tone of complete amazement: "We done fergot Granny!" "Forgot her?" Father shouted. "You mean you ran away and left her sitting there in that wagon hi the middle of the road?"

"Lord, Ma.r.s.e John," Ringo said. "You know hit ain't no Yankee gonter bother her if he know hit." Father swore. "How far back did you leave her?"55.

"It was about three o'clock yesterday," I said. "We rode some last night."

Father turned to the others. "Two of you boys take them up behind you; we'll lead that horse." Then he stopped and turned back to us. "Have you-all had anything to eat?"

"Eat?" Ringo said. "My stomach think my throat been cut."

Father took a pone of bread from his saddle bag and broke it and gave it to us. "Where did you get that horse?" he said.

After a while I said, "We borrowed it."

"Who from?" Father said.

After a while Ringo said, "We ain't know. The man wasn't there." One of the men laughed. Father looked at him quick, and he hushed. But just for a minute, because all of a sudden they all began to whoop and holler, and Father looking around at them and his face getting redder and redder.

"Don't you say a word, Colonel," one of them said. "Hooraw for Sartoris!"

We galloped back; it was not far; we came to the field where the men had run, and the house with the barn, and in the road we could still see the sc.r.a.ps of harness where they had cut it. But the wagon was gone. Father led the old horse up to the house himself and knocked on the porch floor with his pistol, and the door of the house was still open, but n.o.body came. We put the old horse back into the barn; the pipe was still on the ground by the overturned shoeing box. We came back to the road and Father sat Jupiter in the middle of the litter of harness sc.r.a.ps.

"You d.a.m.n boys," he said. "You d.a.m.n boys."

When we went on now, we went slower; there were three men riding on ahead out of sight. In the afternoon, one of them came galloping back, and Father left Ringo and me three others, and he and the rest rode on; it was almost sunset when they came back with their horses sweated a little and leading two new horses with blue blankets under the saddles and U. S. burned on the horses' hips.

"I tole you they wasn't no Yankees gonter stop56.

Granny," Ringo said. "I bet she in Memphis right now." "I hope for your sake she is," Father said. He jerked his hand at the new horses. "You and Bayard get on them." Ringo went to one of the new horses. "Wait," Father said; "the other one is yours."

"You mean hit belong to me?" Ringo said. "No," Father said. "You borrowed it." Then we all stopped and watched Ringo trying to get on his horse. The horse would stand perfectly still until he would feel Ringo's weight on the stirrup; then he would whirl completely around until his off side faced Ringo; the first time Ringo wound up lying on his back in the road.

"Get on him from that side," Father said laughing. Ringo looked at the horse and then at Father. "Git up from the wrong side?" Ringo said. "I knowed Yankees wasn't folks, but I never knowed before they horses ain't horses."

"Get on up," Father said. "He's blind in his near eye." It got dark while we were still riding, and after a while I waked up with somebody holding me in the saddle, and we were stopped in some trees and there was a fire, but Ringo and I didn't even stay awake to eat, and then it was morning again and all of them were gone but Father and eleven more, but we didn't start off even then; we stayed there in the trees all day. "What are we going to do now?" I said.

"I'm going to take you d.a.m.n boys home, and then I've got to go to Memphis and find your grandmother," Father said.

Just before dark we started; we watched Ringo trying to get on his horse from the nigh side for a while and then we went on. We rode until dawn and stopped again. This time we didn't build a fire; we didn't even unsaddle right away; we lay hidden in the woods, and then Father was waking me with his hand. It was after sunup and we lay there and listened to a column of Yankee infantry pa.s.s in the road, and then I slept again. It was noon when I waked. There was a fire now and a shote cooking over it, and we ate. "We'll be home by midnight," Father said.

Jupiter was rested. He didn't want the bridle for a57.

while and then he didn't want Father to get on him, and even after we were started he still wanted to go; Father had to hold him back between Ringo and me. Ringo was on his right. "You and Bayard better swap sides," Father told Ringo, "so your horse can see what's beside him."

"He going all right," Ringo said. "He like hit this way. Maybe because he can smell Jupiter another horse, and know Jupiter ain't fixing to get on him and ride."

"All right," Father said. "Watch him though." We went on. Mine and Ringo's horses could go pretty well, too; when I looked back, the others were a good piece behind, out of our dust. It wasn't far to sundown.

"I wish I knew your grandmother was all right," Father said.

"Lord, Ma.r.s.e John," Ringo said, "is you still worrying about Granny? I been knowed her all my life; I ain't worried about her."

Jupiter was fine to watch, with his head up and watching my horse and Ringo's, and boring a little and just beginning to drive a little. "I'm going to let him go a little," Father said. "You and Ringo watch yourselves." I thought Jupiter was gone then. He went out like a rocket, flattening a little. But I should have known that Father still held him, because I should have seen that he was still boring, but there was a snake fence along the road, and all of a sudden it began to blur, and then I realised that Father and Jupiter had not moved up at all, that it was all three of us flattening out up toward the crest of the hill where the road dipped like three swallows, and I was thinking, 'We're holding Jupiter. We're holding Jupiter,' when Father looked back, and I saw his eyes and his teeth in his beard, and I knew he still had Jupiter on the bit.

He said, "Watch out, now," and then Jupiter shot out from between us; he went out exactly like I have seen a hawk come out of a sage field and rise over a fence.

When they reached the crest of the hill, I could see sky under them and the tops of the trees beyond the hill like they were flying, sailing out into the air to drop down beyond the hill like the hawk; only they didn't. It was like Father stopped Jupiter hi mid-air on