A Fable

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

WEDNESDAY NIGHT

He had debarked that same dawn from the Dover leave packet. A lorry had given him a lift from Boulogne; he got directions from the first man he met and in time entered the brigade office with his posting order already in his hand, expecting to find a corporal or a sergeant or at most the brigade adjutant, but found instead the brigadier himself sitting at the desk with an open letter, who said: 'Afternoon. As you were a moment, will you?' The runner did so and watched enter a captain whom he was to know as com-mander of one of the companies in the battalion to which he would be assigned, followed by a thin wiry surly-looking private who, even to the runner's first glance, seemed to have between his bowed legs and his hands the shape of a horse, the brigadier saying pettishly, 'Stand at ease; stand at ease,' then opened the folded letter and glanced at it, then looked at the private and said: This came by special courier this morning. From Paris. Someone from America is trying to find you. Someone important enough for the French Government to have located you through channels and then send a special courier up from Paris. Someone named-' and glanced at the letter again: '-Reverend Tobe Sutterfield,'

And now the runner was watching the private too, already looking at him in time not only to hear but to see him say, quick and harsh and immediately final: 'No,'

'Sir,' the captain prompted, 'No what?' the brigadier said. 'An American. A blackamoor nr'n-istcr. You dont know who it is?'

'No,' the private said.

'He seemed to think you might say that. He said to remind you of Missouri.'

'No,' the private said, rigid and harsh and final. 'I was never in Missouri. I dont know anything about him,'

'Say sir,' the captain said.

That's your last word?' the brigadier said.

'Yes sir,' the private said.

'All right,' the brigadier said. 'Carry on,' Then they were gont. and, rigid at attention, the runner felt rather than saw the brigadier open the brigade order and begin to read it and then look up at him-no movement of the head at all: merely an upward flick of the eyes, steady for a moment, then down to the order again: thinking (the runner) quietly: Not this time. There's too much rank: thinking: It wont even be the colonel, but the adjutant. Which by ordinary could have been as much as two weeks later, since, a runner formally assigned to a combat battalion, his status was the same as any other member of it and he too would be offi-cially 'resting' until they went back up the lines; and, except for coincidence, probably would have been: reporting (the runner) not to the battalion sergeant-major but to Coincidence, entering his assigned billet two hours later, and in the act of stowing his kit into a vacant corner, saw again the man he had seen two hours ago in the brigadier's office-the surly, almost insubordinate stable-auraed private who by his appearance would have pined and died one day after he was removed further from Whitechapel than a Newmarket paddock perhaps, yet who was not only important enough to be approached through official channels by some American individual or agent or agency himself or itself important enough to use the French Government for messenger, but impor-tant enough to repudiate the approach-seated this time on a bunk with a thick leather money-belt open on one knee and a small dirty dogeared notebook on the other, and three or four other privates facing him in turn, to each of which he counted out a few French notes from the money-belt and then made a notation with the stub of a pencil in the notebook.

And the next day, the same scene; and the day after that, and the one after that, directly after the morning parade for roll-call and inspection; the faces different and varying in number: two, or three, sometimes only one: but always one, the worn money-belt getting a little thinner but apparently inexhaustible, anyway bot-tomless, the pencil stub making the tedious entries in the grimed notebook; then the fifth day, after noon mess; it was pay-day and, approaching the billet, for a moment the runner thought wildly Tuesday that part of the pay parade was taking place there: a line, a queue of men extending out into the street, waiting to creep one by one inside, so that the runner had trouble entering his own domicile, to stand now and watch the whole affair in reverse: the customers, clients, patients-whatever they were-now paying the grimed frayed wads of French notes back into the money-belt, the tedious pencil stub still making the tedious entries; and still standing there watching when the orderly, whom he had seen that first morning in the brigade anteroom, entered and broke through the line, saying to the man on the bunk: 'Come on. You're for it this time. It's a bleeding f... ing motorcar from Paris with a bleeding f... ing prime minister in it'-watching (the runner) the man on the bunk without haste stow the notebook and the pencil-stub into the money-belt and strap it up and turn and roll the belt into the blanket behind him and rise and follow the orderly, the runner speaking to the nearest of the now broken and dispersing line: 'What is it? What's the money for? He's gone now; why dont you just help yourselves while he's not here to put it down against you?' and still getting only the watchful, secretive, already dispersing stares, and not waiting even for that: himself outside too now, in the cobbled street, and saw that too: one of the long black funereal French motorcars such as high government officials use, with a uniformed driver and a French staff-captain in the front seat and a British one and a thin Negro youth on the two small jump seats and behind them in the rear seat, a middle-aged woman in rich furs who could be nothing but a rich American (the runner did not recognise her though almost any Frenchman would since her money partially supported a French air squadron in which her only son was a pilot) and a Frenchman who was not the prime minister but (the runner did recognise this) was at least a high Cabinet secretary for something, and sitting between them, an old Negro in a worn brushed top-hat, with the serene and noble face of an idealised Roman consul; the owner of the money-belt rigid and wooden, staring but at nothing, saluting but saluting no one, just saluting, then rigid and wooden again and ten feet away while the old Negro man leaned, speaking to him, then the old Negro himself descended from the car, the runner watching that too, and not only the runner but the entire circumambience: the six people still in the car, the orderly who had fetched the man from the bunk, the thirty-odd men who had been in the creeping line when the orderly broke through it, having followed into the street to stand before the billet door, watching too, perhaps waiting: the two of them drawn aside now, the owner of the money-belt still rigid, wooden, invincibly repudiant while the serene and noble head, the calm imperial chocolate-colored face, still talked to him, murmured: barely a minute, then the Negro turned and went back to the car and got into it, the runner not waiting to watch that cither, already following the white man back toward the billet, the waiting group before the door parting to let him through, then crowding in after him until the runner stopped the last one by touching, grasping his sleeve.

The money,' the runner said. 'What is it?'

'It's the Association,' the man said.

'All right, all right,' the runner said, almost testily. 'How do you get it? Can anybody...'

'Right,' the man said. 'You take ten bob. Then on the next pay-day you begin paying him sixpence a day for thirty days,'

'If you're still alive,' the runner said.

'Right,' the other said. 'When you have paid up you can start over again,'

'But suppose you're not,' the runner said. But this time the man merely looked at him, so that he said, almost pettishly again: 'All right, all right, I'm not really that stupid; to still be alive a year from now is worth six hundred percent of anything,' But still the man looked at him, with something so curious in his face, behind his eyes, that the runner said quickly, 'Yes. What?'

'You're new,' the other said.

'Yes,' the runner said. 'I was in London last week. Why?'

The rate aint so high, if you're a..,' the voice stopping, ceasing, the eyes still watching him so curiously, so intently, that it Tuesday seemed to the runner that his own gaze was drawn, as though by some physical force, down the man's side to where his hand hung against his flank: at which instant the hand flicked out in a ges-ture, a signal, so brief, so rapid before it became again immobile against its owner's khaki leg that the runner could hardly believe he had seen it.

'What?' the runner said. 'What?' But now the face was closed, inscrutable; the man was already turning away.

'Why dont you ask him what you want to know?' he said. 'He wont bite yer. He wont even make you take the ten bob, if you dont want,'

The runner watched the long car back and fill in the narrow street, to return wherever it came from: nor had he even seen the battalion adjutant yet, who at worse could be no more than cap-tain and very likely not even as old as he: so the preliminaries would not take long, probably no more than this: the adjutant: Oh, you re that one. Why haven't you got up your M. C.? Or did they take that back too, along with the pip?

Then he: I don't know. Could I wear an M. C. on this?

Then the adjutant: I dont know either. What else did you want? You re not due here until Orderly Room Monday.

Then he would ask: who by now had divined who the rich American woman would be, since for two years now Europe-France anyway-had been full of them-the wealthy Philadelphia and Wall Street and Long Island names whose money supported ambulance units and air squadrons in the French front-the com-mittees, organizations, of officially nonbelligerent amateurs by means of which America fended off not Germans but war itself; he could ask then, saying, But why here? Granted that they have one with at the head of it an old blackamoor who looks like a nonconformist preacher, why did the French Government send him up here in a State motorcar for a two-minute visit with a pri-vate soldier in a British infantry battalion?--oh yes, he could ask, getting nothing probably except the old Negro's name, which he already knew and hence was not what he lacked, needed, must have if there were peace: which took another three days from that Monday when, reporting at Orderly Room, he became officially a member of the battalion family and could cultivate the orderly corporal in charge of the battalion correspondence and so hold at last in his own hands the official document signed by the chief-of-staff at Poperinghe, containing not only the blackamoor's name but the rich and organ-rolling one of the organization, committee, which he headed: Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes la France de Tout le Monde-a title, a designation, so embracing, so richly sonorous with grandeur and faith, as to have freed itself completely from man and his agonies, majestic in its empyrean capacity, as weightless and palpless upon the anguished earth as the adumbration of a cloud. And if he had hoped to get anything at all, even that much, let alone anything more, from the owner of the money-belt, he would have been wrong indeed there: which (the failure) cost him five shillings in francs: hunting the man down and stop-ping him by simply getting in front of him and standing there, saying baldly and bluntly: 'Who is Reverend Tobe Sutterfield?' then still standing there for better than another minute beneath the harsh spent vituperation, until he could say at last: 'Are you finished now? Then I apologise. All I really want is ten bob': and watched his name go down into the little dogeared book and took the francs which he would not even spend, so that the thirty sixpences would go back to their source in the original notes. But at least he had established a working, a speaking relationship: because of his orderly-room contact, he was able to use it, not needing to block the way this time to speak: 'Best keep this a staff matter, though I think you should know. We're going back in tonight,' The man looked at him. 'Something is going to happen. They have brought too many troops down here. It's a battle. The ones who thought up Loos cant rest on their laurels forever, you know,' Still the man only looked at him. 'It's your money. So you can protect yourself. Who knows? you may be one of the ones to stay alive. Instead of letting us bring you only Tuesday sixpence a day, demand it all at once and bury it somewhere,' Still the man just looked at him, not even with contempt; suddenly the runner thought, with humility, abasement almost. He has ethics, like a banker, not to his clients because they are people, but be-cause they are clients. Not pity: he -would bankrupt any-all-of them without turning a hair, once they had accepted the gambit; it's ethics toward his vocation, his trade, his profession. It's purity. No: it's even more than that: it's chastity, like Caesar's wife-watching it; the battalion went in that night, and he was right: when it came out again-the sixty-odd percent which was left of it-it bore forever across its memory like the sear of a heated poker, the name of the little stream not much wider in places than a good downwind spit, and the other Somme names-Arras and Albert, Bapaume and St. Quentin and Beaumont Hamel-ineradicable, to last as long as the capacity for breathing would, the capacity for tears-saying (the runner) this time: Tou mean that all that out there is just a perfectly healthy and normal panic, like a market-crash: necessary to keep the body itself strong and hale? that the ones who die and will still die in it were allotted to do so, like the little brokers and traders without wit or intelligence or perhaps just enough money backing, whose high destiny it is to commit suicide in order to keep the edifice of finance solvent?' And still the other only looked at him, not even con-temptuous, not even with pity: just waiting until the runner had finished this time. Then he said: 'Well? Do you want the tanner, or dont you?'

The runner took the money, the francs. He spent them, this time, seeing for the first time, thinking, how finance was like poetry, demanding, requiring a giver and a taker too in order to endure; singer and listener, banker and borrower, buyer and seller, both ethical, unimpugnable, immaculate in devotion and faith; thinking I was the one who failed; I was the debaser, the betrayer, spending the money this time, usually at one blow, in modest orgies of food and drink for whoever would share it with him, ful-filling his sixpence-by-sixpence contract, then borrowing the ten shillings again, with the single-mindedness of a Roman Catholic at his devotions or expiating a penance: through that fall, that winter; it would be spring soon and now his leave would be coming up again and he thought, quietly, without grief, without regret: Of course I could go back home, back to London. Because what else can you do to a cashiered subaltern in this year of Our Lord One Nine One Seven but give him a rifle and a bayonet and I already have those, when, suddenly and peacefully, he knew what he would do with that freedom, that liberty which he no longer had any use for because there was no more any place for it on the earth; and this time he would ask not for shillings but pounds, setting its valuation not in shillings but in pounds, not only on his pilgrimage back to when and where the lost free spirit of man once existed, but on that which made the pilgrimage possible, asking for ten of them and himself setting the rate and interest at ten shillings a day for thirty days.

'Going to Paris to celebrate your f... ing D. C. M. are you?' the other said.

'Why not?' he said: and took the ten pounds in francs and with the ghost of his lost youth dead fifteen years now, he retraced the perimeter of his dead life when he had not only hoped but be-lieved, concentric about the once-sylvan vale where squatted the gray and simple stone of Saint Sulpice, saving for the last the nar-row crooked passageway in which he had lived for three years, passing the Sorbonne but only slowing, not turning in, and the other familiar Left Bank places-quai and bridge, gallery, garden and cafd-where he had spent his rich leisure and his frugal money; it was not until the second solitary and sentimental morning, after coffee (and Figaro: today was April eighth, an English liner, this time practically full of Americans, had been torpedoed yesterday off Ireland; he thought peacefully, tearless: They'll have to come in now; we can destroy both hemispheres now) at the Deux Magots, taking the long way, through the Luxembourg Gardens again among the nursemaids and maimed soldiers (another spring, perhaps by this autumn even, there would be American uniforms Tuesday too) and the stained effigies of gods and queens, into the rue Vaugirard, already looking ahead to discern the narrow crevice which would be the rue Servandoni and the garret which he had called home (perhaps Monsieur and Madame Gargne, patron and patronne, would still be there to greet him), when he saw it-the banner, the lettered cloth strip fastened above the archway where the ducal and princely carriages had used to pass, affirming its grandiose and humble declaration out of the old faubourg of aris-tocrats: Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes a la France de Tout le Monde, and, already one in a thin steady trickle of people-sol-diers and civilians, men and women, old and young-entered some-thing which seemed to him afterward like a dream: a vestibule, an anteroom, where a strong hale plain woman of no age, in a white coif like a nun, sat knitting, who said: 'Monsieur?'

'Monsieur le prdsident, Madame, s'il vous plait. Monsieur le Reverend Sutterfield:' and who (the woman) said again, with no pause in the click and flick of the needles: 'Monsieur?'

'Le chef de bureau, Madame. Le directeur. Monsieur Le R��-end Sutterfield,'

'Ah,' the woman said. 'Monsieur Tooleyman': and, still knitting, rose to precede, guide, conduct him: a vast marble-floored hall with gilded cornices and hung with chandeliers and furnished, crowded, heterogeneous and without order, with wooden benches and the sort of battered chairs you rent for a few sous at band concerts in parks, murmurous not with the voices but as though with the simple breathing, the inspiration and suspiration of the people-the soldiers maimed and unmaimed, the old men and women in black veils and armbands and the young women here and there carrying children against or even beneath the complete weeds of bereavement and grieving-singly or in small groups like family groups about the vast room murmurous also still of dukes and princes and millionaires, facing the end of the room across which was suspended another of the cloth banners, the lettered strip like that one above the gateway and lettered like it: Les Amis Myriades et Anonymes cl la France de Tout le Monde: not looking at the banner, not watching it; not like people in church: it was not subdued enough for that, but perhaps like people in a railway station where a train has been indefinitely delayed; then the rich curve of a stairway, the woman stopping and standing aside, still knitting and not even looking up to speak: 'Pri�e de monter, monsieur-,' and he did so: who had traversed a cloud, now mounting to the uttermost airy nepenthelcne pin-nacle: a small chamber like a duchess's boudoir in heaven con-verted temporarily to represent a business office in a charade: a new innocent and barren desk and three hard and innocent chairs and behind the desk the serene and noble face in its narrow clasp of white wool rising now from the horizon-blue of an infantry cor-poral's uniform which by its look had lain only yesterday still on a supply sergeant's shelves, and slightly behind him the pole-thin Negro youth in the uniform and badges of a French sub-lieutenant which looked almost as new, himself facing them across it, the voices also serenely congruous and inconsequential, like dream: 'Yes, it used to be Sutterfield. But I changed it. To make it easier for the folks. From the Association,'

'Oh. Tout le Monde,'

'Yes. Tooleyman,'

'So you came up that day to see... I was about to say friend-'

Tes, he aint quite ready yet. It was to see if he needed money,'

'Money? He?'

The horse,' the old Negro said. 'That they claimed we stole. Except that we couldn't have stole it, even if we had wanted to. Because it never belonged to no man to be stole from. It was the world's horse. The champion. No, that's wrong too. Things be-longed to it, not it to things. Things and people both. He did. I did, All three of us did before it was over,'

'He?' the runner said.

'Mistairy,'

'Mist what?' the runner said.

'Harry,' the youth said. That's how he pronounced it,'

'Oh,' the runner said, with a sort of shame. 'Of course. Mist-airy-'

That's right,' the old Negro said. 'He kept on trying to get me to say just Airy, but I reckon I was too old.' So he told it: what he had seen, watched at first hand, and what he had divined from what he had seen, watched: which was not all; the runner knew that, thinking, A protagonist. If I'm to run with the hare and be the hounds too, I must have a protagonist, even while the youth, speaking for the first time, answered that: 'It was the deputy marshal that sent the New Orleans lawyer,'

'The who?' the runner said.

The Federal deputy marshal,' the youth said. 'The head man of the folks chasing us,'

'All right,' the runner said. Tell me,' t t t It was, two years before the war; the horse was a three-year-old running horse, but such a horse that even the price which the Argentine hide-and-wheat prince paid for it at the Newmarket sale, although an exceptional one, was not an outrageous one. Its groom was the sentry, the man with the ledger and the money-belt. He went out to America with it, whereupon within the next twenty-four months three things happened to him which changed completely not only his life, but his character too, so that when late in he returned to England to enlist, it was as though somewhere behind the Mississippi Valley hinterland where within the first three months he had vanished, a new man had been born, without past, without griefs, without recollections.

He was not merely included in the sale of the horse, he was compelled into it. And not by the buyer nor even the seller, but by the sold: the chattel: the horse itself, with an imperiousness not even to be temporised with, let alone denied. It was not be- cause he was the exceptional groom, which he might have been, nor even the first-rate one which he actually was. It was because there had developed apparently on sight between the man and the animal something which was no mere rapport but an affinity, not from understanding to understanding but from heart to heart and glands to glands, so that unless the man was present or at least near by, the horse was not even less than a horse: it was no longer a horse at all: not at all intractable and anything but unpredict-able, because it was quite predictable in fact; not only dangerous, but in effect, for all its dedicated and consecrated end and purpose-the long careful breeding and selecting which finally produced it to be sold for the price it brought to perform the one rite for which it had been shaped-worthless, letting none save the one man enter the same walls or fence with it to groom or feed it, no jockey or exercise boy to approach and mount it until the man bade it; and even then, with the rider actually up, not even running until-whatever the communication was: voice, touch, whatever-the man had set it free.

So the Argentine bought the groom too, for a sum left in escrow in a London bank, to become the groom's on his return to England after being formally discharged. By the horse of course, since nothing else could, which (the horse) in the end discharged and ab-solved them all, the old Negro telling this part of it, since this was where he-they-himself and his grandson-came into it:--the horse which before the groom came into its life, merely won races, but which after his advent, began to break records; three weeks after it first felt his hand and heard his voice, it set a mark (The race was named the Sillinger,' the old Negro said. 'It was like our Derby at home,') which seven years later was still standing; and in its first South American race, although only two weeks out of the ship after a month and a half at sea, it set one not likely to be touched at any time. ('Not nowhere. At no time. By no horse,' the old Negro said.) And the next day it was bought by a United States oil baron for a price which even the Argentine millionaire could not refuse, and two weeks later landed in New Orleans, Tuesday where the old Negro, a preacher on Sunday and the rest of the week a groom and hostler in the new owner's Kentucky breeding and training stables, met it; and two nights later the train drawing the van containing the horse and the two grooms, the white one and the black one, plunged through a flood-weakened trestle: out of which confusion and mischance were born the twenty-two months from which the English groom emerged at last a practicing Baptist: a Mason: and one of his time's most skillful manipu-lators of or players at dice.

Sixteen of the twenty-two were the months during which the five separately organised though now grimly unified groups-the Federal Government, the successive state police forces and the railway's and the insurance company's and the oil baron's private detectives-pursued the four of them-the crippled horse and the English groom and the old Negro and the twelve-year-old child who rode it-up and down and back and forth through the section of the Mississippi watershed between Illinois and the Gulf of Mex-ico and Kansas and Alabama, where on three legs the horse had been running in remote back-country quarter-races and winning most of them, the old Negro telling it, grave and tranquil, serenely and peacefully inconsequential, like listening to a dream, until presently the runner five years afterward was seeing what the Fed-eral deputy marshal had five years ago while in the middle of it: not a theft, but a passion, an immolation, an apotheosis-no gang of opportunists fleeing with a crippled horse whose value, even whole, had ceased weeks back to equal the sum spent on its pur-suit, but the immortal pageant-piece of the tender legend which was the crowning glory of man's own legend beginning when his first paired children lost well the world and from which paired pro-totypes they still challenged paradise, still paired and still immortal against the chronicle's grimed and bloodstained pages: Adam and Lilith and Paris and Helen and Pyramus and Thisbe and all the other recordless Romeos and their Juliets, the world's oldest and most shining tale limning in his brief turn the warp-legged foul-mouthed English horse-groom as ever Paris or Lochinvar or any else of earth's splendid rapers: the doomed glorious frenzy of a love-story, pursued not by an unclosed office file nor even the raging frustration of the millionaire owner, but by its own inherent doom, since, being immortal, the story, the legend, was not to be owned by any one of the pairs who added to its shining and tragic increment, but only to be used, passed through, by each in their doomed and homeless turn.

He didn't tell how they did it: only that they did do it: as if, once it was done, how no longer mattered; that if something must be done, it is done, and then hardship or anguish or even impos-sibility no longer signify:--got the frantic and injured horse out of the demolished car and into the bayou where it could swim while they held its head above water-'He found a boat,' the old Negro said. 'If you could call it a boat. Whittled out of a log and done already turned over before you even put your foot in it. They called them pirogues. They talked gobble talk there, like they do here,'-then out of the bayou too, into such complete invisibility that when the railroad detectives reached the scene the next morning, it was as if the flood itself had washed the three of them away. It was a hummock, a small island in the swamp not a mile from the collapsed trestle, where a work-train and crew had arrived the next morning to rebuild the bridge and the track, and from which (They got the horse as far up out of the water as they could the first night, and the old Negro was left to attend it. I just give it water and kept a mud pack on the hip and tried to keep the gnats and flies and mosquitoes away,' the old Negro said.) the groom returned at dawn on the third day, with a block-and-tackle bearing the railroad company's stencil in the pirogue, and food for themselves and the horse and canvas for the sling and cradle and plaster of Paris for the splint--('I know what you're going to ask now,' the old Negro said. 'Where we got the money for all that. He got it like he done the boat,' telling that too: the cockney horse groom who had never been farther from London than Epsom or Doncaster yet who in two years of America had become a Mason and a Baptist, who in only two weeks in the fore- Tuesday castle of the American freighter up from Buenos Aires had discov-ered or anyway revealed to himself that rapport with and affin-ity for dice, who on the first return to the scene of the wreck had picked up the block-and-tackle simply because he happened to pass it, since his true destination had been the bunk-car where the Negro work-gang slept, waking them, the white man in his swamp-fouled alien jodhpurs and the black ones in undershirts or dungaree pants or in nothing at all, squatting around a spread blanket beneath the smoking lantern and the bank notes and the coins and the clicking and scuttering dice.)--and in the pitch dark-he had brought back no lantern, no light; it would not only have been dangerous to show one, he didn't even need one: scorn-fully, even contemptuously, who from his tenth year had known the bodies of horses as the blind man knows the room he durst not leave: any more than he would have brought back a veterinary, not only not needing one but he would not have let any hand save his or the old Negro's touch the horse, even if the horse had per-mitted it-they suspended the horse and set the hip and built the immobilising cast.

Then the weeks while the ruined hip knitted and the search-parties, with every exit to the swamp watched and guarded, con-tinued to drag the bayou beneath the trestle, and to splash and curse among the moccasins and rattlesnakes and alligators of the swamp itself, long after they (the pursuers) had come to believe that the horse was dead for the simple reason that it must be dead, since that particular horse could not be anything else but dead and still be invisible, and that the owner would in the end gain only the privilege of venting his vengeance on the thieves. And once each week, as soon as it was dark enough and the search-parties had withdrawn for the night, the groom would depart in the pirogue, to return before dawn two or three days later with another supply of food and forage; two and three days now because the trestle was repaired at last; once more trains roared hollowly across it in the night and the work-gang and that source of rev-enue or income was gone, back to New Orleans whence it had come and now the white man was going to New Orleans himself, bucking the professional games on baize-covered tables beneath electric lights and now not even the old Negro--(a horseman, a groom, merely by accident, but by avocation and dedication a min-ister of God, sworn dedicated enemy of sin yet who apparently without qualm or hesitation had long since drawn and then for-got it the line of his rectitude to include the magnificent ruined horse and all who were willing to serve it)--would know how far he sometimes had to go before he found another spread blanket beneath a smoked lantern or, as a last resort, the electric-lit baize table, where, although in their leathern cup the dice were as be-yond impugning as Caesar's wife, the counters-chips, money-still accrued, whether or not to the benison of his gift or to the simple compulsion of his need.

Then months, not only within daily earshot of the trains once more thundering across the repaired trestle but of the search parties themselves (to whom at times either of them could have spoken without even raising his voice), the search continuing long after the ones who did the cursing and splashing and the frantic recoiling from the sluggish thrash or vicious buzz of startled moc-casins and rattlesnakes all believed that the horse was long since dead and vanished forever into the sleepless insatiable appetites of eels and gars and turtles and the thief himself fled, out of the country and out of the nation and perhaps even out of the con-tinent and the hemisphere, but continuing nevertheless because the railroad company had for stake an expensive set of triple blocks and over two hundred feet of two-inch cable, and the insurance company owned banks and barge lines and chain stores from Portland, Maine, to Oregon and so could afford not to lose even a one-dollar horse, let alone a fifty-thousand-dollar one, and the horse's owner that bottomless purse which would not miss the value of the sixty race horses he still owned, in order to revenge himself on the thief of the sixty-first, and the Federal police had more at stake than even the state ones who could only share in the glory and the reward: they had a file to be closed out-until Tuesday one day a United Press flash came, relayed last night from Washington to the Federal deputy, of how a horse, a valuable Thor-oughbred and running on three legs, in charge of or at least accompanied by a small bandy-legged foreigner who could barely speak English, and a middle-aged Negro preacher, and ridden by a twelve-year-old Negro boy, had run away from the whole field in a three-furlong race at Weatherford, Texas--('We walked it. the old Negro said. 'At night. It needed that much to get used to itself again. To stop remembering that trustlc and get limbered up again and start being a horse. When daylight come, we would hide in the woods again,' And afterwards too, telling that too: how they didn't dare else: run one race and then leave directly afterward without even stopping almost, because as soon as that three-legged horse won a race the whole world would hear about it and they had to stay at least one day ahead of them.)--and got there one day too late, to learn that the Negro preacher and the snarling contemptuous foreigner had appeared suddenly from nowhere exactly in time to enter the three-legged Thoroughbred in a race on which the foreigner had betted sums ranging (by this time) all the way from ten to a thousand dollars, at odds ranging all the way from one to ten to one to a hundred, the three-legged horse breaking so fast from the post that the barrier seemed actually to have sprung behind it, and running so fast that the trailing field appeared, if anything, to be running in another and later race, and so far ahead at the finish that the jockey seemed to have no con-trol over it at all-if anyone, let alone a child of twelve or at most thirteen who rode the race without saddle but simply a bellyband and a surcingle to hold on to (this informant had seen the race), could have held it after the barrier dropped, the horse crossing the finish line at full speed and apparently bent on making another circuit of the track had not the white foreigner, leaning on the rail beyond the finish line, spoken a single word to it in a voice you could not have heard fifteen feet away.

And the next place where they were within even three days of the horse was at Willow Springs, Iowa, and next to that, Bucyrus, Ohio, and the next time they were almost two weeks behind-an inaccessible valley in the East Tennessee mountains three months later, so remote not only from railroads but even telegraphs and telephones too that the horse had been running and winning races for ten days before the pursuit ever heard of it; this was indubi-tably where he joined, was received into, the order of Masons: since this was the first time they had stopped for longer than one afternoon, the horse able now to run for ten undisturbed days before the pursuit even heard about it, so that, when the pursuers left the valley, they were twice ten days behind the horse, since after two weeks of patient asking and listening up and down that thirty-mile-long mountain-cradled saucer, again, as at the scene of the original disappearance, they had not found one human being who had ever heard of the three-legged horse and the two men and the child, let alone seen them.

So when they heard of the horse next in Central Alabama, it was already gone from there, moving west again, the pursuers still a month behind across Mississippi: across the Mississippi River into Arkansas, pausing only as a bird pauses: not alighting, though the last thing the pause could have been called was hovering since the horse would be running, once more at that incredible, that unbelievable, speed (and at the incredible and unbelievable odds too; by report and rumor the two men-the aged Negro man of God, and the foul-mouthed white one to whom to grant the status of man was merely to accept Darkness' emissary in the stead of its actual prince and master-had won tens of thousands of dollars) as if their mundane progress across America were too slow to reg-ister on the eye, and only during those incredible moments against a white rail did the horse and the three adjunctive human beings become visible.

Whereupon the Federal deputy, the titular-by-protocol leader of the pursuit, found that, suddenly and with no warning, some-thing had happened to him which was to happen five years later in Paris to a British soldier even whose name he would never hear. He-the deputy-was a poet, not the writing kind, or anyway not Tuesday yet, but rather still one of Homer's mere mute orphan godchildren sired by blind chance into a wealthy and political New Orleans family and who, by that family's standards, had failed at Harvard and then wasted two years at Oxford before the family found out about it and fetched him home where, after some months under the threat of the full marshalate, he compromised with his father on the simple deputyship. And so that night-it was in Arkansas, in a new paint-rank hotel room in a little booming logging town, itself less old than last year-he realised what it was about the whole business that he had refused to accept ever since Weather-ford, Texas, and then in the next second dismissed it forever because what remained had not only to be the answer but the truth too; or not even the truth, but truth, because truth was truth: it didn't have to be anything; it didn't even care whether it was so or not even, looking (the deputy) at it not even in triumph but in humility, because an old Negro minister had already seen it with one glance going on two years ago now-a minister, a man of God, sworn and dedicated enemy of man's lusts and follies, yet who from that first moment had not only abetted theft and gam-bling, but had given to the same cause the tender virgin years of his own child as ever of old had Samuel's father or Abraham his Isaac; and not even with pride because at last he had finally seen the truth even if it did take him a year, but at least pride in the fact that from the very first, as he knew now, he had performed his part in the pursuit with passion and regret. So ten minutes Mer he waked his second-in-command, and two days later in the New York office he said, 'Give it up. You'll never catch him,'

'Meaning you wont,' the owner of the horse said. 'If you like it that way,' the deputy said. 'I've resigned,'

'You should have done that eight months ago when you quit,' Touche then,' the deputy said. 'If that makes you feel better too. Maybe what I'm trying to do now is apologise because I didn't know it eight months ago too.' He said: 'I know about what you have spent so far. You know what the horse is now. I'll give you my check for that amount. I'll buy your ruined horse from you. Call it off.' The owner told him what he had actually paid for the horse. It was almost as much as the public believed. 'All right,' the dep-uty said. 'I cant give you a check for that much, but I'll sign a note for it. Even my father wont live forever,' The owner pressed a button. A secretary entered. The owner spoke briefly to the sec-retary, who went out and returned and laid a check on the desk before the owner, who signed the check and pushed it across to the deputy. It was for a sum still larger than the difference between the horse's cost and that of the pursuit to date. It was made out to the deputy.

'That's your fee for catching my horse and deporting that Englishman and bringing my nigger back in handcuffs,' the owner said. The deputy folded the check twice and tore it across twice, the owner's thumb already on the buzzer as the deputy dropped the fragments carefully into an ashtray and was already standing to leave when the secretary opened the door again. 'Another check,' the owner said without even turning his head. 'Add to it the reward for the capture of the men who stole my horse.'

But he didn't even wait for that one, and it was Oklahoma before he (ex now) overtook the pursuit, joining it now as the private young man with money-or who had had it once and lost or spent it-had used to join Marlborough's continental tours (and indeed meeting among them who a week ago had been his com-panions in endeavor the same cold-fronted unanimity of half-con-tempt which the private young men would meet among Marlbor-ough's professionals). Then the little bleak railway stations be-tween a cattle-chute and a water-tank, the men in broad hats and heeled boots already clumped about the placard offering for a stolen horse a reward such as even Americans had never seen be-fore-the reproduction of a newspaper photograph made in Buenos Aires of the man and the horse together, with a printed description of both-a face as familiar and recognizable now to the cen-tral part of the United States (Canada and Mexico too) as that of a President or a female murderer, but above all, the sum, the amount of the reward-the black, succinct evocation of that golden Tuesday dream, that shining and incredible heap of dollars to be had by any man for the simple turn of a tongue, always ahead of them (of the pursuit certainly, and, the deputy now believed, of the pur-sued too), disseminating the poison faster than they advanced, faster even than the meteor-course of love and sacrifice, until al-ready the whole Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio watershed must be cor-rupt and befouled and at last the deputy knew that the end was in sight: thinking how it was no wonder that man had never been able to solve the problems of his span upon earth, since he has taken no steps whatever to educate himself, not in how to manage his lusts and follies; they harm him only in sporadic, almost indi-vidual instances; but in how to cope with his own blind mass and weight: seeing them---the man and the horse and the two Negroes whom they had snatched as it were willy nilly into that fierce and radiant orbit-doomed not at all because passion is ephemeral (which was why they had never found any better name for it, which was why Eve and the Snake and Mary and the Lamb and Ahab and the Whale and Androcles and Balzac's African deserter, and all the celestial zoology of horse and goat and swan and bull, were the firmament of man's history instead of the mere rubble of his past), nor even because the rape was theft and theft is wrong and wrong shall not prevail, but simply because, due to the sheer repetition of zeros behind a dollar-mark on a printed placard, everyone within eyerange or tongucspread (which was every hu-man capable of seeing and hearing between Canada and Mexico and the Rockies and the Appalachians) would be almost franti-cally attuned to the merest whisper regarding the horse's where-abouts.

No, it would not be much longer now, and for an instant he thought, toyed with the idea, of confounding corruption with cor-ruption: using the equivalent of the check which in New York he had offered to write, to combat the reward, and put that away because that would fail too: not that corrupting corruption would merely spread corruption that much further, but because the idea merely created an image which even a poet must regard as only a poet's fantastic whimsy: Mammon's David ringing for a moment anyway Mammon's Goliath's brazen invincible unregenerate skull. It was not long now, the end was actually in sight when the course, the run (as if it too knew that this was near the end) turned sharply back south and east across Missouri and into the closing V where the St. Francis River entered the Mississippi, haunted still by the ghosts of the old bank-and-railroad bandits who had refuged there; then over, finished, done: an afternoon, a little lost branch-line county seat with a fair grounds and a railless half-mile track, the pursuers crossing the infield in the van of a growing crowd of local people, town and swamp and farm, all men, silent, watching, not crowding them at all yet: just watching; and now for the first time they laid eyes on the thief whom they had pur-sued now for almost fifteen months: the foreigner, the Englishman leaning in the doorless frame of the fallen stable, the butt of the still-warm pistol protruding from the waistband of his filthy jodh-purs, and behind him the body of the horse shot neatly once through the star on its forehead and beyond the horse the Roman senator's head and the brushed worn frock coat of the old Negro preacher, and beyond him in turn, in deeper shadow still, the still white eyeballs of the child; and that night in the jail cell the ex-deputy (still a lawyer even though the prisoner violently and obscenely repudiated him) said: 'I would have done it too of course. But tell me why-No, I know why. I know the reason. I know it's true: I just want to hear you say it, hear both of us say it so I'll know it's real'-already-or still-speaking even through the other's single vicious obscene con-temptuous epithet: Tou could have surrendered the horse at any time and it could have stayed alive, but that was not it: not just to keep it alive, any more than for the few thousands or the few hundred thousands that people will always be convinced you won on it'-stopping then and even waiting, or anyway watching, exult-ant and calm while the prisoner cursed, not toward him nor even just at him, but him, the ex-deputy, steadily and for perhaps a full minute, with harsh and obscene unimagination, then the ex- Tuesday deputy speaking again, rapid and peaceful and soothing: 'All right, all right. The reason was so that it could run, keep on running, keep on losing races at least, finish races at least even if it did have to run them on three legs, did run them on three legs because it was a giant and didn't need even three legs to run them on but only one with a hoof at the end to qualify as a horse. While they would have taken it back to the Kentucky farm and shut it up in a whorehouse where it wouldn't need any legs at all, not even a sling suspended from a travelling crane geared by machinery to the rhythm of ejaculation, since a skillful pander with a tin cup and a rubber glove'-exultant and quite calm, murmuring: 'Fathering colts forever more; they would have used its ballocks to geld its heart with for the rest of its life, except that you saved it because any man can be a father, but only the best, the brave-' and left in the middle of the spent dull repetitive cursing and from New Orleans the next morning sent back the best lawyer which even he, with all the vast scope of his family's political affiliations and his own semi-professional and social ones, could find-a lawyer whose like the little lost Missouri town had probably never seen before, nor anyone else for that matter, as having come four hun-dred miles to defend a nameless foreign horse thief-telling the lawyer what he had seen there: the curious, watching attitude of the town-'A mob,' the lawyer said, with a sort of unction almost. 'It's a long time since I have coped with a mob,'

'No no,' the client said quickly. They are just watching, waiting for something, I didn't have time to find out what,'

And the lawyer saw that too. He found more than that: arriving on the second morning after an all-night drive in his private chauf-feured limousine, and within thirty minutes was on the telephone back to his client in New Orleans, because the man he had come to defend was gone, vanished, not escaped from the jail but freed from it, the lawyer sitting at the telephone where he could look out into the quiet square almost empty of movement, from which nobody watched him now nor for that matter had ever actually looked at him, but where he was conscious of them-not so much the dour, slow-speaking, half-Western, half-Southern faces, but of the waiting, the attention.

And not only the white man, the two Negroes were gone too, the lawyer on the New Orleans telephone again that evening, not because it had taken him this long to learn these meagre details, but simply because he realised now that this was all he was going to find out here, by inquiry or purchase or just by simple listening, no matter how much longer he stayed: how the two Negroes had never reached the jail at all but had vanished apparently into thin air somewhere between it and the courthouse, where the ex-dep-uty's Federal successor had formally relinquished the three pris-oners to the local sheriff; only the white man ever to reach the jail, because the ex-deputy had seen him there, and he gone too now, not even freed so much as just vanished, the lawyer discov-ering five minutes after his arrival that there was no prisoner, and at the end of thirty no felon, and by mid-afternoon no crime even, the body of the horse having vanished too some time during that first night, and nobody had moved it nor seen anyone moving it nor heard of anyone who might have moved it or in fact even knew that it was missing.

But the pursuit had long ago learned about all there was to know about those two weeks in the Eastern Tennessee valley last fall, and the ex-deputy had briefed the lawyer, and so to the lawyer there was no mystery about it; he had already divined the solution: there would be Masons in Missouri too-an opinion which the client in New Orleans didn't even bother to ignore, let alone acknowledge, not the ex-deputy's but the poet's voice actually babbling at his end of the wire while the lawyer was still talking: 'About the money,' the lawyer said. 'They searched him, of course-'

'All right, all right,' the ex-deputy said.-right perhaps, justice certainly, might not have prevailed, but something more impor-tant had-'He had only ninety-four dollars and a few cents,' the lawyer said.

The old Negro has got the rest of it in the tail of that frock-coat,' the ex-deputy said.-truth, love, sacrifice, and something else even more important than they: some bond between or from man to his brother man stronger than even the golden shackles which coopered precariously his ramshackle earth-Til be damned,' the lawyer said. 'Of course that's where the money is. Why the hell I didn't-Hush, and listen to me a min-ute. There's nothing more I can do here, so I'm coming back to town as soon as they unlock the garage in the morning and I can get my car. But you are already on the scene, you can do it quicker than I can by telephone from here. Get in touch with your people and get notice spread up and down the valley as quick as you can-placards, descriptions of all three of them-'

'No,' the ex-deputy said. 'You must stay there. If anything fur-ther comes out of the charge, it will have to originate there. You must be there to protect him.'

The only one who will need protection here is the first man who tries to lay a hand on the man who earned as much money as they believe he did, with nothing but his bare hands and a three-legged horse,' the lawyer said. 'He's a fool. If he had stayed here, he could have had the sheriff's badge without even running for it. But I can do everything necessary by telephone from my office until we catch them.'

'I said from the first that you didn't understand,' the ex-deputy said. 'No: that you still did not believe me, even after I tried to tell you. I dont want to find him-them. I had my turn at bat, and struck out. You stay there. That's what you are for,' the ex-deputy said, and hung up. Though still the lawyer didn't move, his end of the connection still open, the smoke from his cigar standing like a balanced pencil on a carven hand until the other New Orleans number answered and he spoke to his confidential clerk, describing the two Negroes, rapid and explicit and succinct: 'Cover all the river towns from St. Louis to Basin Street. Watch the cabin or stable or whatever it is in Lexington. Of course, if he doesn't go back home himself, he might try to send the child back,'

'You're in the middle of a pretty good place to look for him now,' the clerk said. 'If the sheriff there wont-'

'Listen to me,' the lawyer said. 'Listen carefully. He must not reappear here under any condition. He must not be found at all until he can be picked up for something like vagrancy in some city big enough for nobody to know who he is, or care. Under no con-dition must he come into the clutches of any local officers in any town or hamlet small enough even to have heard of that three-legged horse, let alone seen it. Do you understand?'

A moment: then the clerk: 'So they really did win that much money,'

'Do as I tell you,' the lawyer said.

'Of course,' the clerk said. 'Only you're too late. The owner of the horse has already beat you. The police here have had that notice ever since yesterday, and I imagine the police everywhere have it by now-description, reward and all. They even know where the money is: in the tail-pocket of that preacher's coat the nigger wears. It's too bad every house he passes dont have a wireless, like ships do. Then he would know how valuable he is, and he would have something to trade with you on.'

'Do as I tell you,' the lawyer said; that was the second day; then the third day and the lawyer had established his headquarters or post of command in the judge's chambers next the courtroom in the courthouse, not by the consent or even acquiescence of the judge who was a circuit judge and merely followed the itinerary of his court and did not live in the town and was not even consulted, nor by the acquiescence of the town either but by its will, so that it did not even matter whether the judge was a Mason too or not; and in the barbershop that day the lawyer saw last night's St. Louis paper bearing something which even purported to be a photograph of the old Negro, with the usual description and even a guess at the amount of money in the tail of the frock-coat, the barber, busy with another client, having apparently glanced at least once at the lawyer where he stood looking at the paper, because the barber said, That many folks hunting for him ought to find him,' then Tuesday silence and then a voice from the other end of the shop, speaking to nothing and no one and with no inflection: 'Several thousand dollars,'

Then the fourth day, when the Depar'I'ment of Justice investi-gator and the one from the sheriff's bonding company arrived (the first St. Louis reporter had reached the scene one train ahead of the U. P. man from Little Rock) and from his high small quiet borrowed window the lawyer watched the two strangers and the sheriff and the two men who would be the sheriff's local bonds-men cross the square not to the front door of the bank but around to the discreet side one which led directly to the president's office; five minutes there, then out again, the two strangers stopping while the sheriff and the two local men scattered and vanished, the two strangers looking after them until the Federal man removed his hat and seemed to be studying the inside of it for a moment, a second. Then he turned briskly, leaving the bonding company's man still looking out across the square, and crossed to the hotel and entered it and reappeared with his strapped bag and sat down on the bench opposite the bus stop; and then the bonding com-pany's man moved too and crossed to the hotel and reappeared with his bag.

Then the fifth day and the sixth and even the two reporters had returned to where they came from and there remained in the town no stranger save the lawyer; nor was he a stranger any more now, though he was never to know by what means the town had learned or divined that he was there not to prosecute but to shield; and at times during that idleness and waiting, he would imagine, envision himself actually in court with the man whom he had not only no expectation but even intention of ever seeing at all---a picture of himself not engaged in just one more monotonous legal victory, but as a-perhaps the-figure in a pageant which in reality would be an historical commemoration, in fact, even more than that: the affirmation of a creed, a belief, the declaration of an undying faith, the postulation of an invincible way of life: the loud strong voice of America itself out of the westward roar of the tremendous and battered yet indomitably virgin continent, where nothing save the vast unmoral sky limited what a man could try to do, nor even the sky limit his success and the adulation of his fellow man; even the defence he would employ would be in the old fine strong American tradition of rapine, its working precedent having been already established in this very-or anyway approximate-land by an older and more successful thief than any English groom or Negro preacher: John Murrell himself, himself his own attorney: the rape was not a theft but merely a misdemeanor, since the placard offering the reward before the horse's demise had constituted a legal power of attorney authorising any man's hand to the body of the horse, and its violation had been a simple breach of trust, the burden of the proof of which lay with the pursuers since they would have to prove that the man had not been trying simply to find the owner and restore him his property all the time.

This, out of daydream's idle unexpectation, because the lawyer did not really expect ever to see either of them, since the owner or the Federal Government would indubitably catch them first, right up to the morning of the seventh day when there was a knock at the jail's kitchen door-a knock not much louder than audibility, yet quite firm; and, firm, yet not at all peremptory: just polite, courteous and firm: a knock not often heard at the back door of a small Missouri jail, nor even quite at the back door of an Arkansas or Louisiana or Mississippi plantation house, where it might sooner have been at home, the turnkey's wife wiping her hands on her apron as she turned from the sink and opened the door on a middle-ageless Negro man in a worn brushed frock-coat and carrying a napless tophat, whom she did not recognise because she had not expected to see him there, possibly because he was alone, the boy, the child still standing five minutes later just inside the mouth of the alley beside the jail, where neither he nor the old one gave any sign of recognition whatever, although his grandfather-hand-cuffed now to the turnkey-actually brushed him in passing.

But her husband recognised him at once, not by the face, he scarcely glanced at that, but by the coat: the worn dusty broad- Tuesday cloth garment which-not the man but the coat, and not even the whole coat but the elbow-deep, suitcase-roomy tails of it-the county and state police of five contiguous commonwealths had been blocking roads and searching farm wagons and automobiles and freight trains and the Jim Crow cars of passenger ones, and charging in pairs and threes with shotguns and drawn pistols through the pool halls and burial associations and the kitchens and bedrooms of Negro tenements for sixty-five hours now, trying to find. As did the town too: the turnkey and his shackled prize had scarcely left the jail before they began to gather behind them a growing tail of men and youths and small boys like that of a rising kite, which in the street leading to the square the turnkey could still tell himself that he was leading, and which while crossing the square toward the courthouse he even still looked as if he was, walking faster and faster, almost dragging the prisoner at the other end of the chain joining them, until at last he broke and even took one step actually running before he stopped and turned to face the pressing crowd, drawing the pistol from its holster all in one blind motion like the hopeless and furious repudiation of the boy turning, once more whole, stainless and absolved, to hurl his toy pistol into the very face of the charging elephant, victim no more of terror but of pride, and cried in a thin forlorn voice which itself was like the manless voice of a boy: 'Stop, men! This hyer's the Law!'-who, without doubt if they had run at him, would have stood his ground, still holding the pistol which he had not and would not even cock, dying without a struggle beneath the trampling feet in that one last high second of his badge and warrant-a small, mild, ordinary man whom you have seen in his ten thousands walking the streets of little Ameri-can towns, and some not so little either, not just in the vast central valley but on the eastern and western watersheds and the high mountain plateaus too, who had received his job and office out of that inexhaustible reservoir of nepotism from which, during the hundred-odd years since the republic's founding, almost that many millions of its children had received not just their daily bread but a little something over for Saturday and Chris'I'mas too, since, coeval with the republic, it was one of the prime foundations-in this case, from the current sheriff, whose remote kinswoman, to his unending surprise and unbelief even ten years afterward, the turn-key had somehow managed to marry-a man so quiet so mild and so ordinary that none remarked the manner in which he accepted and affirmed the oath when sworn into his office: merely somebody else's nameless and unknown cousin by blood or maybe just mar-riage, promising to be as brave and honest and loyal as anyone could or should expect for the pay he would receive during the next four years in a position he would lose the day the sheriff went out of office, turning to meet his one high moment as the male mayfly concentrates his whole one day of life in the one evening act of procreation and then relinquishes it. But the crowd was not run-ning at him: only walking, and that only because he was between them and the courthouse, checking for an instant at sight of the drawn pistol, until a voice said: 'Take that thing away from him before he hurts somebody,' and they did: a hand, not ungently nor even unkindly, wrenching the pistol firmly from him, the crowd moving again, converging on him, the same voice, not impatient so much as irascible, speaking to him by name this time: 'Gwan, Irey. Get out of the sun': so that, turning again, the turn-key faced merely another gambit, he must choose all over again: cither to acquiesce forevermore to man or sever himself forever-more from the human race by the act-getting either himself or the prisoner free from one end or the other of the steel chain joining them-which would enable him to flee. Or not flee, not flight; who to dispute the moment's heroic image even in that last second: no puny fumbling with a blind mechanical insentient key, but instead one single lightning-stroke of sword or scimitar across the betraying wrist and then running, the scarlet-spurting stump in-evictably aloft like an unbowed pennon's staff or the undefeated lance's headless shank, not even in adjuration but in abdication of all man and his corruption.

But there was not even time for that; his only choice was against Tuesday being trampled as, shoulder to shoulder now with his captive and, if anything, slightly behind him, they moved on in the center of the crowd, across the square and into the courthouse, a firm hand now grasping him above the elbow and thrusting him firmly on exactly as he had nightly dreamed ever since he assumed his office of himself in the act of doing, as soon as he found a felon either small enough or mild enough to permit him, through the corridor and up the stairs to the judge's chambers, where the New Orleans lawyer gave one start of outrage then of astonishment and then the infinitesimal flicker which never reached his face at all nor even his eyes, until the same calm merely irascible voice said, This aint big enough. We'll use the courtroom,' and he (the lawyer) was moving too, the three of them now-himself, the turnkey and the prisoner like three hencoops on a flood-filling the little room with a sibi-lant sound as though all the ghosts of Coke upon Littleton upon Blackstone upon Napoleon upon Julius Caesar had started up and back in one inextricable rustle, one aghast and dusty cry, and through the opposite door into the courtroom itself, where sud-denly the lawyer was not only himself free of the crowd, he had managed (quite skilfully for all his bulk: a man not only tall but big, in rich dark broadcloth and an immaculate pique waistcoat and a black cravat bearing a single pearl like the egg of a celestial humming bird) to extricate the turnkey and the prisoner too, in the same motion kneeing the swing gate in the low railing enclosing Bench and witness stand and jury box and counsels' tables, and thrust the other two through it and followed and let the gate swing back while the crowd itself poured on into the auditorium.

People were entering now not only through the judge's chambers but through the main doors at the back too, not just men and boys now but women also-young girls who already at eight and nine in the morning had been drinking Coca-Cola in the drug-stores, and housewives testing meat and cabbages in the groceries and markets, or matching scraps of lace and buttons over drygoods counters-until not just the town but the county itself, all of which had probably seen the three-legged horse run, and most of which had contributed at least one or two each of the dollars (by now the total had reached the thirty thousands) which the two men had won and which the old Negro preacher had escaped with and indu-bitably concealed-seemed to be converging steadily into the court-house, ringing with unhurried thunder the corridor and stairs and the cavernous courtroom itself, filling row by row the hard pew-like wooden benches until the last reverberation faded behind the cool frantic pulsing of pigeons in the clock tower on the roof and the brittle chitter and rattle of sparrows in the sycamores and locusts in the yard, and the calm merely irascible voice said-and not from behind any face but as though no one man spoke but rather the room itself: 'All right, Mister. Commence,'

And, standing with his prize behind the railing's flimsy sanctu-ary, bayed, trapped in fact, between the little wooden barrier which a child could step over in one stride like a degree of latitude or of honesty, and the sacred dais to which, even before he saw it, he had already lost his appeal, not alone except for his two companions nor even despite them, but in fact because of them, for a moment yet the lawyer watched Man pouring steadily into the tabernacle, the shrine itself, of his last tribal mysteries, entering it without temerity or challenge, because why not? it was his, he had decreed it, built it, sweated it up: not out of any particular need nor any long agony of hope, because he was not aware of any lack or long history of agony or that he participated in any long chroni-cle of frustrated yearning, but because he wanted it, could afford it, or anyway was going to have it whether he could afford it or not: to be no symbol nor cradle nor any mammalian apex, harbor where the incredible cockleshell of his invincible dream made soundings at last from the chartless latitudes of his lost beginnings and where, like that of the enduring sea, the voice of his affirmation roared murmuring home to the atoll-dais of his unanimity where no mere petty right, but blind justice itself, reigned ruthless and inattentive amid the deathless smells of his victories: his stale tobacco spit and his sweat. Because to begin with, he was not he but they, and they only by electing to be, because what he actually Tuesday was, was I and in the first place he was not a mammal and as for his chartless latitudes, he not only knew exactly where he came from six thousand years ago, but that in three score and ten or thereabouts he was going back there; and as for affirmation, the mark of a free man was his right to say no for no other reason except no, which answered for the unanimity too; and the floor was his because he had built it, paid for it, and who could spit on it if not he. And perhaps the lawyer had even read Dickens and Hugo once long ago when he was a young man, looking now across the flimsy barrier into no brick-and-plaster barn built yesterday by the God-fearing grandfathers of other orderly and decorous and God-fearing Missouri farmers, but back a hundred years into the stone hall older than Orleans or Capet or Charlemagne, filled with the wooden sabots until yesterday recking with plowed land and ma-nure, which had stained and fouled the trampled silks and lilies which had lasted a thousand years and were to have endured ten thousand more, and the caps of Mediterranean fishermen, and the smocks of cobblers and porters and road-menders stiffening with the crimson smears of the hands which had rent and cast down the silks and the lilies, looking out at them not even with mere awe and respect, not alone alarm, but with triumph and pride: pride in the triumph of man, and that out of all his kind, time and geogra-phy had matched him with this hour:--America, the United States in this April of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fourteen, where man had had a hundred and forty years in which to become so used to liberty that the simple unchallenged right to attend its ordered and regimented charades sufficed to keep him quiet and content; looking out at them a moment longer, then he turned and struck the handcuffs a sharp and almost musical blow and thun-dered down at the turnkey: 'What does this mean? Dont you know that no man shall be put twice in the same jeopardy?' then turned again and spoke into the room in that same voice like the rich snore of an organ: 'This man has been illegally arrested. The law compels his right to consult a lawyer. We will recess for ten minutes,' and turned again and opened the gate in the railing this time by thrusting the other two through it and on ahead of him toward the door to the judge's chambers, not even looking back as five men rose at the back of the room and went out through the mam doors, and thrust the Negro and the turnkey into the judge's chambers and followed and shut the door and-the turnkey told this afterward-without even stop-ping, went on to the opposite door and opened it and was already standing in it when the five men from the courtroom came around the corner.

'Five minutes, gentlemen,' the lawyer said. Then we will resume in the courtroom,' and closed the door and came back to where the turnkey and the Negro stood. But he didn't even look at the Negro; and the turnkey, spent, exhausted, almost comatose from courage and excitement, discovered, realised with a kind of out-raged unbelief that the lawyer, who had voluntarily given himself only ten minutes to do whatever he intended to do, was apparently going to use up some of them smoking, watching the lawyer pro-duce the cigar from an upper pocket of the white vest which looked as if it had come right out from under the washerwoman's smoothing-iron five minutes ago-a pocket which contained three more just like it. Then the turnkey recognised its brand and therefore its cost-one dollar-because he had owned one once (and on the following Sunday morning smoked it) through the mistake of a stranger under the impression that it was the sheriff who had mar-ried his, the turnkey's, sister instead of he who had married the sheriff's brother's wife's niece, recognised it with grief and outrage too, the same thing happening again but this time a thousand times worse: the man who gave him the other cigar had asked nothing of him, whereas he knew now and at last what the lawyer wanted, was after, had been after all the while, setting the price of his, the turnkey's, corruption at that of one-dollar cigar: this was the forty thousand dollars which the nigger had escaped with and hidden so good that even the Federal Government couldn't find it. Then the grief and outrage was not even outrage, let alone grief; it was triumph and pride and even joy too, since not only had the Tuesday lawyer already lost even before he laid eyes on the nigger, he (the lawyer) wasn't even going to find it out until he (the turnkey) got good and ready to tell him, waiting for the lawyer to speak first, with no organ in the voice either now, which instead was as hard and calm and cold and vacant of trash as that of his wife's uncle-by-marnage: You've got to get him out of town. It's your only chance.' And maybe his (the turnkey's) voice wasn't too calm and maybe to a big-city lawyer it didn't sound too hard either. But even one as big as this one could have heard the finality in it and, if he listened, the scorn and the contempt and the pleasure too: 'I can think of another. In fact, I'm fixing right now to take it.' Then to the nigger: 'Come on': already moving toward the corridor door, drawing the nigger after him, and already reaching from the snap on his belt the ring containing the handcuff key. Tou're thinking of that money. I aint. Because it aint mine to think about. It's his, half of it, that is; whether or not a nigger aint got any business with half of forty thousand dollars aint none of my busi-ness nor yours neither. And soon as I unlock these handcuffs, he can go and get it,' and turned the knob and had opened the door when the voice stopped him-the hard calm not even loud voice behind him sounding like somebody dropping pebbles into a churn: 'Neither am I. Because there's not any money. I'm not even thinking about you. I'm thinking about your bondsmen': and (the turnkey) heard the match and turned in time to watch the flame's hunchy squat at the drawing cigar's tip and the first pale puff of smoke hiding for an instant the lawyer's face.

That's all right too,' the turnkey said. 'I been living in the jail two years already. So I wont even have to move. I expect I can even stand chain-gang work too.'

Tab,' the lawyer said, not through smoke but in smoke, by means of smoke, the puff, the spurt, the pale rich costly balloon bursting, vanishing, leaving the hard calm not loud word as durable and single as a piece of gravel or a buckshot: When you arrested this man the second time, you broke the law. As soon as you turn him loose, he wont have to hunt for a lawyer because there are probably a dozen of them from Memphis and Saint Louis and Little Rock waiting down there in the yard now, just hoping you will have no more sense than to turn him loose. They're not going to put you in jail. They're not even going to sue you. Because you haven't got any money or know where any is, any more than this nigger does. They're going to sue your bondsmen-whoever they were and whatever it was they thought you could do for them-and your-what is it? brother-in-law?--the sheriff.'

They were my-' he started to say kinsmen, but they were not, they were his wife's kinsmen; he had plenty of his own, but none of them-or all of them together, for that matter-had enough money in a bank anywhere to guarantee a bond. Then he started to say friends, but they were his wife's family's friends too. But then it didn't matter what he said, because the voice had already read his mind: '-which makes it harder; you might leave your own kinfolks holding the sack, but these are the sheriff's friends and you've got to sleep in the same bed with his niece every night.' Which was wrong too, since three years and two months and thirteen nights ago now, but that didn't matter either, the cigar smoking in the judge's ashtray now, and the voice: 'Come back here': and he returned, drawing the Negro with him, until they stood facing the white vest with its loop of watch-chain like a section of gold plow-trace, and the voice: 'You've got to get him into a jail somewhere where they can hold him long enough for you to put a charge on him that the law will accept. They can turn him loose the next day or the next minute if they want to; all you want is to have him on record as having been charged with a legal crime or misde-meanor by a legally qualified officer of a legally constituted court, then when his lawyers sue your bondsmen for false arrest, they can tell them to go chase themselves,'

'What charge?' the turnkey said.

'What's the next big jail from here? Not a county seat: a town Tuesday with at least five thousand people in it?' The turnkey told him. 'All right. Take him there. Take my car; it's in the hotel garage; I'll telephone my driver from here. Only, you'll-but surely I dont need to tell you how to spirit a prisoner out of the clutches of a mob,' Which was true too, that was a part of the turnkey's dream too; he had planned it all, run it through his mind out to the last splendid and victorious gesture, time and again since that moment two years ago when he had laid his hand on the Book and sworn the oath, not that he really expected it to happen but to be pre-pared against that moment when he should be called upon to prove not merely his fitness for his office but his honor and courage as a man, by preserving and defending the integrity of his oath in the very face of them by whose sufferance he held his office.

Tes,' he said. 'Only-'

'All right,' the lawyer said. 'Unlock that damn thing. Here, give me the key': and took it from his hand and unlocked the handcuffs and flung them onto the table, where they made again that faint musical note.

'Only-' the turnkey said again.

'Now go around by the corridor and shut the big door to the courtroom and lock it on the outside.'

That wont stop them-hold them-'

'Dont worry about them. I'll attend to that. Go on.'

'Yes,' he said, and turned, then stopped again. 'Wait. What about them fellows outside the door there?' For perhaps two or three seconds the lawyer didn't say anything at all, and when he did speak, it was as though there was nobody else in the room, or in fact as though he was not even speaking aloud.

'Five men. And you a sworn officer of the law, armed. You might even draw your pistol. They're not dangerous, if you're careful.'

'Yes,' he said, and turned again and stopped again, not looking back: just stopping as he had turned. 'That charge,'

'Vagrancy,' the lawyer said.

'Vagrancy?' he said. 'A man owning half of forty-five thousand dollars?'

Tab,' the lawyer said. 'He doesn't own half of anything, even one dollar. Go on,' But now it was he who didn't move; maybe he didn't look back, but he didn't move either, talking himself this time, and calm enough too: 'Because this thing is all wrong. It's backwards. The law spirits a nigger prisoner out of jail and out of town, to protect him from a mob that wants to take him out and burn him. All these folks want to do is to set this one free,'

'Dont you think the law should cut both ways?' the lawyer said. 'Dont you think it should protect people who didn't steal forty-five thousand dollars too?'

Yes,' the turnkey said; and now he looked at the lawyer, his hand on the doorknob again but not turning it yet. 'Only that aint the question I want to ask anyway. And I reckon you got an answer to this one too and I hope it's a good one-' speaking calm and slow and clear himself too: This is all to it. I just take him to Blankton long enough to get a legal charge on the books. Then he can go.'

'ook at his face,' the lawyer said. 'He hasn't got any money. He doesn't even know where any is. Neither of them do, because there never was any and what little there might have been, that cockney swipe threw away long ago on whores and whisky,'

'You still aint answered,' the turnkey said. 'As soon as the charge is on the books, he can go,'

'Yes,' the lawyer said. 'Lock the courtroom doors first. Then come back for the nigger,' Then the turnkey opened the door; the five men stood there but he didn't even falter: on through and past them; then suddenly, instead of following the corridor to the courtroom's rear door as the lawyer had ordered him, he turned toward the stairs, moving fast now, not running: just moving fast, down the stairs and along the hall to the office of his wife's uncle-in-law, deserted now, and into the office, around the partition and straight to the drawer and opened it and without even faltering, took from beneath the mass of old discharged warrants and incom-plete subpoenas and paper clips and rubber stamps and corroded Tuesday pen points, the spare office pistol and slipped it into the empty holster and returned to the hall and mounted the opposite stair-way which brought him to the main courtroom doors and drew them quietly to, even as a face, then three, then a dozen, turned to look at him, and turned the key in the lock and withdrew it and put it into his pocket, already hurrying again, even running now, back to the judge's chambers where the lawyer had put the receiver back on its hook and pushed the telephone away and reached for the cigar in the ashtray and actually looked for the first time at the Negro, drawing the cigar to life in one slow inhale-exhale and through the smoke for the first time examined the calm no-aged Roman senator's face framed in a narrow unclosed circlet of griz-zled hair clasping the skull like a Caesar's laurels above the aged worn carefully brushed carefully mended frock coat, and then spoke, the two of them in succinct flat poste-riposte that was almost monotone: 'You haven't got any money, have you?'

'No,'

'You dont even know where any is, do you?'

'No,'

'Because there's not any. There never was. And even that little, your white bully boy threw away before you even saw it-'

'You're wrong. And you believe you're wrong too. Because I know-'

'All right. Maybe it was even a whole hundred dollars,'

'More than that,'

'More than thirty thousand dollars?' and only the faintest hesi-tation here; no faulting: only an interval: the voice still strong, still invincibly unshaken and unshakable: 'Yes,'

'How much more than thirty thousand dollars?... All right. How much more than a hundred dollars?... Did you ever have a hundred dollars? Ever see a hundred dollars?... All right. You know it's more than a hundred dollars, but you dont know how much more. Is that it?'

'Yes. But you dont need to worry-'

'And you came back to get your half of the hundred dollars anyway,'

'I came back to tell him good-bye before he goes back home,'

'Back home?' the lawyer said quickly. 'You mean, England? Did he tell you that?' and the other, insuperably calm, insuperably intractable: 'How could he told me? Because he wouldn't need to. When a man comes to the place where he aint got anything left worth spending or losing, he always goes back home. But you dont need to worry, because I know what you're fixing to do: lock me up in the jail until he hears about it in the newspapers and comes back. And you're right, because that's what he'll do, because he needs me too. And you dont need to worry about how much money it is; it'll be enough for all the lawyers too,'

'Like the loaves and the fishes?' the lawyer said. But this time it was not an interval; there was no answer at all, serenely nothing, and the interval was the lawyer's to put an end to: 'So he's the one who needs you. Yet he's the one who has the forty thousand dollars. How can anyone with forty thousand dollars need you?' And again the interval, intractable and serene, again the lawyer's to break: 'Are you an ordained minister?'

'I dont know. I bears witness,'

To what? God?'

To man. God dont need me. I bears witness to Him of course, but my main witness is to man,'

The most damning thing man could suffer would be a valid wit-ness before God,'

'You're wrong there,' the Negro said. 'Man is full of sin and nature, and all he does dont bear looking at, and a heap of what he says is a shame and a mawkery. But cant no witness hurt him. Some day something might beat him, but it wont be Satan,' and turned, both of them, at the sound of the door and saw the turnkey inside the room, trying to hold the corridor door, braced against its slow remorseless movement until the yawn's full inswing dismissed Tuesday him completely into the wall and the five men from the corridor entered, the lawyer already moving before they had got inside the room, crossing to the opposite courtroom door, saying over his shoulder: This way, gentlemen,' and opened the door and stood aside holding it: no gesture or motion commanding nor even peremptory as, docile and simultaneous as five sheep, they filed across the room after him like five of the identical targets-ducks or clay pipes or stars-traversing on their endless chain the lillipu-tian range of a shooting-gallery, and on through the door, the lawyer following on the last one's heels and saying over his shoul-der to the turnkey or the Negro or perhaps both or perhaps neither: 'Five minutes,' and followed, on and then through the five men who had stopped, huddled, blocking the narrow passage as if they had walked full tilt, as into an invisible wall, into the room's massed and waiting expectation; and on through the swing gate into the enclosure, to stop facing the room in almost the same prints he had stood in ten minutes ago, solitary this time but any-thing but alone amid, against, as a frieze or tapestry, that titanic congeries of the long heroic roster who were the milestones of the rise of man-the giants who coerced compelled directed and, on occasion, actually led his myriad moil: Caesar and Christ, Bona-parte and Peter and Mazarin and Alexander, Genghis and Talley-rand and Warwick, Marlborough and Bryan, Bill Sunday, General Booth and Prester John, prince and bishop, Norman, dervish, plotter and khan, not for the power and glory nor even the aggrandisement; these were merely secondarily concomitant and even acci-dental; but for man: by putting some of him in one motion in one direction, by him of him and for him, to disjam the earth, get him for a little while at least out of his own way-standing there a moment, then two, then three, not accepting but compelling the entire blast of the cynosure as in the twilit room the mirror con-centrates to itself all of light and all else owns visibility only at second hand; four then five then six, while breathed no sound no sigh no sound of breathing even save the watch-chain's golden sough and the thin insistent music of the pearl, still holding as in his palm like putty, the massed anonymity and the waiting as the sculptor holds for another moment yet the malleable obedient unimpatient clay, or the conductor across his balanced untensile hands the wand containing within its weightless pencil-gleam all the loud fury and love and anguish.

Then he moved his hand, feeling as he did so the whole vast weight of the watching and the attention concentrate in one beam upon it as the magician's hand compels, and took out the watch and snapped it open, seeing even as he calculated the elapsed creep of the hands, within the lid's mellow concavity as in the seer's crystal ball, the shadowy miniatures of the turnkey and the prisoner who should be well into the square by now and even perhaps al-ready in the alley leading to the hotel garage; even at the moment there came into the room the rising roar of an automobile engine, then the sound of the car itself rushing fast into the square and across and out of it, rushing on at that contemptuous and reckless gait at which his insolent Negro driver always drove when, under his master's orders, the car contained passengers whom the driver considered beneath him or beneath the car's splendor-a swaggering demi-d'Artagnan of a mulatto murderer whom the lawyer had let remain in the penitentiary at hard labor for exactly one year and one day, as the handler wires the dead game bird to the neck of the disobedient hunting dog, then getting him out on parole, not that he (the lawyer) held any brief even for the murder of this particular woman, but because of the way it had been done; apparently with the razor already naked in his hand, the man had not driven the woman out of the cabin, but had simply harried and chivvied her through a scene which, as the lawyer imagined it, must have had the quality of ballet, until the woman broke and ran out of the house screaming into the moonlit lane, running without doubt toward the sanctuary of the white kitchen where she worked, until the man without haste overtook her, not to catch, grasp at her, but simply ran past her with one single neat surgeon-like back-handed slash of the razor, running into, then out of, the instant's immobility into which all motion flowed in one gesture Tuesday of formulated epicene, almost finicking, even niggardly fatal violence like the bullfighter's, the two of them running on side by side for two or three paces in the moonlight until the woman fell, the man not even spotted and the blade itself barely befouled, as if he had severed not a jugular but a scream and restored merely to the midnight, silence.

So the lawyer could have stopped now, with one word leaving them once more fixed, as with one twitch of his cape the espada does the bull, and walk again through the door to the judge's chambers and on to the hotel and pack and strap his bag. But he did not: who owed this little more, as the old pagan, before he quaffed it empty, tilted always from the goblet's brimming rim one splash at least upon the hearth, not to placate but simply in recognition of them who had matched him with his hour upon the earth; in one of the houses on one of the best streets in one of the most unassailable sections of New Orleans, he owned a picture, a painting, no copy but proved genuine and coveted, for which he had paid more than he liked to remember even though it had been validated by experts before he bought it and revalidated twice since and for which he had been twice offered half again what he had paid for it, and which he had not liked then and still didn't and was not even certain he knew what it meant, but which was his own now and so he didn't even have to pretend that he liked it, which-so he believed then, with more truth than any save himself knew-he affirmed to have bought for the sole purpose cf not having to pretend that he liked it; one evening, alone in his study (wifeless and childless, in the house too save for the white-jacketed soft-footed not tamed but merely tractable mulatto murderer) suddenly he found himself looking at no static rectangle of disturbing Mediterranean blues and saffrons and ochres, nor even at the signboard affirming like a trumpet-blast the inevictable establishment in coeval space of the sum of his past-the house in its unimpeachable street, the membership in clubs some of whose doors were older than the state and behind which his father's name would, could, never have disturbed the air, and the cryptic num- bers which opened his lock boxes and monotonous incrementation of his securities-lists-but instead was looking at the cognizance of his destiny like the wind-hard banner of the old Norman earl be-neath whose vast shadow not just bankers and politicians clicked and sprang nor governors and lieutenants blenched and trembled but at the groaning tables in whose kitchens and sculleries or even open courtyards and kennels daily sixty thousand who wore no swords and spurs and owned no surnames made the one last su-preme sacrifice: the free gift of their pauperism, and (the lawyer) thought: I didn't really earn this. I didn't have time. I didn't even need to earn it; man out of his boundless and incalculable folly foisted it on me before I even had time to resist him; and closed the watch and put it back into the waistcoat pocket and then the voice, not even raised, murmurous, ventriloquial, source-less, as though it were not even he but circumambience, the room, the high unsubstanced air itself somewhere about or among the soaring and shadowy cornices, not speaking to the faces but rather descending, not as sound but as benison, as light itself upon the docile, the enduring, the triumphing heads: 'Ladies, gentlemen-' then not louder: merely sharp peremptory and succinct, like the report of a small whip or a toy pistol: 'Demo-crats: On the fourth of November two years ago there rose from the ballot boxes of America the sun of a thousand years of peace and prosperity such as the world has never seen; on the fourth day of November two years from now, we will see it set again, if the octopus of Wall Street and the millionaire owners of New England factories have their way, waiting and watching their chance to erect once more the barricade of a Yankee tariff between the Southern farmer and the hungry factories and cheap labor of the old world in Europe already entered into its own millennium of peace and reason, freed at last after two thousand years of war and the fear of war, panting only to exchange at a price you can afford to accept, your wheat and corn and cotton for the manufactured goods necessary to your life and happiness and that of your chil-dren at a price you can afford to pay, affirming again that inalien- Tuesday able right decreed by our forefathers a hundred and twenty-six years ago of liberty and free trade: the right of man to sell the produce of his own sweat and labor wherever and whenever he wants to, without fear or favor of New York capitalists or New England factory owners already spending like water the money ground out of the child labor of their sweat-shops, to divert to the farthest corners of the earth the just profits of your sweat and labor, so that not your wives and children, but those of African savages and heathen Chinese will have the good roads and the schools and the cream separators and the automobiles-' then al-ready in motion before he stopped speaking, crossing rapidly to the gate in the railing as with one concerted unhaste the entire room stood up, not flowing so much as swaying toward the main doors at the back, since almost at once a voice said from the doors: 'Hit's locked,' the sway not even pausing, only reversing and becoming a flow: one murmurous hollow roaring of feet, not run-ning: merely shuffling yet as the crowd flowed back toward and into the narrow passage leading to the judge's chambers, where the lawyer, passing rapidly through the swing gate, now stood between them and the door; and even as he thought, My first mistake was moving he made another.

'Stand back, men,' he said and even raised his hand, palm out, seeing, marking for the first time, faces, individual faces and eyes which least of all were those of individuals now, but rather one single face bearing steadily down on him and overwhelming him until suddenly he was moving backward: no shock, no concussion, but simply enclosed, accepted into one moving envelopment; he stumbled once but immediately what felt like a dozen quick firm impersonal hands steadied and even turned him and then checked him while others reached past him and opened the door to the judge's chambers, not flinging nor even sweeping him aside, but evacuating, voiding him back into the wall as the crowd flowed on across the little room to the opposite corridor door, already emptying the room before they had had time to fill it, so that he knew that the first ones out had gone around to the main courtroom doors and unlocked them, so that not only the corridor but the whole building was murmuring again with the hollow unhurried thunder of feet while he stood for a moment more against the wall with in the center of the once-immaculate waistcoat the print, not smeared: just blurred, not hurried, just firm and plain and light, of a hand.

And suddenly, in outrage and prescience, he started, actually sprang almost, already knowing what he would see before he reached the window, looking through it down into the square where they had already halted, the turnkey already facing back toward the courthouse as he fumbled inside his coat; except there were three of them now and the lawyer thought, rapid, inattentive and with no surprise: Oh yes, the child who rode the horse and looked no more at the turnkey scrabbling clumsily beneath his coat-tail but watched instead the deliberate pour of the crowd from the courthouse portal, already spreading as it converged toward the three waiting figures like the remorseless unhurried flow of spilled ink across a table cloth, thinking (the lawyer) how only when he is mounted on something-anything, from a footstool through a horse or rostrum to a flagpole or a flying machine-is man vulnera-ble and familiar, that on his own feet and in motion, he is terrible; thinking with amazement and humility and pride too, how no mere immobile mass of him, no matter how large nor apparently doing or about to do no matter what, nor even the mass of him in motion mounted on something which, not he but it, was locomo-tive, but the mass of him moving of itself in one direction, toward one objective by means of his own frail clumsily jointed legs and feet-not Ghengis' bone horns nor Murat's bugles, let alone the golden voice of Demosthenes or Cicero, or the trumpet-blast of Paul or John Brown or Pitt or Calhoun or Daniel Webster, but the children dying of thirst amid Mesopotamian mirages and the wild men out of the northern woods who walked into Rome carrying even their houses on their backs and Moses' forty-year scaven-gers and the tall men carrying a rifle or an axe and a bag of beads who changed the color of the American race (and in the lawyer's Tuesday own memory the last individual: cowboy who marked the whole of Western America with the ranging dung of his horse and the oxidising hulls of his sardine and tomato cans, exterminated from the earth by a tide of men with wire-stretchers and pockets full of staples); thinking with pride and awe too, how threatful only in locomotion and dangerous only in silence; neither in lust nor appe-tite nor greed lay wombed the potency of his threat, but in silence and meditation: his ability to move en masse at his own impulse, and silence in which to fall into thought and then action as into an open manhole; with exultation too, since none knew this better than the lords proprietors of his massed breathing, the hero-giant precentors of his seething moil, who used his spendthrift potency in the very act of curbing and directing it, and ever had and ever would: in Detroit today an old-time bicycle-racer destined to be one of the world's giants, his very surname an adjectival noun in the world's mouth, who had already put half a continent on wheels by families, and in twenty-five more would have half a hemisphere on wheels individually, and in a thousand would have already effaced the legs from a species just as that long-ago and doubtless at the time not-even-noticcd twitch of Cosmos drained the seas into continents and effaced the gills from their fish. But that was not yet; that would be peace, and to attain that, the silence must be conquered too: the silence in which man had space to think and in consequence act on what he believed he thought or thought he believed the silence in which the crowd walked, flowed steadily across the square toward the three waiting figures and out of which the turnkey cried in his thin high manlcss voice, dragging the new pistol in its turn from beneath his coat skirts: 'Stop, men! I'm going to count three!' and began to count: 'One-Two-' staring, even glaring at the faces which were not rushing at him nor did they even seem to walk at him, but rather towered down and over him, feeling again the pistol neither wrenched nor snatched but just wrung firmly from him and then other hands had him too. Ton durn fools' he cried, struggling. But how say it? How tell them? You had to be honorable about money, no matter who had it; if you were not honorable about money, pitying the weak did them no good because about all they got from you then was just pity. Besides, it was already too late to try to tell them, even if there had been no other reason, the firm, quite kind, almost gentle hands not only holding him up but even lifting, raising him, and then they were even carrying him as two kinless bachelors might carry a child between them, his feet remembering earth but no longer touching it; then raising him still further until he could see, between and past the heads and shoulders, the ringed circum-ference of faces not grim and never angry: just unanimous and attentive, and in the center of it the old Negro in the worn frock coat and the thin chocolate-colored adolescent boy with eyeballs of that pure incredible white which Flemish painters knew how to grind; then the owner of the calm irascible voice spoke again and now for the first time the turnkey could see and recognise him: no lawyer or merchant or banker or any other civic leader, but him-self a gambler who bucked from choice the toughest game of all: ownership of a small peripatetic sawmill where he had gone to work at the age of fifteen as the sole support of a widowed mother and three unmarried sisters, and now at forty owned the mill and a wife and two daughters and one granddaughter of his own, speaking at last into a silence in which there was not even the sound of breathing: 'How much did you and that fellow really win on that horse? A hundred dollars?'

'More,' the old Negro said.

'A thousand?'

'More than that': and now indeed there was no stir, no breath: only one vast suspension as if the whole bright April morning leaned: 'Was it forty thousand?... All right. Was it half of forty thousand? How much did you see? How much did you count? Can you count to a thousand dollars?'

'It was a heap,' the old Negro said: and now they breathed: one Tuesday stir, one exhalation, one movement; the day, the morning once more relinquished, the voice its valedictory: 'There'll be a train at the depot in twenty-five minutes. You be on it when it leaves and dont come back. We dont like rich niggers here,'

'So we got on the train,'the old Negro said, 'and rode to the next station. Then we got out and walked. It was a far piece, but we knowed where he would be now, if they would just let him alone-' the blue haze-cradled valley where the corners of Georgia and Tennessee and Carolina meet, where he had appeared sud-denly from nowhere that day last summer with a three-legged race-horse and an old Negro preacher and the Negro child who rode the horse, and stayed two weeks during which the horse outran every other one within fifty miles, and finally one brought all the way from Knoxville to try to cope with it, then (the four of them) vanished again overnight six hours ahead of a horde of Federal agents and sheriffs and special officers like the converging packs of a state- or nation-wide foxhunt.

'And we was right; he must a come straight back there from the Missouri jail because it was still June. They told us about it: a Sunday morning in the church and likely it was the preacher that seen him first because he was already facing that way, before the rest of them turned their heads and recognised him too standing against the back wall just inside the door like he hadn't never left-' the runner seeing it too, seeing almost as much as the Fed-eral ex-deputy would have seen if he had been there:--the morose, savage, foul-mouthed, almost inarticulate (only the more so for the fact that occasionally a fragment of what he spoke sounded a little like what the valley knew as English) foreigner who moved, breathed, not merely in an aura of bastardy and bachelordom but of homelessness too, like a half-wild pedigreeless pariah dog: father- less, wifeless, sterile and perhaps even impotent too, misshapen, savage and foul: the world's portionless and intractable and incon-solable orphan, who brought without warning into that drowsing vacuum an aggregation bizarre, mobile and amazing as a hippo-drome built around a comet: two Negroes and the ruined remnant of the magnificent and incredible horse whose like even on four legs the valley or the section either had never seen before, into a country where a horse was any milkless animal capable of pulling a plow or a cart on weekdays and carrying sacks of corn to the mill on Saturdays and bearing as many of the family as could cling to its gaunt ridgepole to the church on Sundays, and where there not only were none, but there never had been any Negroes; whose people man and boy from sixty-odd down to fourteen and thirteen, had fifty years ago quitted their misty unmapped eyries to go for miles and even weeks on foot to engage in a war in which they had no stake and, if they had only stayed at home, no contact, in order to defend their land from Negroes; not content merely to oppose and repudiate their own geopolitical kind and their com-mon economic derivation, they must confederate with its embat-tled enemies, stealing, creeping (once at a crossroads tavern a party of them fought something resembling a pitched battle with a Confederate recruiting party) by night through the Confederate lines to find and join a Federal army, to fight not against slavery but against Negroes, to abolish the Negro by freeing him from them who might bring Negroes among them exactly as they would have taken their rifles clown from the pegs or deer antlers above hearth and doorway to repel, say, a commercial company talking about bringing the Indians back.

Hearing it too: 'Except it wasn't two weeks we was there that first time. It was fifteen days. The first two they spent just looking at us. They would come from all up and down the valley, walking or on horses and mules or the whole family in the wagon, to set in the road in front of the store where we would be squatting on the gallery eating cheese and crackers and sardines, looking at us. Then the men and boys would go around behind the store where we had Tuesday built a pen out of rails and scraps of boards and pieces of rope, to stand and look at the horse. Then we begun to run and by the fifth day we had outrun every horse in the whole valley and had done won even one mortgage on a ten-acre corn-patch up on the moun-tain, and by the seventh day we was running against horses brought all the way in from the next counties across what they called the Gap. rien six days more, with the folks in the valley betting on our horse now, until the fifteenth clay when they brought that horse from Knoxville that had run at Churchill Downs back home once, and this time it was not just the valley folks but folks from all that part of Tennessee watching that three-legged horse without even no saddle (we never used no bridle neither: just a one-rein hackamore and a belly-band for this boy to hold on to) outrun that Knoxville horse the first time at five furlongs and the next time at a full mile for double stakes, with not just the folks in the valley but the folks from the other counties too betting on it now, so that everybody or anyway every family in that part of Tennessee had a share in what it won-'

'That's when he was taken into the Masons,' the runner said. 'During that two weeks,'

'Fifteen days,' the old Negro said. 'Yes, there was a lodge there.-Then just before daylight the next morning a man on a mule rid down from the Gap, just about a hour ahead of them-' the runner hearing this too as the old Negro himself had heard it a year afterward: when the sun rose the automobile itself stood In front of the store-the first automobile which the soil of the val-ley had ever imprinted and which some of the old people and children had ever seen, driven part of the way over the gap trail but indubitably hauled and pushed and probably even carried here and there for the rest of the distance, and inside the store the sher-iff of the county and the city strangers in their city hats and neck-ties and shoes, smelling, stinking of excise officers, revenuers, while already the horses and mules and wagons of yesterday flowed back down from the coves and hills, the riders and occupants dismounting at once now, to pause for a moment to look quietly and curi- ously at the automobile as though at a medium-sized rattlesnake, then crowding into the store until it would hold no more of them, facing not the city strangers standing in a tight wary clump in front of the cold spit-marked stove in its spit-marked sandbox, they had looked at them once and then no more, but rather the sheriff, so that, since the sheriff was one of them, bore one of the names which half the valley bore and the valley had all voted for him and in fact, except for his dime-store cravat and their overalls, even looked like them, it was as though the valley merely faced itself.

They stole the horse,' the sheriff said. 'All the man wants is just to get it back,' But no reply: only the quiet, grave, courteous, not really listening but just waiting faces, until one of the city strangers said in a bitter city voice: 'Wait-' already stepping quickly past the sheriff, his hand al-ready inside the buttoned front of his city coat when the sheriff said in his flat hill voice: 'You wait,' his hand inside the other's buttoned coat too, al-ready covering the other smaller one, plucking it out of the coat and holding easily in the one grasp both the small city hand and the flat city pistol so that they looked like toys in it, not wrenching but merely squeezing the pistol out of the hand and dropping it into his own coat pocket, and said, 'Well, boys, let's get on,' moving, walking, his companions in their white shirts and coat sleeves and pants legs and shoes creased and polished two days ago in Chattanooga hotels, heeling him, compact and close, while the faces, the lane opened: through the store, the lane, the faces closing behind: across the gallery and down the steps, the silent lane still opening and closing behind them until they reached the auto-mobile; then, and young mountain men had not yet learned how to decommission an automobile simply by removing the dis-tributor or jamming the carburetor. So they had used what they did know: a ten-pound hammer from the blacksmith's shop, not knowing even then the secret of the thing's life beneath the hood and so over-finding it: the fine porcelain dust of shattered plugs and wrenched and battered wires and dented pipes and even the Tuesday mute half-horseshoe prints of the hammer punctuating the spew of oil and gasoline and even the hammer itself immobile against an overalled leg in plain view; and now the city man, cursing in his furious bitter voice, was scrabbling with both hands at the sheriff's coat until the sheriff grasped both of them in his one and held the man so; and, facing them now across the ruined engine, again it was merely the valley facing itself. The automobile dont belong to the government,' the sheriff said. 'It belongs to him. He will have to pay to have it fixed,'

Nor anything yet for a moment. Then a voice: 'How much?'

'How much?' the sheriff said over his shoulder.

'How much?' the city man said. 'A thousand dollars, for all I know. Maybe two thousand-'

'We'll call it fifty,' the sheriff said, releasing the hands and re-moving the trim pearl-colored city hat from the city head and with his other hand took from his trousers pocket a small crumple of banknotes and separated one and dropped it into the hat, holding the hat upside down and as though baited with the single bill, toward the nearest of the crowd: 'Next,' he said.

'Except that they had to look quick, because before the preacher could say the benediction so they could get up and even tell him howdy, he was done gone from there too. But quick as he left, it wasn't before the word could begin to spread': telling that too: thirty-seven in the church that morning so in effect the whole val-ley was and by midafternoon or sundown anyway every cove and hill and run knew he was back: alone: without the horse: and broke, and hungry; not gone again: just disappeared, out of sight: for the time: so that they knew they had only to wait, to bide until the moment, which was that night in the loft above the post-office-store-'It was the lodge-room. They used it for their politics too, and for the court, but mostly for the poker- and crap-games that they claimed had been running there ever since the valley was first settled and the store was built. There was a regular out-side staircase going up to it that the lawyers and judges and poli-ticians and Masons and Eastern Stars used, but mainly it was a ladder nailed flat to the back wall outside, leading up to a back window, that everybody in the valley knowed about but not one of them would ever claim he even seen, let alone climbed. And inside there was a jug always full of white mountain whisky setting on the shelf with the water-bucket and the gourd, that everybody in the valley knowed was there just like they done the ladder but that nobody could see while the court or the lodge or a meeting was going on': telling it: An hour after dark when the six or seven men (including the store's clerk) squatting around the spread blanket on the floor beneath the lantern ('It was Sunday night. They just shot craps on Sunday night. They wouldn't allow no poker.') heard his feet on the ladder and watched him crawl through the window and then didn't look at him any more while he went to the jug and poured himself a drink into the gourd dipper, not watching him exactly as not one of them would have offered him as a gift the actual food or as a loan the money to buy it with, not even when he turned and saw the coin, the half-dollar, on the floor beside his foot where ten seconds ago no coin had been, nor when he picked it up and interrupted the game for two or three minutes while he compelled them one by one to disclaim the coin's ownership, then knelt into the circle and bet the coin and cast the dice and drew down the original half-dollar and pyramided for two more casts, then passed the dice, and rising, left the original coin on the floor where he had found it and went to the trap door and the ladder which led down into the store's dark interior and with no light descended and returned with a wedge of cheese and a handful of crackers and interrupted the game again to hand the clerk one of the coins he had won and took his change and, squatting against the wall and with no sound save the steady one of his chewing, ate what the valley knew was his first food since he returned to it, reappeared in the church ten hours ago; and-suddenly-the first since he had vanished with the horse and the two Negroes ten months ago.

'They just took him back, like he hadn't never even been away.

It was more than that. It was like there never had been no more than what they seen now: no horse to win races on three legs and never had been because they probably never even asked him what had become of it, never no two niggers like me and this boy, never no money to ask him how much of it he won like all them folks back there in Missouri done, not even no time between that one a year ago last summer and this one-' no interval of fall and winter and spring, no flame of oak and hickory nor drive of sleet nor foam and rush of laurel and rhododendron down the moun-tainsides into summer again; the man himself (the runner seeing this too out of the listening, the hearing) unchanged and not even any dirtier: just alone this time (though not as well as the Federal ex-deputy could have seen it)--the same savage and bandy mis-anthrope in the foul raked checked cap and the cheap imitation tweed jacket and the bagging Bedford cords ('He called them jodhpurs. They would have held three of him. He said they was made in a place called Savile Row for what he called the second largest duke in the Irish peerage,') squatting on the store's front gallery beneath the patent-medicine and tobacco and baking-powder placards and the announcements and adjurations of can-didates for sheriff and representative and district attorney (this was, an even year; they had already been defeated and for-gotten and there remained only their fading photographs joblotted from the lowest bidder and not looking like them anyway, which no one had expected, but merely like any candidate, which wis all that any hoped, dotting the countryside on telephone poles and fences and the wooden rails of bridges and the flanks of barns and already fading beneath the incrementation of time and weather, like ejaculations: a warning: a plea: a cry: 'Just squatting there at first, not doing nothing and not nobody bothering him, even to try to talk to him, until Sunday when he would be in the church again, setting in the last pew at the back where he could get out first after the benediction. He was sleeping on a straw tick in the lodge room over the store and eating out of the store too because he had won that much that first night. He could have had a job; they told me about that too: him squatting on the gallery one morning when some fellow brought a horse in to the blacksmith that he had tried to shoe himself and quicked it in the nigh hind, the horse plunging and kicking and squealing every time they tried to touch it until at last they was trying to cross-tie it up and maybe even have to throw it to pull the quick shoe, until he got up and went in and laid his hand on its neck a minute and talked to it and then just tied the halter rein in the ring and picked up the foot and pulled the shoe and reset it. The blacksmith offered him a steady job right there but he never even answered, just back on the gallery squatting again, then Sunday in the back pew in the church once more where he could get out first, before anybody could try to talk to him. Because they couldn't see his heart,'

'His heart?' the runner said, 'Yes,' the old Negro said. Then he did vanish, because the next time they seed him they wouldn't have knowcd him except for the cap, the coat and them Irish britches gone now and wearing over-halls and a hickory shirt. Except that they would have had to gone out there to seen that, because he was a farmer now, a wage-hand, likely not getting much more than his board and lodging and washing because the place he was working on hadn't hardly sup-ported the two folks that was already trying to live on it-' the runner seeing that now almost as well as the Federal ex-deputy could have seen it-a childless couple of arthritic middle age: two heirs of misfortune drawn as though by some mutual last resort into the confederation of matrimony as inversely two heirs of great wealth or of royalty might have been-a one-room-and-leanto cabin, a hovel almost, clinging paintless to a sheer pitch of mountainside in a straggling patch of corn standing in niggard monument to the incredible, the not just back- but heart-breaking labor which each meagre stalk represented: moloch-efEgy of self-sustenance which did not reward man's sweat but merely consumed his flesh;--the man who ten months ago had walked in the company of giants and heroes and who even yesterday, even without the horse and Tuesday solitary and alone, had still walked in its magnificent gigantic shadow, now in faded overalls milking a gaunt hill cow and split-ting firewood and (the three of them, distinguishable at any dis-tance from one another only because one wore the checked cap and another a skirt) hoeing the lean and tilted corn, coming down the mountain to squat, not talking yet not actually mute either, among them on the gallery of the store on Saturday afternoon; and on the next morning, Sunday, again in his back pew in the church, always in that clean fresh rotation of faded blue which was not the regalia of his metamorphosis and the badge of all plodding enduring husbandry, but which hid and concealed even the horse-warped curvature of his legs, obliterating, effacing at last the last breath or recollection of the old swaggering aura bachelor, footfree and cavalier, so that (it was July now) there remained (not the heart) only the foul raked heavily-checked cap talking (not the heart talking of passion and bereavement) among the empty Ten-nessee hills of the teeming metropolitan outland: Then he was gone. It was August; the mail rider had brought the Chattanooga and Knoxville papers back over the Gap that week and the next Sunday the preacher made the prayer for all the folks across the water swamped again in battle and murder and sudden death, and the next Saturday night they told me how he taken his last degree in Masonry and how that time they tried to talk to him because the Chattanooga and Knoxville papers was coming over the Gap every day now and they was reading them too: about that battle-'

'Mons,' the runner said.

'Mons,' the old Negro said, '-saying to him, "Them was your folks too, wasn't they?" and getting the sort of answer there wasn't no reply to except just to hit him. And when the next Sunday came, he was gone. Though at least this time they knowed where, so that when we finally got there that day-'

'What?' the runner said. 'It took you from June until August to travel from Missouri to Tennessee?'

'It wasn't August,' the old Negro said. 'It was October. We walked. We would have to stop now and then to find work to earn money to eat on. That taken a while, because this boy never had no size then, and I never knowed nothing but horses and preaching, and any time I stopped to do either one, somebody might have asked me who I was.'

'You mean you had to bring the money to him first before you could even draw travel expenses from it?'

There wasn't no money,' the old Negro said. "There never was none, except just what we needed, had to have. Never nobody but that New Orleans lawyer ever believed there was. We never had time to bother with winning a heap of money to have to take care of. We had the horse. To save that horse that never wanted nothing and never knowed nothing but just to run out in front of all the other horses in a race, from being sent back to Kentucky to be just another stud-horse for the rest of its life. We had to save it until it could die still not knowing nothing and not wanting nothing but just to run out in front of everything else. At first he thought different, aimed different. But not long. It was during that time when we was walking to Texas. We was hiding in the woods one clay by a creek and I talked to him and that evening I bap-tised him in the creek into my church. And after that he knowed too that betting was a sin. We had to do a little of it, win a little money to live on, buy feed for it and grub for us. But that was all. God knowed that too. That was all right with Him.'

'Are you an ordained minister?' the runner said.

'I bears witness,' the old Negro said.

'But you're not an ordained priest. Then how could you confirm him into your church?'

'Hush, Pappy,' the youth said.

'Wait,' the runner said. 'I know. He made you a Mason too,'

'Suppose he did,' the old Negro said. 'You and this boy are alike. You think maybe I never had no right to make him a Chris-tian, but you know he never had no business making me a Mason. But which do you think is the lightest to undertake: to tell a man to act like the head Mason thinks he ought to act, that's just an- Tuesday other man trying to know what's right to do, or to tell him how the head of Heaven knows he ought to act, that's God and fcnows what's right to ease his suffering and save him?'

'All right,' the runner said. 'It was October-'

'Only this time they knowed where he was. "France?" I says, with this boy already jerking at my sleeve and saying, "Come on, Grampaw. Come on, Grampaw."

"Which way is that?" I says. "Is that in Tennessee too?"

'"Come on, Grampaw," this boy says. "I knows where it is."'

'Yes,' the runner said to the youth. Til get to you in a moment too.' He said to the old Negro: 'So you came to France. I wont even ask how you did that with no money. Because that was God. Wasn't it?'

'It was the Society,' the youth said. Only he didn't say 'society': he said 'socictc'

'.

'Yes,' the runner said to the youth. He said in French, his best French: the glib smart febrile argot immolated into the international salons via the nightclubs from the Paris gutter: 'I wondered who did the talking for him. It was you, was it?'

'Someone had to,' the youth said, in still better French, the French of the Sorbonne, the Institute, the old Negro listening, peaceful and serene, until he said: 'His mamma was a New Orleans girl. She knowed gobble talk. That's where he learned it.'

'But not the accent,' the runner said. 'Where did you get that?'

'I clout know,' the youth said. 'I just got it.'

'Could you "just get" Greek or Latin or Spanish the same way?'

'I aint tried,' the youth said. 'I reckon I could, if they aint no harder than this one.'

'All right,' the runner said, to the old Negro now. 'Did you have the Society before you left America?' and heard that, without order or emphasis, like dream too: they were in New York, who a year ago had not known that the earth extended farther than the dis-tance between Lexington, Kentucky, and Louisville until they walked on it, trod with their actual feet the hard enduring ground bearing the names Louisiana and Missouri and Texas and Arkansas and Ohio and Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi-words which until then had been as foundationless and homeless as the ones meaning Avalon or Astalot or Ultima Thule. Then immediately there was a woman in it, a 'lady', not young, richly in furs-'I know,' the runner said. 'She was in the car with you that day last spring when you came up to Amiens. The one whose son is in the French air squadron that she is supporting,'

'Was,' the youth said. 'Her boy is dead. He was a volunteer, one of the first airmen killed in the French service. That's when she began to give money to support the squadron,'

'Because she was wrong,' the old Negro said.

'Wrong?' the runner said. 'Oh. Her dead son's monument is a machine to kill as many Germans as possible because one German killed him? Is that it? And when you told her so, it was just like that morning in the woods when you talked to the horse-thief and then baptised him in the creek and saved him? All right, tell me,'

'Yes,' the old Negro said, and told it: the three of them traversing a succession almost like avatars: from what must have been a Park Avenue apar'I'ment, to what must have been a Wall Street office, to another office, room: a youngish man with a black patch over one eye and a cork leg and a row of miniature medals on his coat, and an older man with a minute red thing like a toy rosebud in his buttonhole, talking gobble talk to the lady and then to the youth too-'A French consulate?' the runner said. 'Looking for a British soldier?'

'It was Verdun,' the youth said.

'Verdun?' the runner said. That was just last year--. It took you until-'

'We was walking and working. Then Pappy begun to hear them-'

'There was too many of them,' the old Negro said. 'Men and boys, marching for months down into one muddy ditch to kill one another. There was too many of them. There wasn't room to lay Tuesday quiet and rest. AH you can kill is man's meat. You cant kill his voice. And if there is enough of the meat, without even room to lay quiet and rest, you can hear it too,'

'Even if it's not saying anything but Why?' the runner said.

'What can trouble you more than having a human man saying to you, Tell me why. Tell me how. Show me the way?'

'And you can show him the way?'

'I can believe,' the old Negro said.

'So because you believed, the French Government sent you to France.'

'It was the lady,' the youth said. 'She paid for it,'

'She believed too,' the old Negro said. 'All of them did. The money didn't count no more now because they all knowed by now that just money had done already failed,'

'All right,' the runner said. 'Anyway, you came to France-' hearing it: a ship; there was a committee of at least one or two at Brest, even if they were just military, staff officers to expedite, not a special train maybe but at least one with precedence over every-thing not military; the house, palace, sonorous and empty, was already waiting for them in Paris. Even if the banner to go above the ducal gates was not ready yet, thought of yet into the words. But that was not long and the house, the palace, was not empty long either: first the women in black, the old ones and the young ones carrying babies, then the maimed men in trench-stained horizon blue, coming in to sit for a while on the hard temporary benches, not always even to see him, since he was still occupied in trying to trace down his companion, his Mistairy, telling that too: from the Paris war office to the Depar'I'ment of State, to Downing Street to Whitehall and then out to Poperinghe, until the man's whereabouts was ascertained at last: who (that Newmarket horse and its legend were known and remembered in Whitehall too) could have gone out as groom to the commander-in-chief himselfs horse if he had chosen, but enlisted instead into the Londoners until, having barely learned how to wrap his spiral puttees, he found himself in a posting which would have left him marooned for the duration as groom-farrier-hostler in a troop of Guards cav-alry had he not taught the sergeant in charge of the draft to shoot dice in the American fashion and so won his escape from him, and for two years now had been a private in a combat battalion of Northumberland Borderers.

'Only when you finally found him, he barely spoke to you,' the runner said.

'He aint ready yet,' the old Negro said. 'We can wait. There's plenty of time yet,'

'We?' the runner said. 'You and God too?'

'Yes. Even if it will be over next year.'

'The war? This war? Did God tell you that?'

'It's all right. Laugh at Him. He can stand that too,'

'What else can I do but laugh?' the runner said. 'Hadn't He rather have that than the tears?'

'He's got room for both of them. They're all the same to Him; He can grieve for both of them,'

'Yes,' the runner said. Too much of it. Too many of them. Too often. There was another one last year, called the Somme; they give ribbons now not for being brave because all men are brave if you just frighten them enough. You must have heard of that one; you must have heard them too,'

'I heard them too,' the old Negro said. lLes Amis ti la France de Tout le Monde' the runner said. 'Just to believe, to hope. That little. So little. Just to sit together in the anguished room and believe and hope. And that's enough? like the doctor when you're ill: you know he cant cure you just by laying his hands on you and you dont expect him to: all you need is someone to say "Believe and hope. Be of good cheer,'

' But sup-pose it's already too late for a doctor now; all that will serve now is a surgeon, someone already used to blood, up there where the blood already is,'

Then He would have thought of that too,'

Then why hasn't He sent you up there, instead of here to live on hot food in clean bugless clothes in a palace?'

'Maybe because He knows I aint brave enough,' the old Negro said.

'Would you go if He sent you?'

'I would try,' the old Negro said. 'If I could do the work, it wouldn't matter to Him or me neither whether I was brave,'

'To believe and to hope,' the runner said. 'Oh yes, I walked through that room downstairs; I saw them; I was walking along the street and happened by simple chance to see that placard over the gate. I was going somewhere else, yet here I am too. But not to believe and hope. Because man can bear anything, provided he has something left, a little something left: his integrity as a crea-ture tough and enduring enough not only not to hope but not even to believe in it and not even to miss its lack; to be tough and to endure until the flash, crash, whatever it will be, when he will no longer be anything and none of it will matter any more, even the fact that he was tough and, until then, did endure,'

'That's right,' the old Negro said, peaceful and serene, 'maybe it is tomorrow you got to go back. So go on now and have your Paris while you got a little time,'

'Aha,' the runner said. 'Ave Bacchus and Venus, morituri te salutant, eh? Wouldn't you have to call that sin?'

'Evil is a part of man, evil and sin and cowardice, the same as repentance and being brave. You got to believe in all of them, or believe in none of them. Believe that man is capable of all of them, or he aint capable of none. You can go out this way if you want to, without having to meet nobody,'

'Thanks,' the runner said. 'Maybe what I need is to have to meet somebody. To believe. Not in anything: just to believe. To enter that room down there, not to escape from anything but to escape into something, to flee mankind for a little while. Not even to look at that banner because some of them probably cant even read it, but just to sit in the same room for a while with that affirmation, that promise, that hope. If I only could. You only could. Anybody only could. Do you know what the loneliest experience of all is? But of course you do: you just said so. It's breathing,'

'Send for me,' the old Negro said.

'Oh yes-if I only could.'

'I know,' the old Negro said. Tou aint ready yet neither. But when you are, send for me,'

'Are what?' the runner said.

'When you needs me,'

What can I need you for, when it will be over next year? All I've got to do is just stay alive,'

'Send for me,' the old Negro said.

'Good-bye,' the runner said.

Descending, retracing his steps, they were still there in the vast cathedral-like room, not only the original ones but the steady trickle of new arrivals, entering, not even to look at the lettered banner but just to sit for a while inside the same walls with that innocent and invincible affirmation. And he had been right: it was August now and there were American uniforms in France, not as combat units yet but singly, still learning: they had a captain and two subalterns posted to the battalion, to blood themselves on the old Somme names, preparatory to, qualifying themselves to, lead their own kind into the ancient familiar abbatoir; he thought: Oh yes, three more years and we will have exhausted Europe. Then we-hun and allies together-will transfer the whole busi-ness intact to the fresh trans-Atlantic pastures, the virgin American stage, like a travelling minstrel troupe.

Then it was winter; later, remembering it, it would seem to him that it might actually have been the anniversary of the Son of Man, a gray day and cold, the gray cobbles of that village Place de Ville gleaming and wimpled like the pebbles beneath the surface of a brook when he saw the small augmenting crowd and joined it too, from curiosity then, seeing across the damp khaki shoulders the small clump of battle-stained horizon blue whose obvious or at Wednesday least apparent leader bore a French corporal's insigne, the faces alien and strange and bearing an identical lostness, like-some of them at least-those of men who have reached a certain point or place or situation by simple temerity and who no longer have any confidence even in the temerity, and three or four of which were actually foreign faces reminding him of the ones the French For-eign Legion was generally believed to have recruited out of Euro-pean jails. And if they had been talking once, they stopped as soon as he came up and was recognised, the faces, the heads above the damp khaki shoulders turning to recognise him and assume at once that expression tentative, reserved and alert with which he had become familiar ever since the word seeped down (prob-ably through a corporal-clerk) from the orderly room that he had been an officer once.

So he came away. He learned in the orderly room that they were correctly within military protocol: they had passes, to visit the homes of one or two or three of them in villages inside the British zone. Then from the battalion padre he even began to divine why. Not learn why: divine it. 'It's a staff problem,' the padre said. 'It's been going on for a year or two. Even the Americans are probably familiar with them by now. They just appear, with their passes all regularly issued and visaed, in troop rest-billets. They are known, and of course watched. The trouble is, they have done no-' and stopped, the runner watching him.

'You were about to say, "done no harm yet,"' the runner said. 'Harm?' he said gently. 'Problem? Is it a problem and harmful for men in front-line trenches to think of peace, that after all, we can stop fighting if enough of us want to?'

To think it; not to talk it. That's mutiny. There are ways to do things, and ways not to do them.'

'Render unto Caesar?' the runner said.

'Ican't discuss this subject while I bear this,' the padre said, his hand flicking for an instant toward the crown on his cuff.

'But you wear this too,' the runner said, his hand in its turn indicating the collar and the black V inside the tunic's lapels.

'God help us,' the padre said.

'Or we, God,' the runner said. 'Maybe the time has now come for that': and went away from there too, the winter following its course too toward the spring and the next final battle which would end the war, during which he would hear of them again, rumored from the back areas of the (now three) army zones, watched still by the (now) three intelligence sections but still at stalemate because still they had caused no real harm, at least not yet; in fact, the runner had now begun to think of them as a for-mally accepted and even dispatched compromise with the soldier's natural undeviable belief that he at least would not be killed, as regimented batches of whores were sent up back areas to compro-mise with man's natural and normal sex, thinking (the runner) bitterly and quietly, as he had thought before: His prototype had only mans natural propensity for evil to contend with; this one faces all the scarlet-and-brazen impregnability of general staffs.

And this time (it was May again, the fourth one he had seen from beneath the brim of a steel helmet, the battalion had gone in again two days ago and he had just emerged from Corps head-quarters at Villcneuve Blanche) when he saw the vast black motorcar again there was such a shrilling of N. C. O. s' whistles and a clashing of presented arms that he thought at first it was full of French and British and American generals until he saw that only one was a general: the French one: then recognised them all: in the rear seat beside the general the pristine blue helmet as un-stained and innocent of exposure and travail as an uncut sapphire above the Roman face and the unstained horizon-blue coat with its corporal's markings, and the youth in the uniform now of an American captain, on the second jump seat beside the British staff-major, the runner half-wheeling without even breaking stride, to the car and halted one pace short then took that pace and clapped his heels and saluted and said to the staff-major in a ringing voice: 'Sir!' then in French to the French general-an old man with enough stars on his hat to have been at least an army commander: 'Monsieur the general,'

'Good morning, my child,' the general said.

'With permission to address monsieur the director your com-panion?'

'Certainly, my child,' the general said.

'Thank you, my general,' the runner said, then to the old Negro: 'You missed him again.'

'Yes,' the old Negro said. 'He aint quite ready yet. And dont forget what I told you last year. Send for me,'

'And dont you forget what I told you last year too,' the run-ner said, and took that pace backward then halted again. 'But good luck to you, anyway; he doesn't need it,' he said and clapped his heels again and saluted and said again to the staff-major or perhaps to no one at all in the ringing and empty voice: 'Sir!'

And that was all, he thought; he would never see either of them again-that grave and noble face, the grave and fantastic child. But he was wrong. It was not three days until he stood in the ditch beside the dark road and watched the lorries moving up toward the lines laden with what the old St. Omer watchman told him were blank anti-aircraft shells, and not four when he waked, groaning and choking on his own blood until he could turn his head and spit (his lip was cut and he was going to lose two teeth-spitting again, he had already lost them-and now he even remembered the rifle-butt in his face), hearing already (that was what had waked, roused him) the terror of that silence.

He knew at once where he was: where he always was, asleep or on duty either: lying (someone had even spread his blanket over him) on the dirt ledge hacked out of the wall of the tiny cave which was the ante-room to the battalion dugout. And he was alone: no armed guard sitting across from him as he realised now he had expected, nor was he even manacled: nothing save himself lying apparently free on his familiar ledge in that silence which was not only above ground but down here too: no telephonist at the switchboard opposite, none of the sounds-voices, movement, the coming and going of orderlies and company commanders and N. C. O,'s-all the orderly disorder of a battalion p. c. functioning normally in a cramped space dug forty feet down into the earth-which should have been coming from the dugout itself-only the soundless roar of the massed weight of shored and poised dirt with which all subterrcne animals-badgers and miners and moles-are deafened until they no longer hear it. His watch (curiously it was not broken) said:, whether Ack Emma or Pip Emma he could not tell down here, except that it could not be, it must not be Pip Emma; he could not, he must not have been here going on twenty hours; the seven which Ack Emma would signify would already be too many. So he knew at least where they would be, the whole p. c. of them-colonel, ad)utant, sergeant-major and the telephonist with Ins temporarily spliced and extended line-topside too, crouching behind the parapet, staring through peri-scopes across that ruined and silent emptiness at the opposite line, where their opposite German numbers would be crouching also behind a parapet, gazing too through periscopes across that vernal desolation, that silence, expectant too, alerted and amazed.

But he did not move yet. It was not that it might already be too late; he had already refused to believe that and so dismissed it. It was because the armed man might be in the dugout itself, guarding the only exit there. He even thought of making a sound, a groan, something to draw the man in; he even thought of what he would say to him: Dont you see? We dont know -what they are up to, and only I seem to have any fears or alarms. If I am wrong, we will all die sooner or later anyway. If I am right and you shoot me here, we will all surely die. Or better still: Shoot me. I shall be the one man out of this whole four years who died calmly and peacefully and reposed in dry clothing instead of panting, gasping, befouled with mud to the waist or drenched completely in the sweat of exertion and anguish. But he didn't do it. He didn't need to. The dugout was empty also. The armed man might be at the top of the stairs instead of the foot of them but then there or thereabouts would be where the colonel and his orderly room and periscope was too; besides, he would have to Wednesday Night face, risk the rifle somewhere and it wouldn't matter where since it contained only (for him) one bullet while what he was armed with was capable of containing all of time, all of man.

He found his helmet at once. He would have no rifle, of course, but even as he dismissed this he had one: leaning against the wall behind the sergeant-major's desk (oh yes, what he was armed with even equipped him at need with that which his own armament was even superior to) and yes, there it still was in the sergeant-major's desk: the pass issued to him Monday to pass him out to Corps Headquarters and then back, so that he didn't even expect to find a guard at the top of the fifty-two steps leading up and debouching into the trench: only the transubstantiated orderly room as he had foreknown-colonel, adjutant, sergeant-major, tele-phone periscopes and all, his speech all ready on his tongue when the sergeant-major turned and looked back at him.

'Latrine,' he said.

'Right,' the sergeant-major said. 'Be smart about it. Then report back here.'

'Yes sir,' he said and two hours later he was again among the trees from which he had watched the torches moving about the archie battery two nights ago; three hours after that he saw the three aeroplanes-they were S. E. 's-in the sky which had been empty of aircraft for forty-eight hours now, and saw and heard the fran-tic uproar of shells above where the enemy front would be. Then he saw the German aeroplane too, watched it fly arrow-straight and apparently not very fast, enclosed by the pocking of white British archie which paced it, back across No-man's Land, the three S. E.'s in their pocking of black hun archie zooming and climbing and diving at the German; he watched one of them hang on the German's tail for what must have been a minute or two, the two aircraft apparently fastened rigidly together by the thin threads of tracer. And still the German flew steadily and sedately on, descending, descending now even as it passed over him and the battery behind-near-which he lurked opened on it in that frenzy of frantic hysterical frustration common to archie batteries; descending, vanishing just above the trees, and suddenly he knew where: the aerodrome just outside Villeneuve Blanche, vanishing sedately and without haste downward, enclosed to the last in that empty similitude of fury, the three S. E.'s pulling up and away in one final zoom; and, as if that were not enough to tell him what he had to do, he saw one of them roll over at the top of its loop and, frozen and immobile, watched it in its plan as it dove, rushed straight down at the battery itself, its nose flicking and winking with the tracer which was now going straight into the battery and the group of gunners standing quietly about it, down and down past what he would have thought was the instant already too late to save itself from crashing in one last inextricable jumble into the battery, then levelling, himself watching the rapid pattering walk of the tracer across the intervening ground toward him until now he was looking directly into the flicking wink and the airman's hclmeted and goggled face behind and above it, so near that they would prob-ably recognise each other if they ever saw each other again-the two of them locked in their turn for a moment, an instant by the thin fiery thread of a similitude of death (afterward he would even remember the light rapid blow against his leg as if he had been tapped rapidly and lightly once by a finger), the aeroplane pulling level and with a single hard snarling downward blast of air, zooming, climbing on until the roaring whine died away, he not moving yet, immobile and still frozen in the ravelling fading snarl and the faint thin sulphur-stink of burning wool from the skirt of his tunic.

It was enough. He didn't even expect to get nearer the Ville-neuve aerodrome than the first road-block, himself speaking to the corporal not even across a rifle but across a machine gun: 'Im a runner from the-th Battalion,'

'I can't help that,' the corporal said.'You don't pass here.' Nor did he really want to. He knew enough now. Ten hours later in the Villeneuve Blanche gendarme's uniform, he was in Paris, tra- Wednesday Night versing again the dark and silent streets of the aghast and sus-pended city dense not only with French civil police but the mili-tary ones of the three nations patrolling the streets in armed motorcars, until he passed again beneath the lettered banner above the arched gateway.