LUCILLE CHRISTIAN admitted Mr. Munn into the hall when he arrived at the Christian place just after dark.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get out for supper,’ he told her. ‘It was nice of you all to ask me. But I had more work than I could get through this afternoon.’
‘We were sorry,’ she said. She pushed the door closed, and though it was heavy it swung soundlessly on the hinges. Then she stood there with her hand on the knob, not as though waiting for him to speak or move, but as though he were not there at all, as though she could sink at will into the deep and complete satisfaction of her own being. The light from the lamp on the marble-topped table gave her dark blue, too-large eyes a velvety appearance, and gave the flesh of her face a faint gold tinge, as though an almost infinitesimal amount of light had been captured by the flesh itself and was now released. Mr. Munn glanced at the flesh of her arm under the lace insertion of the sleeve, trying to determine if that golden tinge was caught there too, but he could not tell.
Actually, she stood there for only an instant, balancing herself at the end of the gesture that had closed the door; but it was long enough to give him that impression of complete stillness, of absorbed repose, which he had discovered, with surprise, that day of the rally when she had stood in the middle of the floor of the shadowy, dull room at the hotel.
‘The others are already here,’ she said. ‘In the parlor.’
The others, he thought wonderingly.
She moved across the hall briskly and laid her hand on the knob of a closed door. Her waist was small and straight, where the lawn was gathered at the wide, embroidered belt, and her neck rose very straight from the banded lace collar of the guimpe. She pushed open the door with a firm motion. ‘Just go in,’ she told him.
‘Thank you,’ he replied, and bowed slightly.
She made no reply.
He saw Mr. Christian rising to meet him, and then the two other men. ‘Well, you got here,’ Mr. Christian was saying. ‘Wish you’d had supper with us. We had some right good vittles, if I do say it. Sukie, now, she sets a good table; she keeps the niggers humping round that kitchen.’ He thrust out his big hand at Mr. Munn, and said, ‘Sorry you couldn’t come.’
‘I know I missed something,’ Mr. Munn rejoined.
‘Maybe he did, didn’t he, Mac?’ Mr. Christian nodded in the direction of one of the two other men, a stranger, a lanky man with coarse, reddish hair.
‘He sure did,’ the red-haired man said in a gentle, drawling voice, ‘and I’m a judge.’
Mr. Christian led Mr. Munn across the room to the other man, who was tall too, and so gauntly rawboned that his long, square-cut black coat hung from his shoulders in apparently empty folds. ‘Well, Professor,’ Mr. Christian said, ‘this is Percy Munn.’ And turning to Mr. Munn: ‘And this is Professor Ball. But I bet you know him. Everybody knows the Professor.’
‘I know Mr. Munn,’ the rawboned man responded, and thrust out his hand, ‘but I haven’t seen him in a long time, years, in fact. Tonight is a privilege.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Mr. Munn said, and was about to grasp the offered hand when he saw that it was completely swathed in bandages. Involuntarily he stopped, his glance resting on the carefully wound cloths. Each finger was wrapped separately to make a great, clumsy, club-like glove. Then he remembered.
‘It will cause me no pain,’ the Professor assured him, and seized Mr. Munn’s hand. ‘A trifling affliction which time and the ministrations of my learned son-in-law over there’ — and he nodded toward the red-haired man — ‘may serve to remedy. And ——’
‘A case of impetigo,’ the red-haired man added, ‘and peculiarly stubborn.’
‘Vulgarly known,’ the Professor continued, ‘as the country leprosy. But not Biblical, I rejoice to state —— But, as I was about to say, it is a privilege to shake your hand, if I may say so. A young man who does credit to his community. A privilege for an old man who is about to go from the stage of action to greet the rising Roscius.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘It is my privilege.’ The Professor couldn’t be very old, he noticed, not much more than sixty. His hair was not gray, and there was scarcely any gray in his scraggly, red-brown beard which sprang in tangled tufts from the bony chin and cheeks, like vegetation that hardily finds a foothold on an arid and rocky hillside.
Mr. Christian introduced him to the lanky, red-haired man. That was Doctor MacDonald, the son-in-law of Professor Ball, and, he added, a native of Louisiana but by way of being an adopted Kentuckian.
‘Yes, sir, an adopted Kentuckian,’ the Professor repeated. ‘A good woman will do a lot for a man, now. They’ve saved some from the curse of the bottle. They’ve led some to the light of salvation. And my daughter Cordelia — as I may remark with pardonable paternal pride — has almost made a Kentuckian out of Doctor MacDonald.’
‘Now that’s a fact,’ Doctor MacDonald agreed, laughing. He laughed easily and softly, easily like a man who finds the world hung together right and himself at home in it, and softly like a man who finds part of his pleasure always in the privacy of himself. ‘A fact, now,’ he repeated, letting his lanky frame fold back in the big rocking chair, and laying his long, sinewy hands on his knees.
I wonder what they’re doing here, Mr. Munn thought. They hadn’t just happened in, apparently, for Lucille Christian’s words, ‘The others are already here,’ had implied that they were expected, and presumably that they were expecting him. He knew Professor Ball, all right, even if not much more than by sight. But he hadn’t seen him in years. Had a farm over in Hunter County and wrote letters to the papers about the preservation of fertility and all. Letters full of quotations from Thomas Jefferson and old John Taylor, and from the Latin — Virgil mostly, he remembered. And he ran an academy for boys. But Mr. Munn had never heard of Doctor MacDonald.
‘I knew your uncle,’ Professor Ball was saying, ‘over in our section.’
‘Uncle Mord?’ Mr. Munn asked.
‘Mordecai Munn, and a fine Christian gentleman he was, I can assure you. The happy warrior, for a fact now,
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain.
Mordecai Munn, his spitten-image.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘You might say we led forth our flock together, as the poet puts it, for we were in Professor Bowie’s old academy together. Yes, sir, side by side, and I knew him well. Smart as a whip he was, and a spirited boy, but not an apt scholar, I regret to state. Many’s the time he said to me, “Now, Beany” — for they called me by that name, having begun by calling me Beanpole, I always being spare-made, boy as well as man — “Now, Beany, you do my Cicero for me, and I’ll lend you my cap-and-ball when you go squirrel hunting next time.” And I would do it all right, and I like as not never took the loan of his cap-and-ball, never till this day being much of a sporting man, and even then having a love of the beautiful and eloquent word. But Mordecai, you might say he scarce took a sup of the Pierian spring, so to speak. He couldn’t sit still, it seemed like. I’d speak with him and remonstrate sometimes, but he’d say, “You know, Beany, if I just sit still I go to sleep.” And he did, for a fact — sound asleep like a man with that jewel above price, an easy conscience. Yes, sir.’ Professor Ball suddenly leaned forward in his chair and thrust his long neck out, with a quick, viper-like motion, and spat accurately into the dead, gray wood ashes that filled the cold fireplace.
My God, Mr. Munn thought, is he going to talk all night? Mr. Christian, he observed, was staring gloomily into the empty fireplace, with his head bowed a little so that the lamplight shone on the slick, pink surface of his bald skull; and Doctor MacDonald lay comfortably sprawled in the rocking chair, his legs thrust out before him, and his unlit pipe stuck between his teeth, which were revealed in a kind of secret half smile.
‘Yes, sir,’ Professor Ball continued, ‘sound asleep, and never a subjunctive to disturb his slumber. But then the war came on, and he said, “Beany, my boy, off I go.” And he did, not nineteen years of age. He bore a charmed life, they all said. And when it was over, he came back, after what you might denominate as feats of superhuman endurance and heroic valor. Then’ — and Professor Ball spat again, with that quick, viper-like forward thrust of the long neck — ‘that man who had been, you might say miraculously, preserved through storms of shot and shell, just stops to light his pipe one morning when he comes out on the front porch to look at the state of the weather, and he stumbles and falls down the front steps and breaks his neck. Before the prime of life, and the porch not very high. Truly, man knoweth not the hour of his going forth.’ Professor Ball slowly raised one of his big, clumsy, club-like bandaged hands in an oracular gesture, then let it subside.
‘He died a long time ago,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘I just barely remember him when he’d come to see us sometimes.’
‘It was in ’seventy-eight he fell down the steps. Thirty-five years old, I recollect, and just three years older than me. But when we were boys we were together in Professor Bowie’s Academy, because I was forward with my books, if I may be permitted without immodesty to say so. And Mordecai not having the name of an apt scholar.’ He shook his head gravely, then added, ‘But he was a God-fearing gentleman.’
Mr. Christian got heavily to his feet, and stood by the table where the lamp was. Professor Ball glanced at him, then said: ‘But you must condone my rambling recollections. The vice of approaching age, my boy.’ He stopped a moment, then spoke again. ‘I know we are gathered here for a serious purpose.’ He looked inquiringly at Mr. Christian.
‘You’re damned tooting, Professor,’ Mr. Christian returned. ‘You r’ar back and tell him. I believe the boy’s ripe and honing for gospel.’
‘It’s a simple proposition,’ Professor Ball said. ‘Very simple.’ He lifted his hands and put the tips of his bandaged fingers together and meditatively tapped them, while his voice assumed an impersonal tone. Just like in his school, Mr. Munn thought.
‘Very simple. It unfolded from a few family conversations between my son-in-law here, Doctor MacDonald, and me. Just two things determine the price of any commodity. Supply and demand.’ He gently tapped the bandaged fingers together. ‘Yes, sir. Now, the demand for tobacco, you might say, is constant from one year to the next. Ergo, the supply of tobacco is what determines the price. It is on that principle that the Association is founded.’
‘That’s right,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘But the Association is being attacked by fair means and foul. In the public press and in the courts of justice, by the moneyed interests. These interests walk in darkness and strike the unwary man and rob him of the fruit of his toil. What the Association needs is a means of controlling the supply of tobacco.’
‘You can’t do that,’ Mr. Munn pointed out, ‘except by getting everybody in the Association. God knows, we’ve tried hard enough.’
Professor Ball lifted one commanding hand, as though for silence in a schoolroom, and smiled. ‘Let us suppose that there were another Association with the sole aim of controlling supply. But let me digress, if you please, sir. When, I ask, is the tobacco plant most vulnerable? When it is young and tender. In the plant bed before it is set in the field. Then a few strokes of a hoe, and a thousand pounds of leaf have disappeared. Very simple.’
‘You mean ——’ Mr. Munn hesitated. He looked at Professor Ball’s palish, preacherish face, with its high, narrow forehead and scraggly beard. ‘You mean, scrape a man’s plant bed?’
‘You might go so far as to say it was his own fault,’ Professor Ball said. ‘He’d have a free option. He could join the Association and abide by its rules and regulations, or’ — he looked away from Mr. Munn and fixed his mild gaze on some imaginary spot across the room in the shadow — ‘it would be his own responsibility.’
Mr. Munn shook his head and rose slowly to his feet. ‘It just isn’t in me, I reckon,’ he admitted. Mr. Christian came quickly to him and put a heavy hand on his shoulder, as though to force him back into his seat, and said, ‘Now, Perse, don’t be going off half-cocked!’ Doctor MacDonald, who had not changed his position, was watching with that same secret half smile on his face and the dead pipe stuck between his bared teeth.
‘You’d be surprised what’s in you,’ Professor Ball said quietly, ‘sometimes. Now take me, for instance.’
Mr. Munn sank slowly into his chair.
‘I’m a peaceful man. My hand has never been raised in anger against a fellow creature. When I was young, my weak constitution kept me from following the path of patriotic valor, like your uncle Mordecai. And I often meditated going into the ministry and preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, and many’s the night I wrestled with the angel in sweat and prayer to know if I had a clear and certain call. Yes, sir, I’m a man of peace. But it’s surprising to a man what he’ll find in himself sometimes.’
Mr. Munn shook his head meditatively. ‘No,’ he said.
But Professor Ball seemed to be paying him no attention. He was not even looking at him. ‘Now what’s the right thing one time, that thing the next time is wrong. It’s in the Bible that way, and the Stagirite. If I peruse him aright. Yes, sir, there is a time. For one thing and another. And a man never knows what he’ll find in himself when the time comes.’ Suddenly he jerked himself forward, toward Mr. Munn, with that same viper-like thrust as when he had spat, but now his whole attenuated body partook of the motion, and he pointed his arm at Mr. Munn, shaking the long, knobby bandage of his forefinger. ‘And now’s the time. Now. Before that case ever gets to a jury. Now.’ The long, bandaged finger flickered and came to rest pointed at Mr. Munn’s chest, like a loaded pistol. ‘There’s trouble in the air and in the hearts of men now, this minute. You won’t be making the trouble. There’s been trouble in Hunter County, and there’ll be worse. You won’t be making it, but you’ll be making it mean something. You can’t stop it. It’s coming. You can’t stop the mountain torrent, but you can make it feed the fruitful plain and not waste itself.’
‘Hell, no, you didn’t make the trouble’ — Mr. Christian lunged to his feet again. ‘That bastard Tolliver made it, and all those bastards behind him, whose names I don’t know, but, by God! I wish I did so I could say ’em over every night. Tolliver and Tolliver’s kind. And don’t tell me you’re gonna sit there right now and suck right along with him. Like you did. My God!’
Before he went to bed that night, Mr. Munn agreed to join the Free Farmers’ Brotherhood of Protection and Control. Before he finally said, ‘Yes, I’m with you, I reckon,’ he knew that he would do it. He resisted their arguments, and resisted the impulse that grew within himself, clinging to the present with that blind instinct that opposes even desired and expected change and makes a man linger even at the moment when he escapes from an unhappy, though accustomed, scene; or clinging to it that the delay might make all the sweeter his acquiescence, all the greater his relief when he should make the final plunge into certainty. He said, ‘Yes, I’m with you, I reckon,’ and saw Doctor MacDonald, who had never said a word the whole time, looking at him with that same half smile, an expression that seemed to say he had foreknown the entire matter.
‘The Free Farmers’ Brotherhood of Protection and Control,’ Mr. Christian commented; ‘now ain’t that something? Protection and control. Professor, you’re a mighty smart man. Now ain’t he, Perse?’
Mr. Munn replied, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘I always said good learning’s a fine thing. It never hurt nobody. And just look’ — and he gestured toward the erect and emaciated figure of Professor Ball — ‘that’s what it’ll do for a man!’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Professor Ball said, and turned and spat into the fireplace. ‘I have a little motto which came into my head for the Brotherhood. In the French tongue,’ he added, clearing his throat slightly. ‘Le bras pour le droit.’
‘That’s fine,’ Mr. Christian declared. ‘That sounds mighty fine.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Professor Ball answered.
‘What does it go on to say?’
‘It says’ — and Professor Ball laid the tips of his bandaged fingers together — ‘ “The arm for the right.” ’
‘By God!’ Mr. Christian exclaimed, ‘the arm for the right! Professor, you’re a smart man, sure as a dog’s got fleas. Now ain’t he, Perse?’ He turned and slapped Mr. Munn on the shoulder and shook him.
‘Yes, sir,’ Mr. Munn agreed. ‘That’s true.’
‘And the doc there, too,’ Mr. Christian said, and waved his arm toward Doctor MacDonald’s chair. ‘The doc, too. He’s a smart man.’ Then he turned directly to him, and urged, ‘Mac, you tell him about the start you made over in your section.’
The doctor unclenched his pipestem from his teeth, and said in his gentle, drawling voice: ‘Now, it’s nothing much to talk about. We’ve just got three little bands of Free Farmers together and organized already. We call them bands; ten men to a band, and a captain. We calculated that ten men was a good round number. And ten bands would make a company with a commander at the head. Professor Ball here’ — and with his pipestem he indicated his father-in-law — ‘he wanted to call the commander a centurion, but we figured ——’
‘In their great days, the Romans,’ Professor Ball interrupted, ‘were a people of sturdy farmers. History teaches us that. Remember Cincinnatus, plowing his four jugera of land. A simple farmer. And what does Cicero say in a similar connection?’
‘Durned if I know,’ Mr. Christian said.
‘He says’ — and he fixed his gaze severely upon Mr. Christian, and then, in turn, upon the other two men, ‘he says, “a villa in senatum arcessebatur et Curius et ceteri senes, exquo qui eos arcessebant viatores nominati sunt.” ’
‘Is that a fact?’ demanded Mr. Christian.
‘It is,’ Professor Ball affirmed. ‘And the word “centurion,” to come back ——’
‘Yes,’ Doctor MacDonald interrupted, ‘we figured “centurion” might confuse a lot of people over in Hunter County, sounding sort of foreign the way it does, and there being so many foreign tobacco buyers around here.’
‘It’s in the Bible,’ Professor Ball said; ‘ “And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way, and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee.” It’s in the Bible.’
‘Sure, sure,’ Doctor MacDonald granted amiably, ‘yes, sir. But, now, not every man over in Hunter County is as good a Bible scholar as you, Professor, and it might just get a lot of them twisted up. So “commander” looks like it might be better.’
‘Maybe so,’ Professor Ball said grudgingly.
‘And over all the companies there would be a chief. The men in every band would elect their captain, and the captains would elect their commanders, and the chief and his council would direct the policy. That’s the way it would be. And fast, if it’s gonna do any good.’
‘But careful,’ Professor Ball warned. ‘Only men of good name. No blackguards and riffraff, only worthy and respectable men with a good name in their community. That’s the kind of men we’ve got joined up over in Hunter County.’
‘That’s right,’ Doctor MacDonald said. ‘Only men of good name. And what we want you to do, Mr. Munn, is to give us a few names. And to speak to a few men yourself — sort of sound them out, you know. You might get a few to come in when you do, and take the oath at the same time.’
‘The oath?’ Mr. Munn asked. ‘You take an oath?’
Professor Ball nodded gravely. ‘It would stick in the throat of no honorable man,’ he said. And he added, ‘A sacred oath.’
‘We just want you to use your influence a little, now,’ Doctor MacDonald said. ‘And give us a list to be working on.’
‘I’ll give you a list,’ Mr. Munn promised, ‘but I won’t speak to anybody until after I’ve joined myself. Until after. I don’t know why, but that’s just the way I feel about it.’
‘That’s what you might call a pretty scruple,’ Professor Ball said, nodding. ‘I always respect a man’s scruples, whatsoe’er they be, when he names them and abides by them.’
‘But I’ll give you some names. If you’ll let me have something to write with, Mr. Bill.’
Mr. Christian got a piece of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen out of the tall, scroll-worked rosewood secretary in the corner, the door of which creaked when he opened it. He uncorked the bottle with fingers that seemed too thick and impatient for the task, and set it down near Mr. Munn’s elbow, under the yellow rays of the lamp. The marble of the table-top had faint, yellowish graining, and stains as of a delicate golden rust, which the light emphasized. As Mr. Munn picked up the pen, he noticed the fact, and idly recollected how, when he first entered the house, the light in the hall had given the flesh of Lucille Christian’s face a golden tinge. Like the light on this marble now.
The ink bottle was almost dry, and was crusted about the neck. Mr. Munn had to tilt it to wet the point of the pen.
‘I’ll be damned,’ Mr. Christian remarked, ‘it’s aggravating now. There ain’t much writing goes on around here. I never was much of a hand to be writing letters and such, but, by God, when the time comes when a man does want to do a little writing, looks like there’d be some ink in the bottle.’
‘It’ll do all right,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘It’s aggravating,’ Mr. Christian reiterated.
Mr. Munn wrote down two names; Joseph Foster, Murray Mill Pike, Bardsville; and Kimball G. Snider, Strawberry Creek Ford, Morganstown Pike, Bardsville.
‘I think they’ll come in,’ Mr. Munn reflected. Then he wrote down another name, Aaron Smythe, and held the pen meditatively poised.
‘That boy of yours,’ Mr. Christian asked, ‘now, you know — what’s-his-name — the one whose neck you pulled outer the rope?’
‘Trevelyan — Bunk Trevelyan.’
‘He’s a likely-looking specimen. If he’s got any gratitude and you said a word to him sometime, I bet he’d come in.’
Mr. Munn shook his head, holding the pen poised over the paper. ‘No, I reckon I won’t say anything to him. Now, or later. He might think he had to join just because I got him off, that I had some sort of hold on him. But you haven’t got any right to force a man into something like this just out of gratitude or because you’ve got a hold on him.’ He wrote the name down, Harris Trevelyan, and looked around at the other men. ‘But you all can speak to him and maybe he’d come in. Only don’t mention my name.’
‘We’ll respect your wish, Mr. Munn,’ Professor Ball said.
‘I don’t think of any more right off. I’ll think of some more in the next day or two. Some I can recommend all right.’
‘We’ve got a lot to go on right now,’ Doctor MacDonald said. ‘Men we’ve talked to have been making recommendations. We’ve got enough names to make up more than twenty bands, right in this section. And we’ve talked to some.’
‘Right around here?’ Mr. Munn demanded.
‘Yes, sir, and we’ve got names in seven different counties. We’ve got a line on a good many, too.’
‘It looks like you’re looking forward to something pretty big,’ Mr. Munn said.
Doctor MacDonald swung his lanky body up from the rocking chair and leaned toward Mr. Munn, pointing the stem of the unlit pipe at him. ‘Man,’ he said, and his lips drew back from the teeth in that secret half smile, ‘man, you don’t know how big it might be.’ He dropped his arm to his side, slowly. The sleeve was too short for him, and the long, sinewy hand, with its knobby knuckles and clean-looking fingers, hung far out.
Before he went to sleep that night, Mr. Munn decided that he liked Doctor MacDonald. He liked his good nature, and the hardness that lay just beneath it, you could tell, just as the potentiality of speed and strength seemed to reside, upon second glance, in the slow motions of his lanky frame. Mr. Munn was not excited by the events of the evening. He was not sleepy, but calm and detached, as he lay on his back in the strange bed and stared up at the black ceiling and let the words and faces drift through his mind. He was at peace with himself, he told himself. His decision, his action, seemed so inevitable, like a thing done long before and remembered, like a part of the old, accustomed furniture of memory and being. Then it occurred to him that Senator Tolliver, not Christian and MacDonald and Ball, was really responsible for his decision, if anybody was. If the Senator had never laid a hand on his shoulder, had never leaned confidentially toward him, had not used him and betrayed him, he might never have taken this step. But that seemed part of the pattern, a sure and inevitable part. And the Senator’s face, which, smiling and dignified, flickered across his inward vision, was replaced by another and another, faces of people he knew, faces he had merely seen for a moment and had wondered about, the face of the old man with the purplish wen on his temple, the old man he had tried to tell May about that time, the old man who had been the only one to sign up that time at one of the meetings way out in the sticks, who had walked up to the front, oblivious of the other people as if he had been in an open field, and had said, ‘Boy, if you’ll gimme that-air pen-staff I’ll sign my name,’ and then: ‘I got me a little piece of ground nigh onto thirty years back. All that time ain’t no man said me yea nor nay, nor go nor come. I’m gonna put my name down now, boy, and if you say yea it’s yea, and nay it’s nay. What little crop I got don’t amount to nothing. My crop ain’t a pea in the dish. But I aim to sign.’ The words of the old man with the purplish wen on his temple were as clear to him as if he heard the voice saying them out loud to him that minute. He tried to phrase for himself the effect the recollection of the man always had on him, but he could not. He had never been able to do so. And he had not been able to do so for May, who had sat on his lap listening, or trying to listen, to his insufficient speech. What held him to the old man? He could not say. But what had held him to the Senator, he knew that. His vanity. He had been flattered. The Senator had touched his vanity. What spring of action, more obscure, more profound, had the old man touched? A deeper vanity. A vanity below another surface, which had been peeled away. It did not matter what name a man gave it.
He rose from the bed, not restlessly as a nervous man does at night when he cannot sleep, but deliberately and comfortably as if the night were the new day. He walked across the room and leaned on the wide ledge of the window and looked over the lawn. There was no moon, but in the swimming starlight the newly springing grass looked pale, except where the shadows of the cedars lay. Those shadows were of inky blackness. He looked across the yard and toward the fields beyond, and thought how night changed everything, even the most accustomed landscape, your own fields. Or the face of somebody you knew and loved.
As he rode down the narrow gravel road that dipped from the pike toward the creek bottoms, the spring twilight was fading softly out. He tried to remember if he had ever been down this road before. When a boy, perhaps. In those days he had ranged pretty widely over the countryside. He had thrown a line at one time or another into almost every creek in the section — Strawberry, Cold Spring, Elk Horn, Dorris — and at almost every bend for many miles in Black Water River. And he had clambered up brushy hills at night, scratching his face and tearing his clothes in his haste to reach the spot where the dogs had treed. There had been the blood-stirring, hollow sound of the dogs barking for the tree, a sound in the frosty woods that reverberated as in a long cavern, and the hollering of another boy somewhere in the woods. He himself had run like a dog, not caring for the whipping brush, straight toward that tree, where the eyes would shine down from the darkness of the boughs. He had camped on a good many of these creeks, on Strawberry Creek itself, but farther down, he remembered. With boys like little Bill Christian, who was dead now a long time, shot with his own shotgun. Maybe sometimes he had camped at Murray Mill itself with the boys. It would be like all the other old mills, anyhow: the stone dam, hung with moss, across the creek bed; the disintegrating structure of the mill; the two-story dwelling-house beyond in a grove of cedars, or the chimneys where one had burned. At night the motionless water above the dam would look like slick, black metal.
Anyway, he knew what the country was like up here, for he had been up the main Murray Mill road, many times. The good soil gave out along here. Here the hillsides rose sharply from the creek bottom, nothing but the red clay sticking to bunks of limestone, and cedars with their stringy roots grappling at the fissures in the rock.
Mr. Munn could hear the sound of the flowing water, and thought of the night in the fall when he had gone to the meeting in the schoolhouse, up Rose Creek section, and how they had waited silently in the schoolhouse for the rain to let up, and how he had ridden back alone through the sodden countryside with the drumming of the rushing stream in his ears. It was much the same kind of place here. The valley was quite dark now, even though when he looked above the undifferentiated mass of the hills, he saw that a little light lingered in the upper air.
A horseman separated himself from the impenetrable shadow of the cedars by the side of the road, and moved slowly toward Mr. Munn. Mr. Munn drew rein, and waited while the rider slowly approached. The sound of the hoofs of the other horse made a casual, crunching sound on the loose gravel. Mr. Munn’s own mount stood perfectly still, and he listened to the sound of its breathing. He could not tell anything about the appearance of the man, it was so dark, except that he seemed to sit his horse with a natural grace.
‘Fair weather,’ the man said in an everyday tone.
‘Fairer tomorrow,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘Pass on,’ the man said. He moved back into the darkness of the overhanging cedar boughs.
Two hundred yards farther, the road made a bend. There the mill was, an irregular, indefinable bulk on the other side of an open space, which was a little lighter than the road had been. Where the road debouched on that open space, he stopped. He could make out the fallen rail fence that bordered what must be an overgrown pasture, and how one fork of the road went down to a ford below the dam. The other fork was quickly lost in the dark shadow that enveloped the mill. The scene was as he had guessed: there the bulk of the mill, and the black, still water above the dam, and over the whole place the calmness of night and long disuse which he had known when he used to go camping at such localities when he was a boy.
But he felt an almost overmastering impulse to stop in the shadow where he was, not to cross that open space. It was different from what he had expected. He had expected, in so far as he had consciously expected any definite thing, to find people here, men lounging about waiting, their pipes in their mouths, perhaps, talking in low voices as on some country occasion, such as evening services at a crossroad church. But there was nothing here. Absolute stillness, except for the sound of water on the stones, and no movement in the lighter space, where the fallen rail fence was. Then he heard the short whinny of a horse. Well, he said to himself, and lifted his rein, and his mount moved slowly forward into the open, up the road beside the old fence, and then up the fork toward the mill. Some men were standing in the shadow by the loading platform, he discovered when he was almost upon them. He could only make out the whitish blur of their faces.
‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said.
The men replied nothing.
He rode on past them, and tethered his mare to a sapling. They were looking at me all the time I rode across that light place, he thought. He walked back toward them, and took his place, leaning against the loading platform. The men were not in a group, he found, and they were not talking to each other. They were cut off from each other, as it were, each one drawn in upon himself; and yet they were so close that each man could have reached out to touch a neighbor.
‘Good evening,’ the man nearest him said in a low voice.
‘Good evening,’ Mr. Munn replied.
Not another word was spoken, until someone came out on the loading platform from the interior of the mill and in a low voice pronounced the name Jim Talbot. Then the man on the platform asked, more sharply now, ‘Is Jim Talbot here?’
One of the men on the ground vaulted clumsily onto the platform, and said, ‘I’m Jim Talbot.’
‘Come on in,’ the other man directed, and disappeared into the interior of the mill. No light could be seen from the inside. The man named Talbot took a step forward, paused as though to hitch up his belt, and remarked, to no one in particular, ‘Well, here goes.’ Then he followed, gropingly, through the door where the other man had gone.
After a short while, that other man came out on the platform again, and pronounced another name, Fuqua G. Morris. It was the same man, Mr. Munn decided, for he could tell by the voice.
The man who answered to the name of Morris vaulted onto the platform, and entered the mill.
There was no conversation among the men left at the loading platform. Now and then one of them would shift his feet restlessly, scraping the gravel. Once a man asked another for a chew, and the other, without a word, passed it to him; and once a man struck a match for a pipe. The two men nearest him seemed to withdraw from the little sphere of light. Then the man’s hand cupped around the flame, and he touched it to the pipe. It illuminated only his upper face, the heavy curve of the nose, which was bronze-colored in that small light, and the staring, faintly glittering orbs of the eyes under the low hat-brim. Then the man dropped the burning match to the gravel and ground it with his heel. Now and then a man would be summoned, and would enter the mill.
Once a horseman emerged from the shadow of the trees across the open space, and began to move toward the mill. Mr. Munn knew that that stranger could not see them there, and that the eyes of every man were fixed on that exposed and approaching figure. The stranger rode slowly past, tethered his horse, and came to lounge against the platform. ‘Good evening,’ he said, just as Mr. Munn had done.
‘Good evening,’ some man answered. But no one else replied.
When Mr. Munn heard his own name pronounced from the platform behind him, it came with as much surprise as though he had thought himself entirely alone. And yet, the first several times that man had appeared, Mr. Munn had been sure the summons would be for him. Then, somehow, he had assumed each time that the call would not be. As on the day of the rally when he had uncomprehendingly heard himself introduced to the crowd, now his body stiffened in response to the sound of the name before his mind had accepted the full fact. Then he said, ‘All right,’ and swung himself onto the platform, and followed the man in.
In the blacker, interior darkness, he followed close to his guide for a few paces. Under his tread he felt the unevenness of the worn boards, which creaked startlingly. Then they must have come to a corner, Mr. Munn thought, for to his left he could see narrow streaks of light apparently outlining a door.
‘Just walk through that door there,’ the guide commanded, ‘and stand in the middle of the floor.’
‘All right,’ Mr. Munn said, and walked to the door, fumbled at the wooden latch, and entered.
A beam of light lay widening toward him, and he stood in its center. It came from some kind of lantern with a reflector and a screen that threw the other half of the big room into darkness — to his eyes, pitch darkness. They are over there, he thought. He stood just inside the door, blinking against the light.
‘Come closer,’ a voice commanded.
Mr. Munn tried to identify the voice, but could not. He took three slow steps forward, lifting his head a little so that the light would not fall directly in his eyes. The ceiling of the room was very high. He could make out the rafters above the lighted section. The room had probably been a granary.
‘Go to the table,’ the voice said.
Mr. Munn went to the table, which stood some ten feet away from the lantern and directly in front of it. He touched his fingers to the table-top, and waited. On the table a book lay, a Bible, an ordinary kind of Bible with worn, imitation leather covers. He had seen many a Bible like that, many a one, lying on the table in the family room of a farmhouse, or on the mantelpiece beside a carved wood clock, probably, and a glass vase full of paper spills, and a spectacle case.
‘Percy Munn,’ the voice said, ‘you are about to take a most serious step. It is not necessary to impress upon you the gravity of that step. And about to take a most sacred oath. If you are to turn back, now is the time to turn back.’
Someone coughed twice in the darkness. Mr. Munn turned his head slightly toward that direction.
‘You can turn your back now and go out of this room and mount your horse and ride away and never speak one word of your coming here tonight, and no single soul will think the less of your manhood. But now is the time. Look in your heart and mind, and consider.’
Mr. Munn waited with his eyes raised above the direct rays of the light. There was silence for some thirty or forty seconds.
‘Percy Munn,’ the voice then said, ‘are you clear in your mind, and determined?’
‘I am,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘You are about to take the oath of membership in the Free Farmers’ Brotherhood for Protection and Control. The sole purpose of this organization is to see that a fair price is paid for dark fired tobacco, and it will adopt such means as seem advisable to further that purpose. Are you, Percy Munn, prepared to take the oath?’
‘I am,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘Place your left hand upon that book.’
Mr. Munn did so.
‘That book, Percy Munn, is the Holy Bible. An oath taken upon it and in God’s name is sacred for all time and eternity. Will you swear upon it?’
‘I will,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘Raise your right hand and repeat these words,’ and the voice proceeded: ‘I, Percy Munn, knowing the injustice under which our people groan ——’ and it paused for Mr. Munn to repeat the words.
‘I, Percy Munn, knowing the injustice under which our people groan ——’ Mr. Munn said slowly and distinctly.
‘— and being willing to abide it no longer ——’
Mr. Munn repeated: ‘— and being willing to abide it no longer ——’
The voice resumed: ‘— do swear on this holy book and on the name of God our Creator . . . that I will steadfastly support the purpose of the Free Farmers’ Brotherhood for Protection and Control — and whatever measures may be deemed advisable for the accomplishment of that purpose — and that I will loyally obey the commands of the truly elected officers superior to me in this organization — and that never, under any circumstances, will I speak one word of this organization or its affairs — to any man or woman not of this organization — not excepting the wife of my bosom. — This I solemnly swear.’
‘— This I solemnly swear,’ Mr. Munn concluded. He removed his hand from the book.
‘Come forward,’ the voice said, and he walked across the intervening ten feet or so of floor toward the lantern and the voice. He passed beyond the range of the lantern’s rays, was completely blind for an instant before his eyes could accustom themselves to the dark, and then saw the man standing behind the table that supported the lantern, and the other men sitting on benches and boxes beyond. The man behind the lantern shook Mr. Munn’s hand, and said, ‘Well, sir, we’re happy to welcome you in.’
‘Thank you,’ Mr. Munn said. He peered at the man’s face, thinking he had seen it somewhere before, but in that light he couldn’t be sure.
‘If you’ll just have a seat, we’ll be proceeding,’ the man said.
One of the men on the bench just behind the table moved over, and Mr. Munn sat down beside him.
He watched the other men, one after another, come through the door over there across the wide floor, and stand motionless just inside it until the voice gave the command, and then move slowly forward, blinking at the light. Some of them peered hard at a spot just by the light, straining, apparently, to penetrate the depth of darkness where people were; and others, as Mr. Munn himself had done, lifted their eyes toward the obscurity of the ceiling. The first kind were nervous, and they would wet the lips with the tongue before they began to repeat the words of the oath. Mr. Munn tried to recall whether or not he himself had wet his lips that way. He had not been nervous, he decided. He had really felt nothing, nothing at all, when he stood out there in the middle of the floor in the full beam of the light. That was what surprised him. A man was due to feel something out there, taking the oath. Then he began to think how the taking of the oath changed the relation of all those men to each other there beside him in the dark. The oath had said, God our Creator. He wondered how many of those men believed in God. And then if he himself did. It had been a long time since he had thought of that, he remembered. The man who was, at that moment, taking the oath finished, and at the command, advanced to join the group in the shadow.
A minute later the door opened, and a man entered, a tall man, and stood there in the full beam of light. The man was Bunk Trevelyan.