IT WAS hot in the little back room of Wilson’s restaurant. The sweat gathered in the edges of Mr. Munn’s hair, and now and then a drop would slide down his forehead or down his cheek. He would be conscious of its tickling motion, but he would not lift his hand to wipe his face. He would, in fact, cherish, though peevishly, that small sensation of discomfort, for it distracted him from the immediate world around him. He could feel, too, the sweat gathering at his armpits. He felt the matted hair there, and then a minute movement down the flesh under his left arm, for a drop had detached itself and was sliding down. He shuddered with a sudden wave of cold that was within him, that grew out of his own body, and had no relation to the hot, motionless air of the room and the glaring light pouring in from the alley window. He lifted his glass and took a full drink, not savoring the taste, but letting the ice-cold liquid flow down his throat all at once. Then he waited for the shudder.
‘Then he tried to get Tom Sorrell,’ Mr. Sills said. ‘Five hundred dollars.’
‘Mr. Sorrell said he didn’t know at first what the fellow was driving at,’ Professor Ball put in.
Mr. Munn looked at Professor Ball. Professor Ball did not seem to be aware of the heat, not even with that long black coat buttoned up over him and the heavy white bandages on his hands. The skin of his face was perfectly dry. It was yellowish in color and delicately creased like well-worked leather. He was staring out of the alley window at the blank brick wall, and watching him, Mr. Munn remembered how in this room that day of the rally a year before — almost exactly a year but seemingly so much longer — Senator Tolliver had raised his eyes to that wall as into a distance. Professor Ball was doing that, looking beyond them.
‘Mr. Sorrell didn’t know what he was driving at,’ Professor Ball repeated. ‘And that is, I take it, understandable. An honest man — and Mr. Sorrell is an honest and worthy man — wouldn’t readily grasp such perfidy.’
‘My God!’ Mr. Munn said, ‘I oughter have let them hang the bastard.’ He drained his glass, looked into it as though to verify the fact that it was empty, and then struck it twice sharply on the table. A negro man entered from the hall, and Mr. Munn pointed at the glass. ‘Won’t you take one this time, Professor?’ he asked Mr. Ball.
‘I have never found the indulgence necessary,’ Professor Ball answered, ‘but thank you.’
Mr. Munn looked inquiringly at Mr. Sills.
‘Not another one,’ Mr. Sills said, shaking his head, ‘not in this heat. I don’t see how you do it. And it this hot.’
‘There’s worse things than being hot, I guess,’ Mr. Munn rejoined.
‘But Trevelyan,’ Professor Ball said — ‘to return, gentlemen, to the matter of Trevelyan.’
‘I oughter have let them hang him,’ Mr. Munn repeated meditatively.
The negro came back with the drink.
‘It would’ve been convenient, all right,’ Mr. Sills said.
‘No,’ Professor Ball replied; ‘it would have been convenient, as matters have developed, but it wouldn’t have been right. Mr. Munn was serving the cause of justice. And not for hire. For the love of justice, than which there is no nobler sentiment in the human breast.’
‘I was a sucker,’ Mr. Munn said, with a trace of bitterness, ‘and this is what we get.’
‘No,’ Professor Ball rejoined; ‘justice is justice. You should have no regret.’
‘As a matter of fact ——’ Mr. Sills remarked, then coughed dryly, deprecatorily, while both of the other men looked at him.
‘Yes?’ Mr. Munn said.
‘As a matter of fact, I’ve wondered about that fellow Trevelyan. Before this came up. Maybe he was guilty.’
‘We found the knife,’ Mr. Munn said aggressively, ‘and the watch. What do you want for evidence?’
‘Well ——’
‘Well ——’ Mr. Munn repeated. ‘And God knows you couldn’t ever expect a jury to believe that story about the frog finding the knife. Now, could you?’
‘Well, I didn’t say you could. All I said was, maybe he was guilty. A feller who could do what he’s just done, could do ——’
‘If you don’t mind, Mr. Sills, I’d prefer not to discuss the case.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Mr. Sills answered. ‘The nigger is dead that had the knife, and you can’t unhang him. All I was saying was ——’
‘If you’ll excuse me, Mr. Sills, I don’t want to discuss it.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Mr. Sills said again, and shrugged slightly. Mr. Munn thought for an instant that he detected a flicker of amusement, or triumph, in Mr. Sills’ eyes, and anger gripped him. Then, scrutinizing Mr. Sills’ face, he wasn’t sure, it was so colorless, so unmoving. He took a quick gulp of his drink.
‘But this, gentlemen, now this,’ Professor Ball was saying — ‘this is more immediate. The other is past. And this, now, is serious.’
‘Serious enough,’ Mr. Sills agreed; then added, ‘But what to do, that’s the question.’
‘He took an oath,’ Professor Ball reminded them.
Mr. Sills turned to Mr. Munn, saying: ‘Sorrell said he’d just about as soon pay the five hundred, even if it would sure pinch him a right smart, if he thought that’d settle anything. But he said it’d all happen again, sooner or later.’
‘He took an oath,’ Professor Ball said. ‘It was a sacred oath, before God, and we all took it.’
Mr. Sills went on: ‘Mr. Sorrell said he was for running him out of the country. Even if that wouldn’t do any good, he said it would give him a lot of satisfaction.’
‘It was an oath,’ Professor Ball repeated once more.
‘Well?’ Mr. Sills demanded, almost peevishly, turning toward the old man.
‘Well ——’ Professor Ball was looking out the window at the blank brick wall beyond and the glaring light.
‘We can’t decide anything,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘It’s for the council to decide.’
‘And soon,’ Professor Ball added.
Mr. Sills nodded his head, and repeated, ‘Soon.’
‘We can’t decide anything,’ Professor Ball continued. ‘We have no authority as individuals. But we just wanted to let you know, my boy, valuing your opinion the way we do.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘We just found out. We just happened to run into Mr. Sorrell, and he told us. He was upset, and he’d just come in to town —’ Professor Ball rose from his chair, and stretched forth his right hand, with its club-like bandage, toward Mr. Munn. ‘I must go now. Doctor MacDonald ought to be informed, and others. There should be a meeting of the council immediately.’
‘Good-bye, sir,’ Mr. Munn said, shaking hands.
Professor Ball shook hands with Mr. Sills, picked up his hat from the table, and left the room.
The two men remaining looked at each other for a second, but neither made a move to sit down.
‘Well ——’ Mr. Sills began.
‘It’s a God-damned mess,’ Mr. Munn declared. He looked nervously about the room, with the glance of a man who thinks he may have left something behind. Then he turned abruptly to Mr. Sills. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an appointment.’ He took out his watch. ‘I’m late for it now.’ He said good-bye and hurried out into the alley and up a side street toward the hotel.
He waited for his mare, striding back and forth in the hallway of the livery stable, driving his heels into the soft, ripe-feeling substance underfoot, inhaling the ammoniac odor of the manure and the sweetness of the hay, while the negro man did the saddling and brought her out. His stomach felt cold and clotted, and at the same time the solid mass of the heat bore down on his body like the weight of water on a diver at great depth, a weight pressing surely and relentlessly at every point. He thought that he should not have taken that last drink.
The negro brought out the mare.
‘Gitten tow’ds home early, ain’t you, Mister Perse?’
‘Hell, no,’ he said, hearing his own sharp, irritable tone, like the tone of a stranger, and experiencing an access of shame that, perversely, fanned the irritation so that he snapped his jaws shut and dug his heels into the mare’s flanks. She plunged as if stung by a fly, and then he found himself out of the shadow of the stable and in the sudden, vibrating glare of the afternoon.
He rode straight out of town, out the Murray Mill Pike.
He crossed the little wooden bridge over the branch, which was stagnant now and edged with a greenish, copperish scum, and drew rein even with the clump of cedar. There the buckberry bushes were, and some elder and sumac. The white dust from the road powdered the leaves of the bushes. It was this time of year, and this kind of season, dry like this with the dust accumulating undisturbed on the motionless leaves by the roadside, when Duffy had been killed. When the body fell, the white dust would have received it like a cushion, breaking the weight of the fall, and puffing out in a small, white cloud from the impact. The dust would have sucked up, instantly, whatever blood drained from the wounds. Then the body had been dragged off the road into the buckberry bushes. The murderer would have scraped his foot over the spot where the blood had drained from the wound into the dust. He would have looked up and down the road, quickly, and then he would have scraped his foot, almost automatically, over the spot. He would have done that.
Standing beside the mare at the edge of the road, Mr. Munn stared down at the ground, as though some trace might remain. There was nothing, only the white dust. He mounted, and rode on.
Trevelyan’s shack was precisely as he had remembered it, box-like, built of vertical boards from which the whitewash had scaled off a long time back, set flat on the bare, trodden ground. A large gum tree stood near the house, the earth seeming to recede from around its roots. Under the gum tree a hen was fluffing and wallowing in the dust. When Mr. Munn rode up to the gate, it left off, and went under the house.
From the doorway, Trevelyan’s wife watched him as he approached and dismounted. He dropped the bridle over the sagging gatepost, and strode toward her over the turfless ground. She had her hands clasped together at the level of her waist. She was barefooted, and he noticed how her feet, which were streaked with dust, looked small and bony, like a child’s feet, even though she was not a small woman.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said, and watched her face as she prepared to speak. In it there was a kind of preliminary gathering, an effort, that would come to focus in the word she would speak.
‘Howdy-do,’ she answered.
‘Is your husband here?’ he demanded.
‘He’s here,’ she said, nodding slowly.
‘If’n you’ll just step in, and set down,’ she replied, ‘I’ll git him. He’s a-choppen some stovewood, and if’n you’ll ——’ She let one of her hands move in a gesture of invitation that seemed to fail before it had well begun.
He shook his head. ‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll just go back and talk to him, if you’ll tell me where he is.’
‘He’s in the back, a-choppen,’ she said. ‘But if’n you’ll step in ——’ She made a weak gesture.
‘No, thanks,’ he said, and moved quickly away. He did not want to be with the woman any longer.
He turned the corner of the house, and passed under the boughs of the gum tree. He heard the sound of an axe stroke on wood, a sound thin but satisfying and clean in the emptiness of the afternoon. Then he saw Trevelyan. The man was some fifty yards back of the shack. Mr. Munn saw him swing up the axe, and caught the flash of the sun on the blade.
When he was within some twenty feet, he called sharply, ‘Trevelyan!’ and then approached the man, who leaned lightly on his axe, waiting.
‘Howdy-do,’ Trevelyan said.
‘Trevelyan,’ Mr. Munn began, and stepped to a position directly in front of him, ‘I understand you tried to blackmail Mr. Tom Sorrell. For five hundred dollars.’
Trevelyan’s impassive face did not change, or changed only by a slight narrowing of the eyes, as though the light were, for the moment, too great. He said nothing.
‘I want to know. Now.’
‘I ain’t a-messen in yore bizness,’ Trevelyan said, measuring his words out, not looking at Mr. Munn now, but off at the horizon, his eyes squinting, ‘an’ I don’t aim to have no man messen in mine.’
‘I want to know. And no lie.’
‘Lie! Ain’t air man ——’ Trevelyan’s hand tightened on the axe handle, and over the big knuckle bones the red, too-thin skin whitened.
‘You fool,’ Mr. Munn said evenly, ‘you’ve got a place here, and, by God, now ——’
‘Fifteen acres,’ Trevelyan answered, and spat into the dust, ‘and ever God’s foot mortgaged.’
‘— and, by God, now you go and fix it so you’ll have to leave the country. You do that, and those men the only friends you had ——’
‘Naw, naw,’ Trevelyan interrupted, and he turned his eyes, still squinting, upon Mr. Munn; ‘naw, they ain’t no friends of mine. They ain’t done nuthen fer me. I ain’t beholden to ’em. To no man.’
‘Well, they might do something for you now, something you won’t like, Trevelyan. I’m not saying, but I’m saying this: you better clear out. And now. Now. Today, not tomorrow. Here ——’ Mr. Munn pulled a wallet from his pocket and took two bills, a ten and a five. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘here, you take this and clear out. Now.’
Trevelyan only looked at the money, his face unchanging.
‘You clear out. Far as it’ll take you. You write me where you are. I’ll let you know when to come back.’ Mr. Munn’s voice sank lower, hurrying, while he thrust the money toward the big man, almost touching the sweat-stained blue cloth of his shirt. ‘I’ll see your crop’s cut and fired. Like I did before. I’ll ——’
‘Hit ain’t worth a toot,’ Trevelyan said.
‘I’ll see it taken care of.’ He thrust the money forward.
Trevelyan was shaking his head, slowly. ‘Naw, hit ain’t worth a toot. Let hit rot in the field, fer all of me. But I ain’t a-leave-en. Ain’t no man gonna run me outer no country.’
‘You fool!’ Mr. Munn crumpled the money in his hand. His voice rose. ‘You fool, you clear out. Now. You don’t know.’
Trevelyan unhurriedly spat, then looked away. ‘I was aimen to git out,’ he said. ‘I was aimen to git me that money from that bastud and git out. Oklahoma, and git me a start. They say a man kin git a start.’ He finished, pausing almost as though in reminiscence.
‘Now!’ Mr. Munn insisted.
‘Naw, not now. Ain’t no man a-tellen me to git out. No man. Not even you, nor no mortal man.’
‘It’s no favor to me,’ Mr. Munn said bitterly, ‘your going. I ought to let come what will come. I haven’t got any claim on you. It’s you got a claim on me. Because I was fool enough to pull your neck out of the rope once.’
‘I never ast you,’ Trevelyan retorted.
‘Your wife did.’
‘I never ast you and I never knowed when she done hit. You done hit because you wanted to. I never ast no man fer nuthen. Not since I was born. You done hit because you wanted.’
‘I damn well wish I hadn’t,’ Mr. Munn declared.
‘I’d a-got off,’ Trevelyan said.
‘They’d hanged you, Trevelyan. You know it, they’d hanged you. They’d put a rope round your neck, Trevelyan ——’ Mr. Munn made a circle, like a noose, with forefingers and thumbs, and held it to the man’s gaze and shook his hands back and forth. The two bills had fluttered to the ground between them.
‘I’d a-got off,’ Trevelyan said.
‘But that don’t matter now. Not now,’ Mr. Munn went on, jerking his hands apart. With the extended forefinger of his right hand he stabbed once at the sweat-soaked blue cloth which covered the man’s chest. ‘Now it matters for you to go. I’m telling you because I got you off the other time. That’s why I’m telling you, and I mean it.’ He leaned closer to Trevelyan, not eight inches between their bodies, and stared upward at his face. ‘Now go!’ he commanded.
‘No,’ Trevelyan answered.
Mr. Munn stepped backward a long, quick pace, as though he had been slapped in the face. ‘All right,’ he said, his voice suddenly quiet, ‘all right, you poor, God-damned fool.’
‘Ain’t no man e’er put a skeer on me,’ Trevelyan said.
Mr. Munn stared at Trevelyan for a moment. Then he struck his palms together, once. The impact made a dry, flat sound. Somewhere, off in the bushes, an insect made a rasping note, twice repeated.
Mr. Munn swung round, grinding his heel on the sun-baked earth. He took three strides toward the house, without looking back.
‘Hey!’ Trevelyan called.
Mr. Munn looked back.
‘You’re leave-en yore money,’ Trevelyan said. He glanced dispassionately at the ground before his feet where the bills lay.
‘You’ll need it,’ Mr. Munn told him, and turned away.
‘Hit kin lay and rot,’ Trevelyan answered.
After he had passed the corner of the house, he heard the axe stroke on the wood. He hurried across the yard, and mounted his horse. The woman was standing in the doorway of the house. He averted his eyes from her, and she said nothing. As he wheeled his horse, he caught, out of the tail of his eye, the flash of sun on the swift arc of the descending axe.
He rode down the short, brush-bordered lane leading to the big road. On the right-hand side was a field of tobacco. It was Trevelyan’s tobacco. The stalks were spindly and drooping, and the leaves, dry-looking, hung from the stalks. They did not loop strongly away from the base, but sagged as though their fibers had long lost strength and resilience. Between the tobacco hills, even on the hills, the ground was dry, packed, cracked-looking. It had a grayish cast.
‘Crawfish ground,’ Mr. Munn said aloud; ‘crawfish ground.’
Looking at that field, the miserable, drouth-bitten plants and the badly cultivated earth, and the blaze of sunlight over it, he felt a surge of hatred, or of something near hatred, for Trevelyan. He had not had such a feeling earlier.
He rode on, to the pike. He passed the spot where the cedar grove and the buckberry bushes were. He knew, even as he fought against the knowledge, the remembrance, that he had ridden toward Trevelyan’s house with the full intention of asking him if he had killed Duffy. He had been going to say, ‘Trevelyan, you killed that man. Answer me.’ He had not said it. He had said something else. He had been afraid. But not of Trevelyan.
Except for the temperature — and even the night tonight was coolish, too, for it was getting on in August — it might have been that other night when he had ridden out this road, with the two deputies, almost a year ago now. It is the same road, he thought, and I am the same man and I am doing the same thing, but it is a different time and it is a different thing, or is it a different thing, only a different time? — for then I rode here to find the knife and my riding here now is part of that same act, completing itself, fulfilling a single thought, the same gesture or an act of the will.
The men rode, single file, behind him. Except for the soft soughing of hoofs in the dust, or the infrequent, padded chink of a horseshoe on a stone, there had been no sound for a long way. The men had not spoken a word.
Or is it a different thing, he thought, part of the same motion fulfilling a single act of will? But not his own will, it occurred to him. Not entirely his own. In this, now, there is no will, not mine nor anybody’s, for there is no will in the act in memory, for it is complete and is in one time out of time, he thought; for as he moved down the road, thinking of that other night, he felt removed, even now, from the present experience, as though it were in memory.
He had felt that way when he reached into the hat and picked up one of the acorns and drew it out and opened his hand and saw that it was the yellow one. Mr. Burden had said, ‘Well, if we’re gonna do it, we might get it over with,’ and had gone outside the schoolhouse and fumbled about by the light of matches under the oak tree in the yard. He had come back into the silent group, and had asserted, extending his hand: ‘There’s a yellow one here. Might as well let it be the one.’
‘Let everybody look at them good,’ Mr. Sills had said. ‘We don’t want any argument later.’
‘Not much,’ Doctor MacDonald had agreed, smiling.
Mr. Munn had found the yellow acorn in his hand. ‘Well,’ he remarked, looking at it, ‘that’s it.’ He had lifted his glance from the object to find the eyes of all the men fixed upon him, detaching him from them.
Doctor MacDonald had come to stand in front of Mr. Munn. ‘I’ll go with you all,’ he had offered.
‘It won’t be necessary,’ Mr. Munn had said.
‘Not necessary,’ Doctor MacDonald had answered, ‘but I don’t want to pass any responsibility.’
‘No,’ Mr. Munn had said. He had twisted the yellow acorn slowly in his fingers.
Doctor MacDonald had seemed about to speak again; then had turned away.
Mr. Munn had dropped the acorn into his pocket.
The acorn was in his pocket now. Tonight he again wore the old black coat which he had worn the night before, at the schoolhouse at Grayson’s Crossing. He reached into his pocket and felt in his fingers the small, slick, ovoidal form.
When they turned off the pike into the lane, one of the men inquired, ‘Hadn’t we better leave the horses here?’
‘No,’ Mr. Munn said in an ordinary tone.
Up the lane a dog barked, and then again, closer. Then it dashed into the open, stopped, and barked again. Its shape was vague in the darkness.
‘The bastard!’ one of the men exclaimed.
Three of the men slipped off their horses, and passed their bridles to be held by others still mounted. They began to fumble on the ground beside the lane. The dog continued to bark. One of them struck a match.
‘Put that light out,’ Mr. Munn ordered.
The flame went out.
One of the men straightened up, and stepped slowly toward the dog. The other man waited. The first man held at his side a short, club-like stick which he had found. The dog barked twice, circling the man, and then ran in close and veered off. The man made no motion. He let the club hang loosely by his side. The dog again rushed in. The man took one long stride toward the dog, the club whipped over, and for an instant, the instant before the sodden crack of the impact of wood on flesh, the forms seemed to be almost merged in the darkness. Then the man swung back, and the dog, with a kind of contorted jerking of all four legs, tried to shove itself along. It tried to stand, but could not. It had not yelped, not even at the instant of the blow. The moaning sound that it now made was very similar to the moan of a human being.
The man lifted the club and again struck. The wood cracked, breaking in half. ‘Damn!’ the man cried, ‘God damn!’ He flung the piece of broken club into the dark mass of weeds by the lane.
The dog moaned again, and again tried to shove itself along the ground.
‘Can’t somebody find something?’ the man demanded fretfully.
The other two men stirred about, feeling along the ground with their feet or bending over.
‘A chunk of rock, or something,’ the man said.
‘God damn it, it’s too dark,’ somebody exclaimed.
The dog kept on moaning. The horses were moving restively.
‘We can’t stand around all night,’ another man complained.
‘Aw, hell!’ one of the men on the ground said in a tone of fatalistic disgust, and moved toward the dog. He withdrew his hand from his pocket. There was a faint click. The man was opening a knife. He leaned forward, over the dog, pushed the head back with one foot, thrust the blade downward and then jerked it sidewise. He straightened up, peering at the mass on the ground before him. He had cut the dog’s throat. He stepped to the side of the lane, and bent over to drive the blade of the frog-sticker into the earth, time after time, to clean off the blood. Then he shut the knife, and dropped it into his pocket.
Somebody else had taken the dog by the hind legs and had dragged it into the weeds. The men moved up the lane, single file. The paleness of the dust of the lane was visible before them. They walked their horses on the side of the lane away from the field of tobacco. On the side by the field there were no trees or brush. On the side where they moved, a scraggly row of trees made a deeper darkness. Mr. Munn stared across at the tobacco field. It was too dark now to make out anything over there, but he thought how the spindly, miserable plants had looked and how he had felt when he saw them. Now he felt nothing.
As they neared the end of the lane, one of the men asked in a harsh whisper, ‘Reckon has he got another dog?’
‘No,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘Reckon did anybody hear that barking?’ another man queried.
‘It’s a right smart piece up here,’ somebody said, whispering.
‘Better leave the horses here,’ Mr. Munn directed. And: ‘Mr. Sass, will you and Mr. Mock take charge of them?’
The horses were led into the shadow of the thicket. The men paused, and drew together into a compact group.
‘Maybe we better wait and see if anybody heard that dog,’ a man whispered.
‘No,’ Mr. Munn said, ‘we won’t wait.’
The men adjusted the cloths on their faces. Without further talk, two of them separated from the group, and moved off toward the rear of the house, skirting the brush along the fence. They were quickly out of sight. ‘All right,’ Mr. Munn said.
Still in a compact group, the rest of the men moved to the gate. Mr. Munn cautiously pushed it open. The men moved across the yard toward the house, soundlessly. They pressed themselves against the walls of the house on each side of the door. A man who wore no cloth over his face but who had his hat pulled down stood directly in front of the door. He reached his hand out and struck the boards of the door. At first there was no sound from within. Then there seemed to be a stirring inside, at the window. The men pressed themselves more tightly against the wall. The position of the single man who was facing the door was in the line of vision from the window. There was a sharp movement from within. ‘Wait a minute,’ a voice said.
The door swung slowly inward, and there the vague form of a man stood blocking the opening.
‘Hello,’ the unmasked man in the yard said. And at the word the man who had been crouching nearest the door thrust his foot into the aperture, jammed a pistol at arm’s length against Trevelyan’s body, and commanded, ‘Come on out!’
Another man, pistol in hand, flung himself against the door, driving it violently from Trevelyan’s grasp.
Trevelyan stepped slowly forward. His hands rose with a retarded, groping motion above his head.
The woman’s voice called sharply from the interior dark, ‘Harris! Harris!’
‘What do you want?’ Trevelyan asked.
‘Come on out,’ one of the men ordered.
The woman’s voice called, more shrilly, ‘Harris!’
‘Shet up!’ Trevelyan called back over his shoulder. Then, turning his head slowly toward the men, ‘What you aimen to do?’ No one answered him. He stood there, naked except for a pair of overalls hitched over one shoulder, and peered at the men. ‘What you aimen to do?’ he repeated.
‘Start moving,’ Mr. Munn said.
‘Kin I git my shoes?’ Trevelyan said.
‘Start moving,’ Mr. Munn ordered.
They walked rapidly toward the gate, Trevelyan in front and the two men with pistols holding the muzzles against the flesh of his back. They had reached the gate when the woman called again, from the doorway now. In the darkness of the doorway, she was visible only as a blurred and unformed patch of lighter color. ‘Harris!’ she called. ‘Where you going, Harris?’
‘You git back,’ he told her, not turning his head.
She came out into the yard, hesitating about halfway to the gate, and calling, ‘Harris! Harris!’
The two men who had gone to the rear of the house came running across the yard to join the group. They passed within fifteen feet of the woman.
‘Tie him,’ Mr. Munn said.
They tied Trevelyan’s hands behind him, pushed him into a saddle, and mounted. The man on whose horse Trevelyan sat got up behind another man.
Before the last man was up, the woman ran across the yard, not toward the gate but toward the corner nearest the group, not twenty feet away. ‘Harris!’ she screamed. ‘You listen, Harris! Don’t you go, Harris!’ She was gripping the palings of the fence, leaning against them.
Trevelyan twisted around toward her. ‘I reckin I kin take a whuppen good as the next man,’ he said.
The last man mounted. He held the bridle of Trevelyan’s horse for a lead.
‘Harris!’ the woman screamed.
‘Shet up!’ Trevelyan said.
The group moved down the lane at a trot. The woman ran back toward the gate as though to come out of the yard and pursue them. But she stopped at the gate. They heard her call once more.
Some half a mile up the main pike, the horsemen took a side road. When they turned into it, Trevelyan asked. ‘Where you goen?’
No one answered him.
‘What you aimen to do?’ he said. ‘Whup me?’ He looked from side to side at the cloth-covered faces of the men who rode stirrup to stirrup with him. They rode looking straight ahead, as if he had never spoken. ‘You kin whup me,’ he said, ‘but ain’t no man kin skeer me.’
The road gradually gave way to an untraveled track over which the grass and weeds had run, covering old ruts. The horses now went forward at a walk. On each side of the track the trees grew thick and tall, so that the darkness was close between the trees like the interior darkness of a hall or corridor. But the sky was lighter now, for the clouds that had earlier concealed the stars were breaking up and drifting off toward the northern horizon. But along the lane there was no breath of wind. The leaves hung soundless and motionless.
The lane gave abruptly upon a clearing some forty yards in diameter. In contrast with the close shadows of the lane the area seemed light and the sky very open and wide and of immeasurable depth in those spaces where no clouds were. To the left of the area and directly ahead, the woods looked black and solid. To the right the ground broke precipitously away into an abandoned quarry working. Here the track doubled back to take a shelving descent on the shallower side. It disappeared into the water that now, some fifteen yards below, filled the great cavity. The horsemen left the track and moved across the weed-grown ground toward the lip of the quarry.
There they dismounted and tethered the horses to a fallen tree. Trevelyan stood in the middle of the group and looked from one man to another. No one looked at him. Nor did they look at each other, but off at the woods, or back at the darkness of the lane through which they had come, or across the lip of the quarry. For a moment they stood apathetically, like strangers who have waited a long time in a railway station at night or in an anteroom at a hospital.
Then Mr. Munn commanded, ‘Cut the rope.’
The man who had killed the dog drew the knife from his pocket and snapped open the blade. The long blade concentrated a little light to gleam dully. While the man fumbled with the rope, Trevelyan stood stock-still. Although he wore nothing but the overalls, and his bare feet were tangled in the dew-drenched grass, he did not appear to be cold. Once he shook his head and winced when the man, trying to insert the blade in the knot, twisted the rope on his wrists. Then the man made a quick, jerking motion with the knife, the same motion he had made when he killed the dog, and the rope fell to the ground.
Trevelyan brought his hands slowly and crampedly forward. He inspected them, working the fingers and flexing the wrists. Then he let his arms fall to his sides.
‘Trevelyan,’ Mr. Munn said, and pointed toward the quarry, ‘you get over there.’
Trevelyan hesitated.
Several of the men held pistols in their hands, but loosely, pointed at the ground.
Trevelyan moved toward the brink of the quarry. The ten men approached him in a ragged half-circle. They hesitated some twelve or fifteen feet away from him. Trevelyan glanced from man to man around him. He put his tongue out and ran it over his lips. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if’n you gonna whup me, why don’t you do hit?’
‘Trevelyan,’ Mr. Munn went on through the cloth of his mask, ‘it’s not a whipping.’ He went closer. ‘It’s not a whipping,’ he repeated. ‘You tried to blackmail Sorrell. You tried twice. Do you deny it?’
‘I ain’t sayen I did, and I ain’t sayen I didn’t,’ Trevelyan answered slowly, almost meditatively.
Mr. Munn went closer. His head was thrust forward a little as he stared at the man who formed the center of the tightening half-circle. ‘You did,’ Mr. Munn said. ‘You took an oath and then you broke it. You were going to sell out, Trevelyan. Weren’t you, Trevelyan?’
The man made no reply. He seemed, for the moment, to be looking across the open space toward the black woods. Mr. Munn took another step forward. He held the pistol in his hand now. In his hand it felt cold and foreign. ‘You did, Trevelyan. You went to see Sorrell again yesterday afternoon. You threatened him. He ordered you off his place, and you knocked him down. Then you telephoned that deputy and saw him and tried to make a deal with him about turning Sorrell in, but not having to testify ——’ Mr. Munn took another step. ‘Didn’t you, Trevelyan?’
Trevelyan replied: ‘You ain’t skeeren me. Not none of you. Nor air man.’
‘Didn’t you, Trevelyan ——’
‘Go on and whup me,’ Trevelyan said.
‘Didn’t you, Trevelyan?’ Mr. Munn thought: I am talking to him and as long as I talk to him we will not do it, I will not do it, that’s why I’m talking to him, why don’t we go on and do it?
He looked about him at the other men. They held pistols in their hands, but their faces were covered. It seemed to him that only the hands holding the pistols, not those blank, cloth-shrouded faces that could not be seen, were alive and real. At that moment the mask was suffocating to him. Its privacy was hideous, cutting him off from everything, from everyone. From all the world. He lifted his left hand, slowly; then, as though stifling, he tore the mask from his face, and took a long stride toward Trevelyan, and thrust out his head and called, ‘Trevelyan!’
The man’s mouth moved without sound, then said, ‘I knowed hit was you.’
‘Trevelyan!’ Mr. Munn thought how sick, how afraid, how stifled, those men were under their masks. He gulped a full, deep, exquisite breath, like a man who rises from a long dive, and with burning lungs and bursting heart plunges, chest-high, into air.
‘And you, Trevelyan’ — and he took another stride — ‘you killed that man, you did; answer me!’
He was almost upon him. Trevelyan moved, lifted his arm. The pistol exploded in Mr. Munn’s grasp. He swung back from Trevelyan, seeing, even in that light, the man’s narrow eyes go suddenly wide.
Like a belated echo, another shot was fired. Who fired it, Mr. Munn did not know. Trevelyan staggered, and crossed his hands on his chest with a movement that was sad, almost womanly, humble.
Then, there came the volley.
Trevelyan sagged, then fell backward over the lip of the quarry.
There was not a sound. There was nothing there in the little space before the men. Even the grass did not look trodden. It was as though nothing had been there.
The smell of gun smoke hung on the air, sharp and cleanly like the smell of a disinfectant.
The men let their arms, which had been outstretched, sink to their sides.
‘He fell over,’ somebody said in a hushed tone. It was as though he had just witnessed an accident.
Nobody moved.
‘Somebody oughter look,’ a man hazarded.
Mr. Munn tried to say, ‘I’ll do it.’ But he could not.
One of the men approached the rim, somehow as with an air of stealth, and peered down. He returned to the group. Then he said, ‘He’s in the water.’
Somebody remarked: ‘It’s deep there. On this side.’
Another man walked to the rim and looked over. When he came back, he said nothing. The men got on their horses and rode slowly across the open space. The sky was lighter now, the clouds almost gone. The legs of the horses made a swishing, silken sound in the dew-damp weeds and grass; the saddles creaked a little; insects gave their small night noises, familiarly.
My shot, Mr. Munn thought, my shot, did it hit him?
One of the men removed the cloth that had masked his face, and stuck it into a side pocket with the easy gesture of a man who crams his handkerchief into his pocket. Mr. Munn looked at the man’s face. The other men took off their masks. Mr. Munn looked at them. Their shadowy faces were remarkable to him, the same faces, but remarkable. They were like faces a man finds on returning to the scenes of his youth, the same faces, recognizable still, but only in their astounding and reproachful difference.
Along the overgrown track the riders strung out in single file, Mr. Munn in front. He seemed to feel the eyes of all of them fixed upon his back, pressing, grinding, boring in as with a physical pressure. He had the impulse to plunge his heels into the mare’s flanks and break into a gallop up the long dark corridor between the trees, to leave them all behind, staring; but he mastered it. Then he tried, as with the discovery of caution and cunning, not to hear the subdued sounds of their motion. He fixed his own gaze on the point, far ahead, where the dark forms of the two rows of trees converged against the sky, trying to draw the awareness of the men out of himself and delude his senses into the absolute emptiness, the loneliness, which he thought he must have.
My shot, he thought, did it hit him? But the thought only flickered at the edge of his consciousness, like something caught out of the tail of the eye, and he put it from him, discovering, complacently and craftily, how easy, how unexpectedly easy, it was to do so if he focused all his powers upon that spot where the dark trees converged. The thought was not important, not really. He experienced a sense of release, of pleasure, at the discovery of its unimportance. The only thing important now was to fix his eyes upon that point, yonder, far up the track, and keep them fixed there. That was important.
A short distance before the pike, after the weed-grown track had given way to the road, Mr. Munn pulled his mare to the side, and let the men come even with him. ‘Good night,’ he said, his voice having, to his own ears, a barren and croaking sound as though made by some artificial contrivance.
‘I thought you might spend the night at my place,’ Mr. Wyngard suggested.
‘No,’ Mr. Munn answered shortly. ‘I can cut through here to my road.’
The men moved off and away from him. He watched them move away, their definite forms disintegrating into the uncertain shadows; and though solitude had, the minute before, seemed so beckoning, so desirable, he was now filled with a perverse and sudden despair, now that those forms were moving away from him.
He rode at a trot, giving himself as completely as possible to the rhythm of the motion, the easy, lulling sounds of hoofs and leather, the anonymous, familiar closeness of the shadowed landscape. Those items belonged wholly to the moment in which he existed, a moment without affiliations with the past or the future. He tried to sink into that moment, trying to escape from time by surrendering most completely to time. He felt like a man who, in the ease of a dream, walks a wire across space, surprised that what had in waking reality seemed so impossible is so easy, but at the same time still aware that with a single misstep, a single failure in balance, he will go hurtling down to one side or the other. The immediate, ignorant moment was like that wire to him.
But while he moved forward, surrendering himself to the moment, complacent and surprised that it was so easy, after all, to live by that definition of life, he grew increasingly aware of what was, apparently, a purely physical discomfort. He felt like a man who thinks himself recovered from an illness, and goes about his normal affairs to find, unexpectedly, that the sickness is still there in his bones and vitals. It is not because of it, he thought, because of what happened. His mind automatically refused the statement of what had happened; the fact itself was denied in namelessness. But the discomfort increased. The knowledge which his mind denied rose in his bowels. I’m sick, he thought, it’s just that I’m a little sick. The nausea rose in him like sediment in a disturbed vessel.
Finally, he slipped from the saddle and vomited on the grass by the road.
He clung to the stirrup leather, supporting himself, until his strength returned. When he came to the branch that ran across the road, under a little plank bridge, he again dismounted. Trees grew thickly there, along the water, but where he knelt the grass was soft under his knees. He sank his hands and wrists into the cool water, wetting his sleeves. From his cupped hands he supped up the water and rinsed his mouth, and then drank. Then, leaning over the surface and holding his face close, he bathed his face in the water and pressed the coldness of his hands against his eyes. Feeling the water on his face, he thought suddenly of Trevelyan’s face in the water. In the water of the quarry. The man had said, in the water. He rose quickly, clumsy with haste, and stared at the water before him. It was black under the trees. A man would lie in the water and the water would be over him and inside of him and he would become a part of the water. The water which he had just drunk so avidly felt cold and inimical within him. Again he had the impulse to vomit, but controlled himself.
He struck his hands together violently, the fist of one into the palm of the other. ‘The fool!’ he exclaimed, ‘the God-damned fool; the poor God-damned fool!’
He felt better then, and rode on. The whole matter almost seemed then, on the moment, like something known for a long time. He would fix his gaze, as before, upon some distant point and bend every energy upon it, so that he seemed to be drawn out of himself. And so powerfully could he distract himself in this exercise that, as he rode up the drive toward his own house and saw a faint light in one of the windows downstairs, no question crossed his mind. He saw the light, and accepted it; that was all.
He went directly to the stable, and unsaddled the mare. Then, having the key to the front and not to the side door, he returned across the yard, under the maples. A few prematurely fallen leaves rustled beneath his tread.
Not until he had pushed open the door and stood on the threshold, the key still in his hand, did the significance of the light, which he now saw falling faintly into the hall from the half-open door of the room at the left, really take hold upon him. He had told May that he might not come back until very late, or perhaps not at all, and that she should get Rosie to sleep up at the house. He drew the door softly shut behind him.
‘Perse,’ he heard his own name pronounced. It was May’s voice.
He stood stock-still, with his hand still on the knob of the door behind him. Then she came into the hall. Her small figure was outlined against that dim light from the room behind her.
‘Perse,’ she repeated.
He tried to speak to her, but the words would not come, his throat was so dry and constricted.
‘Perse, what’s the matter?’ she demanded, her voice rising and her gaze unwaveringly fixed upon him.
‘Nothing,’ he managed to say, and took a step toward her.
‘But Perse ——’
Staring at her, he could think of nothing in the world to say to her.
‘But Perse, there is.’ She retreated before him, her eyes still fixed on his face. She pushed the door fully open behind her, not turning to look, and stepped back across the threshold into the room. He came close to her, and she took another step back, pronouncing his name and lifting one hand a little in an indeterminate gesture.
The lamp on the table in the middle of the room was turned down so low that the flame flickered weakly along the wick and the shadows swam unsteadily, encroachingly, in the corners and over the floor. What little light there was, the woman’s blonde hair caught. It was loose over her shoulders. She was wearing a blue kimono. It seemed too large for her. When she lifted her arm, the looped and flowing sleeve emphasized its fragility and the aimlessness of the gesture.
‘Oh, Perse!’ she exclaimed. ‘I can’t stand it. What’s the matter, Perse?’
‘Nothing,’ he answered, as she stared at him.
‘You never tell me,’ she said weakly and lamentingly, her arm rising in that gesture and then subsiding. ‘Not anything.’
He reached out as if to pluck at the flowing garment. But she stood too far away from him.
‘It’s so late; you stayed out so late.’ And then: ‘You’ve been drinking, Perse. You’ve had whisky.’
‘No,’ he denied.
‘What’s the matter? Oh, Perse!’
‘God damn it!’ he uttered, and stepped quickly to her and seized her by the shoulders.
‘You’re hurting ——’
‘Well,’ he said. He drew her to him, more tightly. Then he began to kiss her on the face.
‘Don’t, Perse, don’t! Don’t; I want to talk to you.’
He continued to hold her. Then he began to force her back, beyond the table.
‘No, no!’ she exclaimed, and a tone of desperation came into her voice.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘No. No. Not now.’
He paid no attention to her.
‘No. Later, maybe later ——’ She tried to thrust him back, and mixed with the tone of desperation there was a hint of wheedling, guileful but hopeless.
After he had forced her past the table to the divan, she struggled with him with a strength which he had never suspected. Then, suddenly, she was as passive as a dead body, although her hands remained crushed against his chest as in resistance and revulsion.