Flags in the Dust

4

…this time it was a Ford car, and Bayard saw its wild skid as the driver jerked it across the treacherous thawing road, and the driver’s gaping mouth, and in the rushing moment and with brief amusement, between the man’s cravatless collar and the woman’s stocking wrapped about his head beneath his hat and tied under his chin, his Adam’s apple like a scared puppy in a tow sack. Then this flashed past and Bayard wrenched the wheel, and the stalled Ford swam sickeningly into view again as the big car slewed greasily upon the clay surface, its declutched engine roaring. Then the other car swam away again as he wrenched the wheel over and slammed the clutch out for more stability; and again that sickening, unhurried rush as the car refused to regain its feet and the depthless December world swept laterally across his vision. Old Bayard lurched against him again: from the corner of his eye he could see the fellow’s hand clutching at the edge of the door. Now they were facing the bluff on which the cemetery lay; directly over them John Sartoris’ effigy lifted its florid stone gesture, and from among motionless cedars gazed out upon the valley where for two miles the railroad he had built ran beneath his carven eyes. Bayard wrenched the wheel again.

On the other side of the road a ravine dropped sheer away, among-scrub cedars and corroded ridges skeletoned brittly with frost and muddy ice where the sun had not yet reached; the rear end of the car hung timelessly over this before it swung again, with the power full on, swung on until its nose pointed downhill again, with never a slackening of its speed. But still it would not come into the ruts again and it had lost the crown of the road, and though they had almost reached the foot of the hill, Bayard saw they would not make it. just before the rear wheel slipped off he wrenched the steering wheel over and swung the nose straight over the bank, and the car poised lazily for a moment, as though taking bread. “Hang on,” he shouted to his grandfather. Then they plunged.

An interval utterly without sound and in which all sensation of motion was lost. Then scrub cedar burst crackling about them and whipping branches of it exploded upon the nose of the car and slapped viciously at them as they sat with braced feet, and the car slewed in a long bounce. Another vacuum-like interval, then a shock that banged the wheel into Bayard’s chest and wrenched it in his tight hands, wrenched his arm-socket. Beside him his grandfather lurched forward and he threw out his arm just in time to keep the other from crashing through the windshield. “Hang on,” he shouted again. The car had never faltered and he dragged the leaping wheel over and swung it down the ravine arid opened the engine again, and with the engine and the momentum of the pilings they crashed on down the ravine ‘ and turned and heaved up the now shallow bank and onto the road again. Bayard brought it to a stop.

He sat motionless for a moment, “Whew,” he said. And then: “Great God in the mountain.” His grandfather sat quietly beside him, his hand still on the door and his head bent a little. “Think I’ll have a cigarette, after that,” Bayard added. He found one in his pocket, and a match; his hands were shaking. “I thought of that damn concrete bridge again, just as she went over,” he explained, a little apologetically. He took a deep draught at his cigarette and glanced at his grandfather. “Y’all right?” Old Bayard made no reply, and with the cigarette poised, Bayard looked at him. He sat as before, his head bent a little and his hand on the door. “Grandfather?” Bayard said sharply. Still old Bayard didn’t move, even when his grandson flung the cigarette away and shook him roughly.

5

Up the last hill the tireless pony bore him, and in the low December sun their shadow fell longly across the hardwood ridge and into the valley, from which the high, shrill yapping of the dogs came again upon the frosty windless air. Young dogs, Bayard told himself, and he sat his horse in the faint scar of the road, listening as the high breathless hysteria of them swept echoing across his aural field though the race itself was hidden beyond the trees. Motionless, he could feel frost in the air. Above him the pines, though there was no wind in them, made a continuous dry, wild sound; above them against the high evening blue, a shallow V of geese slid. There’ll be ice tonight, he thought, thinking of black backwaters where they would come to rest, of rank bayonets of dead grasses about which the water would shrink soon in the brittle darkness, in fixed glassy ripples. Behind him the earth rolled away ridge on ridge blue as woodsmoke, on into a sky like thin congealed blood. He turned in his saddle and stared unwinking into the bloody west against which the sun spread like a crimson egg broken upon the ultimate hills.

That meant weather: he snuffed the motionless tingling air, hoping he smelled snow.

The pony snorted and tossed ins head experimentally, and found the reins were slack and lowered his head and snorted again into the dead leaves and the delicate sere needles of pine at his feet. “Come up, Perry,” Bayard said, jerking the reins. Perry raised his head and broke into a stiff, jolting trot, but Bayard lifted him out of it and curbed him again into his steady foxtrot. The sound of the dogs had ceased, but he had not gone far when they broke again into clamorous uproar to his left, and suddenly near, and as he reined Perry back and peered ahead along the quiet, fading scar of it, he saw the fox trotting sedately toward him in the middle of the road. Perry saw it at the same time and laid his fine ears back and rolled his young eyes. But the animal came on, placidly unawares at its steady, unhurried trot, glancing back over its shoulder from time to time. ‘Well, PU be damned,’’ Bayard whispered, holding Perry rigid between his knees. The fox was not forty yards away, yet still it came on, seemingly utterly unaware of the man and horse. Then Bayard shouted.

The fox glanced at him;;the level sun swam redly and fleetingly in its eyes, then with a single modest flash of brown it was gone. Bayard expelled his breath: his heart was thumping against his ribs. “Whooy,” he yelled. “Come on, dogs!” The dogs heard him and their din swelled to a shrill pandemonium and the pack swarmed wildly into the road in a mad chaos of spotted hides and flapping ears and tongues, and surged toward him. None of them was more than half grown, and ignoring the horse and rider they burst still clamoring into the undergrowth where the fox had vanished and shrieked frantically on; and as Bayard stood in his stirrups and peered after them, preceded by yapping in a yet higher and more frantic key, two even smaller puppies moiled out of the woods and galloped past him on their short legs with whimpering cries and expressions of ludicrous and mad concern. Then the clamor died into hysterical echoes, and so away.

He rode on. On either hand were hills: the one darkling like a bronze bastion, upon the other the final rays of the sun lay redly. The air crackled with frost and tingled in his nostrils and seared his lungs with fiery, exhilarating needles. The road followed the valley; but half the sun now showed above the western wall, and among trees stark as the bars of a grate, he rode stirrup-deep in shadow like cold water. He would just about reach the house before dark. The clamor of the dogs swelled again ahead of him, approaching the road again, and he lifted Perry into a canter.

Presently before him lay a glade—an old field, sedge-grown, its plow-scars long healed over. The sun filled it with dying light, and he pulled Perry short upstanding: there, at the corner of the field beside the road, sat the fox. It sat there like a tame dog, watching the woods across the glade, and Bayard shook Perry forward again. The fox turned its head and looked at him with a covert, fleeting glance, but without alarm, and Bayard stopped again in intense astonishment. The clamor of the dogs swept nearer through the woods, yet still the fox sat on its haunches, watching the man with-covert quick glances. It revealed no alarm whatever, not even when the puppies burst yapping madly from the trees. They moiled at the wood’s edge for a time while the fox watched them. The largest one, evidently the leader, saw the quarry. Immediately they ceased their noise and trotted across the glade and squatted in a circle facing the fox, their tongues lolling. Then with one accord they all faced about and watched the darkening woods, from which and nearer and nearer, came that spent yapping in a higher key and interspersed with whimpering. The leader barked once; the yapping among the trees swelled with frantic relief and the two smaller puppies burst forth and burrowed like moles through the sedge and came up. Then the fox rose and cast another quick, covert glance at the horseman, and surrounded by the amicable weary calico of the puppies, trotted across the glade and vanished among the darkening trees. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Bayard said. “Come up, Perry.”

At last a pale and windless plume of smoke stood above the trees, against the sky, and in the rambling, mud-chinked wall a window glowed with ruddy invitation across the twilight Dogs had already set up a resonant, bell-like uproar; above it Bayard could distinguish the dear tenor of puppies and a voice shouting at them, and as he pulled Perry to a halt in the yard, the fox was vanishing diffidently but without haste beneath the back porch. A lean figure faced him in the dusk, with an axe in one hand and an armful of wood, and Bayard said:

“What the devil’s that thing, Buddy? That fox?”

“That’s Ethel,” Buddy answered. He put the wood down deliberately, and the axe, and he came and shook Bayard’s hand once, limply, in the country fashion, but his hand was hard and firm. “How you?”

“All right,” Bayard answered. “I came out to get that old fox Rafe was telling me about.”

“Sure,” Buddy agreed in his Slow, infrequent voice. “We been expectin’ you. Git down and lemme take yo’ pony.”

“No, I’ll do it. You take the wood on in; I’ll put Perry up.” But Buddy was firm, without insistence or rudeness, and Bayard surrendered the horse to him. :

“Henry,” Buddy shouted toward the house, “Henry.” A door opened upon jolly leaping flames; a figure stood squatly in it. “Here’s Bayard,” Buddy said. “Go on in and warm,” he added, leading the horse away. Dogs surrounded him; he picked up the wood and the axe and moved toward the house in a ghostly surge of dogs, and the figure stood in the door while he mounted the veranda and leaned the axe against the wall.

“How you?” Henry said, and again the handshake was limp; again the hand was firm and kind, harsher though than Buddy’s hard young flesh. He relieved Bayard of the wood and they entered the house. The walls were of chinked logs; upon them bung two colored outdated calendars and a patent medicine lithograph. The floor was bare, of hand-trimmed boards scuffed with heavy boots and polished by the pads of generations of dogs; two men could lie side by side in the fireplace. In it now four-foot logs blazed against the clay fireback, swirling in wild plumes into the chimney’s dark maw, and in silhouette against it, his head haloed by the fine shaggy disorder of his hair, Virginius MacCallum sat. “Hyer’s Bayard Sartoris, pappy,” Henry said.

The old man turned in his chair with grave, leonine deliberation and extended his hand without rising. In 1861 he was sixteen and he walked to Lexington, Virginia, and enlisted, served four years in the Stonewall brigade and walked back to Mississippi and built himself a house and got married. His wife’s dot was a clock and a dressed hog; his own father gave them a mule. His wife was dead these many years, and her successor was dead, but he sat now before the fireplace at which that hog had been cooked, beneath the roof he had built in ‘66, and on the mantel above him the clock sat, deriding that time whose creature it had once been. ‘Well, boy?” he said. “You took yo’ time about comin’. How’s yo’ folks?”

“Pretty well, sir,” Bayard answered. He looked at the old man’s hale, ruddy face intently and sharply. No, they hadn’t heard yet.

“We been expectin’ you ever since Rafe seen you in town last spring. Hyer, Henry, tell Mandy to set another plate.”

Four dogs had followed him into the room. Three of them watched him gravely with glowing eyes; the other one, a blue-ticked hound with an expression of majestic gravity, came up and touched its cold nose to his head “Hi, Gen’ral,” he said, rubbing its ears, whereupon the other dogs approached and thrust their noses against his hands.

“Pull up a cheer,” Mr. MacCallum said. He squared his own chair around and Bayard obeyed, and the dogs followed him, surging with blundering decorum about his knees, “I keep sendin’ word in to git yo’ gran’pappy out hyer,” the old man continued, “but he’s too ‘tarnal proud, or too damn lazy to come. Hyer, Gen’ral! Git away from thar. Kick ‘em away, Bayard. Henry!” he shouted. Henry appeared “Take these hyer damn dawgs out till after supper.”

Henry drove the dogs from the room. Mr. MacCallum picked up a long pine sliver from the hearth and fired it and lit his pipe, and smothered the sliver in the ashes and laid it on the hearth again. “Rafe and Lee air in town today,” he said. “You could have come out in the waggin with them. But I reckon you’d ruther have yo’own hoss.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered quietly. Then they would. know. He stared into the fee for a time, robbing his hands slowly on his knees, and for an instant he saw the recent months of his life coldly in all their headlong and heedless wastefulness; saw it like the swift unrolling of a film, culminating in that which any fool might have foreseen. Well, dammit, suppose it had: was he to blame? had he insisted that his grandfather ride with him? had he given the old fellow a bum heart? And then, coldly: you were scared to go home. You made a nigger sneak your horse out for yon. Yon, who deliberately do things your judgment tells you may not be successful, even possible, are afraid to face the consequences of your own acts. Then again something bitter and deep and sleepless in him blazed out in vindication and justification and accusation; what, he knew not, blazing out at what. Whom, he did not know: You did it! You caused it all: you killed Johnny.

Henry had drawn a chair up to the fire, and after a while the old man tapped his clay pipe carefully out against his palm and drew a huge, turnip-shaped silver watch from his corduroy vest “Half after five,” he said. “Ain’t them boys come yet?”

“They’re here,” Henry answered briefly. “Heard ‘em takin’ out when I put out the dawgs.”

“Git the jug, then,” his father ordered. Henry rose and departed again, and feet clumped heavily on the porch and Bayard turned in his chair and stared bleakly at the door. It opened and Rafe and Lee entered

“Well, well,” Rafe said, and his lean dark face lighted a little. “Got here at last, did you?” He shook Bayard’s hand, and Lee followed him. Lee’s face, like all of them, was a dark, saturnine mask. He was not so stocky as Rafe, and least talkative of them all. His eyes were black and restless; behind them lived something quick and wild and sad: he shook Bayard’s hand without a word.

But Bayard was watching Rafe. There was nothing in Rafe’s face; no coldness, no questioning—Was it possible that he could have been to town, and not heard? Or had Bayard himself dreamed it? But he remembered that unmistakable feel of his grandfather when he had touched him, remembered how he had suddenly slumped as though the very fibre of him, knit so erect and firm for so long by pride and by his unflagging and hopeless struggling against the curse of his name, had given way all at once, letting his skeleton rest at last Mr. MacCallum spoke.

“Did you go by the express office?”

“We never got to town,” Rafe answered. “Axle tree broke just this side of Vernon. Had to uncouple the wagon and drive to Vernon and get it patched up. Too late to go in, then. We got our supplies there and come on home.”

“Well, no matter. You’ll be goin’ in next week, for Christmas,” the old man said, and upon a breath of vivid darkness Buddy entered and came and squatted leanly in the shadowy chimney corner.

“Got that fox you were telling me about hid out yet?” Bayard asked Rafe.

“Sure. And we’ll get ‘im, this time. Maybe tomorrow. Weather’s changin’.”

“Snow?”

“Might be. What’s it goin’ to do tonight, pappy?”

“Rain,” the old man answered. “Tomorrow, too. Scent won’t lay good until Wen’sday. Henry!” After a moment he shouted Henry again, and Henry entered, with a blackened steaming kettle and a stoneware jug and a thick tumbler with a metal spoon in it. There was something domestic, womanish, about Henry, with his squat slightly tubby figure and his mild brown eyes and his capable, unhurried hands. He it was who superintended the kitchen (he was a better cook now than Mandy) and the house, where he could be found most of the day, pottering soberly at some endless task. He visited town almost as infrequently as his father; he cared little for hunting, and his sole relaxation was making whisky, good whisky, in a secret fastness known only to his father and to the negro who assisted him, after a recipe handed down from lost generations of his dour and uncommunicative forbears. He set the kettle and the jug and the tumbler on the hearth, and took the clay pipe from his father’s hand and put it on the mantel, and reached down a cracked tumbler of sugar and seven glasses, each with a spoon in it. The old man leaned forward into the firelight and made the toddies one by one, with tedious and sober deliberation. When he had made one around, there were two glasses left. “Ain’t them other boys come in yet?” he asked. Nobody answered, and he corked the jug. Henry set the two extra glasses back on the mantel.

Mandy came to the door presently, filling it with her calico expanse. “Y’all kin come in now,” she said, and as she turned waddling Bayard spoke to her and she paused as the men rose. The old man was straight as an Indian, and with the exception of Buddy’s lean and fluid length, he towered above his sons by a head. Mandy waited beside the door until they had passed, and gave Bayard her hand. “You ain’t been out in a long while, now,” she said. “And I bet you ain’t fergot Mandy, neither.”

“Sure, I haven’t,” Bayard agreed. But he had. Money, to Mandy, did not compensate for some trinket of no value which John never forgot to bring her when he came. He followed the others into the frosty darkness again. Beneath his feet the ground was already stiffening; overhead the sky was brilliant with stars; He stumbled a little behind the clotted backs until Rafe opened a door into a separate building, upon a room filled with warmth and a thin blue haze in which a kerosene lamp burned steadily, and odors of food, and stood aside until they had entered In the middle of the floor the table was laid, on it the lamp stood and at one end was placed a chair. The two sides and the other end were paralleled by backless benches. Against the further wall was the stove, and a huge cupboard of split boards, and a woodbox. Behind the stove two negro men and a half-grown boy sat, their faces shining with heat and with white rolling eyes; about their feet five puppies snarled with mock savageness at one another or chewed damply at the negroes’ static ankles or prowled about beneath the stove and the adjacent floor with blundering, aimless inquisitiveness.

“Howdy, boys,” Bayard said, calling them by name, and they bobbed at him with diffident flashes of teeth.

“Put dem puppies up, Richud,” Mandy ordered. The negroes gathered the puppies up one by one and stowed them away in a smaller box behind the stove, where they continued to move about with scratchings and bumpings and an occasional smothered protest. From time to time during the meal a head would appear suddenly, staring over the box edge with blinking and solemn curiosity, then vanish with an abrupt scuffling thump and more protests, and moiling, infant-like noises rose again. “Hush up, dawgs! G’awn to sleep now,” Richard would say, rapping the box with his knuckles. At last the noise ceased.

The old man took the chair, his sons around him, and the guest; some coatless, all collarless, with their dark, saturnine faces stamped all clearly from the same die. They ate. Sausage, and spare ribs, and a dish of hominy and one of fried sweet potatoes, and cornbread and a molasses jug of sorghum, and Mandy poured coffee from a huge enamelware pot. In the middle of the meal the two missing ones came in—Jackson, the eldest, a man of fifty-five, with a broad, high forehead and thick brows and an expression at once dreamy and intense—a sort of shy and impractical Cincinnatus; and Stuart, forty-four and Rafe’s twin. Yet although they were twins, there was no closer resemblance between them than between any two of them. As though the die was too firm and made too clean an imprint to be either hurried or altered, even by nature. Stuart had none of Rafe’s easy manner (Rafe was the only one of them that, by any stretch of the imagination, could have been called loquacious); on the other hand, he had much of Henry’s placidity. He was a good farmer and a canny trader, and he had a respectable bank account of his own. Henry, fifty-three, was the second son.

They ate with silent and steady decorum, with only the barest essential words, but amicably. Mandy moved back and forth between table and stove.

Before the meal was finished a sudden bell-like uproar of dogs floated up and seeped, muted by the tight walls, into the room. “Dar, now.” The negro Richard cocked his head. Buddy poised his coffee.

“Where are they, Dick?”

“Right back of de spring house. Dey got ‘im, too.” Buddy rose and slid leanly from his corner.

“I’ll go with you,” Bayard said, rising also. The others ate steadily. Richard got a lantern down from the cupboard top and lit it, and the three of them stepped out into the chill darkness across which the baying of the dogs came in musical gusts, ringing as frosty glass. It was chill and dark. The house loomed its rambling low wall broken by the ruddy glow of the window. “Ground’s about hard already,” Bayard remarked,

“ ‘Twon’t freeze tonight,” Buddy answered. “Will it, Dick?”

“Naw, suh. Gwine rain.”

“Go on,” Bayard said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Pappy said so,” Buddy answered. “Warmer’n ‘twas at sundown.”

“Don’t feel like it, to me,” Bayard insisted. They passed the wagon motionless in the starlight, its tires glinting like satin ribbons, and the long, rambling stable, from which placid munchings came, and an occasional snuffing snort as the lantern passed. The lantern twinkled among tree trunks as the path descended; the clamor of the dogs swelled just beneath them, and in a sapling just behind the spring house they found the ‘possum, curled motionless and with its eyes tightly shut, in a fork not six feet from the ground. Buddy lifted it down by the tail, unresisting. “Hell,” Bayard said.

Buddy called the dogs away, and they mounted the path again. In a disused shed behind the kitchen what seemed like at. least fifty eyes gleamed in matched red points as Buddy swung the lantern in... and flashed it onto a cage screened with chicken wire, from which rose a rank, warm odor and in which grizzled furry bodies moved sluggishly or swung sharp, skull-like faces into the light. He opened the door and dumped his latest capture in among its fellows and gave the lantern to Richard. They emerged. Already the sky was hazing over a ‘ little, losing its brittle brilliance.

The others sat in a semicircle before the fire; at the old man’s feet the blue-ticked hound dozed. They made room for Bayard, and Buddy squatted again in the chimney corner.

“Git ‘im?” Mr. MacCallum asked.

“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered. “Like lifting your hat off a nail in the wall.”

The old man puffed again. “We’ll give you a sho’ ‘nough hunt befo’you leave.”

Rafe said: “How many you got now, Buddy?”

“Ain’t got but fo’teen,” Buddy answered.

“Fo’teen?” Henry repeated. “We won’t never eat fo’teen ‘possums.”

“Turn ‘em loose and run ‘em again, then,” Buddy answered. The old man puffed slowly at his pipe. The others smoked or chewed also, and Bayard produced his cigarettes and offered them to Buddy. Buddy shook his head.

“Buddy ain’t never started yet,” Rafe said.

“You haven’t?” Bayard asked. “What’s the matter, Buddy?”

“Don’t know,” Buddy answered, from his shadow. “Just ain’t had time to learn, I reckon.”

The fire crackled and swirled; from time to time Stuart, nearest the box, put another log on. The dog at the old man’s feet dreamed, snuffed; soft ashes swirled on the hearth at its nose and it sneezed and woke, raised its head and blinked up at the old man’s face, then dozed again. They sat without word or movement, their grave, aquiline faces as though carved by the firelight out of the shadowy darkness, shaped by a angle thought and smoothed and colored by the same hand. The old man tapped his pipe carefully out upon his palm and consulted his fat silver watch. Eight o’clock.

“We’uns git up at fo’ o’clock, Bayard,” he said.

“But you don’t have to git up till daylight. Henry, git the jug.”

“Four o’clock,” Bayard repeated, as he and Buddy undressed in the lamplit chill of the lean-to room in which, in a huge wooden bed with a faded patchwork quilt, Buddy slept. “I don’t see why you bother to go to bed at all.” As he spoke his breath vaporized in the chilly air.

“Yes,” Buddy agreed, ripping his shirt over his head and kicking his lean, race-horse shanks out of his shabby khaki pants. “Don’t take long to spend the night at our house. You’re comp’ny, though.” Buddy’s preparations for sleeping were simple: he removed his boots and pants and shirt and went to bed in his woolen underwear, and he now lay with only his round head in view, watching Bayard who stood in a sleeveless jersey and short thin trunks. “You ain’t goin’ to sleep warm that-a-way,” Buddy added. ‘You want one o’ my heavy ‘uns?”

“I’ll sleep warm, I guess,” Bayard answered. He blew the lamp out and groped his way to the bed, his toes curling away from the icy floor, and got in. The mattress was filled with corn shucks; it rattled beneath him, drily sibilant, and whenever he or Buddy moved at all or took a deep breath even, the shucks shifted with small ticking sounds.

“Git that ‘ere quilt tucked in good over there,” Buddy advised from the darkness, emitting his breath in a short explosive sound of relaxation and contentment He yawned, audible but invisible. “Ain’t seen you in a long while,” he suggested.

“That’s right. Let’s see, when was it? Two—three years, wasn’t it?”

“Nineteen fifteen,” Buddy answered. “Last time you and him...” He ceased suddenly. Then he added quietly: “I seen in a paper, when it happened. The name. Kind of knowed right off ‘twas him. It was a limey paper.”

“You did? Where were you?”

“Up there,” Buddy answered. “Where them limeys was. Where they sent us. Flat country. Don’t see how they ever drained it enough to make a crop, with all that rain.”

“Yes,” Bayard said. His nose was like a lump of ice. He could feel his breath warming his nose a little, could almost see the pale smoke of it as he breathed; could feel the inhalation chilling his nostrils again. It seemed too that he could feel the planks of the ceiling as they sloped down to the low wall on Buddy’s side, could feel the atmosphere packed into the low corner, bitter and chill and thick, too thick for breathing, like invisible slush; and he lay beneath it...He was aware of the dry ticking of shucks beneath him and discovered so that he was breathing in deep troubled draughts and he wished dreadfully to be up, moving, before a fire, light; anywhere, anywhere. Buddy lay beside him in the oppressive, half-congealed solidity of the chill, talking in his slow, inarticulate idiom of the war. It was a vague, dreamy sort of tale, without beginning or end and with stumbling reference to places wretchedly pronounced—you got an impression of people, creatures without initiation or background or future, caught tunelessly in a maze of solitary conflicting preoccupations, like bumping tops, against an imminent but incomprehensible nightmare.

“How’d you like the army, Buddy?”

“Not much,” Buddy answered. “Ain’t enough to do. Good life for a lazy man.” He mused a moment.

“They gimme a medal,” he added, in a burst of shy, diffident confidence and sober pleasure. “I aimed to show it to you, but I fergot. Do it tomorrow. That ‘ere flo’s to dang cold to tech till I have to. I’ll watch a chance when pappy’s outen the house.”

“Why? Don’t he know you got it?”

“He knows,” Buddy answered. “Only he don’t like it because he claims it’s a Yankee medal. Rafe says pappy and Stonewall Jackson ain’t never surrendered.”

“Yes,” Bayard repeated. After a while Buddy ceased and sighed again, emptying his body for sleep. But Bayard lay rigidly oh his back, his eyes wide open. It was like being drunk and whenever you close your eyes the room starts going round and round, and so you sit rigid in the dark with your eyes wide open not to get sick. Buddy had ceased talking; presently his breathing became longer, steady and regular, and the shuck; shifted with sibilant complaint, as Bayard turned slowly onto his side.

But Buddy breathed on in the darkness, steadily and peacefully. Bayard could hear his own breathing also, but above it, all around it, surrounding him, that other breathing. As though he were one thing breathing with restrained laboring, within himself breathing with Buddy’s breathing; using up all the air so that the lesser thing must pant for it. Meanwhile the greater thing breathed peacefully and steadily and unawares, asleep, remote; ay, perhaps dead. Perhaps he was dead, and he recalled that morning, relived it again with strained and intense attention from the time he had seen the first tracer smoke, until from his steep side-slip he watched the flame burst like the gay flapping of an orange pennon from John’s Camel and saw his brother’s familiar gesture and the sudden awkward sprawl of his plunging body as it lost equilibrium in midair; relived it again as you might run over a printed tale, trying to remember, feel, a bullet going into his body or head that might have slain him at the same instant. That would account for it, would explain so much: that he too was dead and this was hell, through which he moved forever and ever with an illusion of quickness, seeking his brother who in turn was somewhere seeking him, never the two to meet. He turned onto his back again; the shucks whispered beneath him with dry derision. .

The house was full of noises; to his sharpened senses the silence was myriad: the dry agony of wood in the black frost; the ticking of shucks as he breathed; the very atmosphere itself like slush ice in the vice of the cold, oppressing his lungs. His feet were cold, his limbs sweated with it, and about his hot heart his body was rigid and shivering and he raised his naked arms above the covers and lay for a time with the cold like a lead cast about them. And all the while Buddy’s steady breathing and his own restrained and labored breath, both sourceless yet involved one with the other.

Beneath the covers again his arms were cold across his chest and his hands were like ice upon his ribs, and he moved with infinite caution while the chill croached from his shoulders downward and the hidden shucks chattered at him, and swung his legs to the floor, and his curling toes. He knew where the door was and he groped his way to it. It was fastened by a wooden bar, smooth as ice; he fumbled this out of its slots carefully and without noise. The door had sagged from the hinges and after the first jarring scrape, he grasped the edge of it in his chill fingers and raised it and swung it back, and stood in the door.

In the sky no star showed, and the sky was the sagging corpse of itself. It lay upon the earth like a deflated balloon; into it the dark shape of the kitchen rose without depth, and the trees beyond, and homely shapes like chill ghosts in the cold corpse-light—the woodpile; a farming tool; a barrel beside the broken stoop at the kitchen door, where he had stumbled, supperward. The gray chill seeped into him like water into sand, with short trickling runs; halting, groping about an obstruction, then on again, trickling at last along his unimpeded bones. He was shaking slowly and steadily with cold; beneath his hands his flesh was rough and without sensation, yet still it jerked and jerked as though something within the dead envelope of him strove to free itself. Above his head, upon the wooden roof, there sounded a single light tap, and as though at a signal, the gray silence began to dissolve. He shut the door silently and returned to bed.

In the bed he lay shaking more than ever, to the cold derision of the shucks under him, and he lay quietly on his back, hearing the winter rain whispering on the roof. There was no drumming, as when summer rain falls through the buoyant air, but a whisper of unemphatic sound, as though the atmosphere lying heavily upon the roof dissolved there and dripped sluggishly and steadily from the eaves. His blood flowed again, and the covers felt like iron or like ice; but while he lay motionless beneath the rain his blood warmed yet more, until at last his body ceased trembling and he lay presently in something like a tortured and fitful doze, surrounded by coiling images and shapes of stubborn despair and the ceaseless striving for…not vindication so much as comprehension, a hand, no matter whose, to touch him out of his black chaos. He would spurn it, of course, but it would restore his cold sufficiency again.

The rain dripped on, dripped and dripped; beside him Buddy breathed placidly and steadily: he had not even changed his position. At times Bayard dozed fitfully: dozing, he was wide awake; waking, he lay in a hazy state filled with improbable moiling and in which there was neither relief nor rest: drop by drop the rain wore the night away, wore time away. But it was so long, so damn long. His spent blood, wearied with struggling, moved through his body in slow beats, like the rain, wearing his flesh away. It comes to all...Bible...some preacher, anyway. Maybe he knew. Peace. It comes to all.

At last, from beyond walls, he heard movement. It was indistinguishable, yet he knew it was of human origin, of people he knew ‘waking again into the world he had not been able even temporarily to lose, people to whom he was...and he was comforted. The sounds continued, and at last and unmistakably he heard a door, and a voice Which he knew that with a slight effort of concentration he” could name; and best of all, that he could rise and go where they were gathered about a crackling fire. Arid he lay, at ease at last, intending to rise the next moment and go to them, putting it off a little longer while his blood beat slowly through his body and his heart was quieted. Buddy breathed steadily beside him, and his own breath was quiet now as Buddy’s while the human sounds came murmurously into the cold room with grave and homely reassurance. It comes to all, it comes to all, his tired heart comforted him, and at last he slept.

He waked in the gray morning, his body weary and heavy and dull: his sleep had not rested him. Buddy was gone, and it still rained, though now it was a definite sound on the roof and the air was warmer, with a rawness that probed into the very bones of him; and in his stockings and carrying his scarred, expensive boots in his hands, he traversed the cold room where Lee and Rafe and Stuart slept, and found Rafe and Jackson before the living-room fire.

“We let you sleep,” Rafe said, then he said: “Good Lord, boy, you look like a hant. Didn’t you sleep last night?”

“Yes, I slept all right,” Bayard answered. He sat down and stamped into his boots, and buckled the thongs below his knees. Jackson sat at one side of the hearth; in the shadowy corner near his feet a number of small, living creatures moiled silently, and still bent over his boots Bayard said:

“What you got there, Jackson? What sort of puppies are them?”

“New breed Tin trying Jackson answered, and Rafe approached with a half a tumbler of Henry’s pale amber whisky.

“Them’s Ethel’s pups,” he said. “Git Jackson to tell you about ‘em after you eat Here, drink this. You look all wore but. Buddy must a kept you awake, talkin’,” he added, with dry irony.

Bayard accepted the glass and emptied it, and lit a cigarette. “Mandy’s got yo’ breakfast on the stove,” ‘ Rafe added.

‘‘Ethel?’’ Bayard repeated. “Oh, that fox. I aimed to ask about her, last night.”

“Yes, Jackson aims to revolutionize the huntin’ business, with her. Aims to raise a breed of animals with a hound’s wind and bottom, and a fox’s smartness and speed.”

Bayard approached the shadowy corner and examined the small creatures with interest and curiosity.

“I never saw many fox pups,” he said at last, “but I never saw any that looked like them.”

“That’s what Gen’ral seems to think,” Rafe answered,

Jackson spat into the fire and stooped over the creatures. They knew his hands, and the moiling of them became more intense, and Bayard then noticed that they made no sound at all, not even puppy whimperings. “Hit’s a experiment,” Jackson explained. “The boys makes fun of ‘em, but they haint no more’n weaned, yet. You wait and see.”

“Don’t know what you’ll do with ‘em,” Rafe said brutally. “They won’t be big enough for work stock. Better git yo’ breakfast, Bayard.”

“You wait and see,” Jackson repeated. He touched the scramble of small bodies with his hands, in a gentle, protective gesture. “You can’t tell nothin’ ‘bout a dawg ‘twell hit’s at least two months old, can you?” he appealed to Bayard, looking up at him with his vague, intense gaze from beneath his shaggy brows.

“Go git yo’ breakfast, Bayard,” Rafe repeated. “Buddy’s done gone and left you.”

He bathed his face with icy water in a tin pan on the porch, and ate his breakfast—ham and eggs and flapjacks and sorghum and coffee—while Mandy talked to him about his brother. When he returned to the house old Mr. MacCallum was there. The puppies moiled inextricably in their corner, and the old man sat with his hands on his knees, watching them with bluff and ribald merriment, while Jackson sat nearby in a sort of Covering concern, like a hen,

“Come hyer, boy,” the old man ordered when Bayard appeared “Hyer, Rafe, git me that ‘ere bait line.” Rafe went out, returning presently with a bit of pork rind on the end of a string. The old man took it and rose, and hauled the puppies ungently into the light, where they crouched abjectly moiling—as strange a litter as Bayard had ever seen. No two of them looked alike, and none of them looked like anything else. Neither fox nor hound; partaking of both, yet neither; and despite their soft infancy, there was about them something monstrous and contradictory and obscene. Here a fox’s keen, cruel muzzle between the melting, sad eyes of a hound and its mild ears; there limp fears tried valiantly to stand erect and failed ignobly in flapping points; shoebutton eyes in meek puppy faces, and limp brief tails brushed over with a faint, golden fuzz like the inside of a chestnut burr. As regards color,, they ranged from pure reddish brown through ail indiscriminate brindle to pure ticked beneath a faint dun cast; and one of them had, feature for feature, old General’s face in comical miniature, even to his expression of sad and dignified disillusion. “Watch ‘em, now,” the old man ordered.

He got them all facing forward, then he dangled the meat directly behind them. Not one noticed it; he swept it back and forth above their heads; not one looked up. Then he swung it directly before their eyes; still they crouched diffidently on their young, unsteady legs and gazed at the meat with curiosity but without any interest at all and fell again to moiling soundlessly among themselves.

“You can’t tell nothin’ about a dawg—” Jackson began. His father interrupted him.

“Now, watch.” He held the puppies with one hand and with the other he forced the meat into their mouths. Immediately they surged clumsily and eagerly over his hand, but he moved the meat away and at the length of the string he dragged it along the floor just ahead of them until they had attained a sort of scrambling lope. Then in midfloor he flicked the meat slightly aside, but without seeing it the group blundered on and into a shadowy corner, where the wall stopped them and from which there rose presently the patient, voiceless confusion of them. Jackson left his chair and picked them up and brought them back to the fire.

“Now, what do you think of them, for a pack of huntin’ dogs?” the old man demanded. “Can’t smell, can’t bark, and damn ef I believe they kin see.”

“You can’t tell nothin’ about a dawg—” Jackson essayed patiently.

“Gen’ral kin,” his father interrupted. “Hyer, Rafe, call Gen’ral in hyer.”

Rafe went to the door and called, and presently General entered, his claws hissing a little on the bare floor and his ticked coat beaded with rain, and he stood and looked into the old man’s face with grave inquiry. “Corne hyer,” Mr. MacCallum said, and the dog moved again, with slow dignity. At that moment he saw the puppies beneath Jackson’s chair. He paused in midstride and for a moment he stood looking at them with fascination and bafflement and a sort of grave horror, then he gave his master one hurt, reproachful look and turned and departed, his tail between his legs. Mr. MacCallum sat down and rumbled heavily within himself.

“You can’t tell about dawgs—” Jackson repeated. He stooped and gathered up his charges, and stood up.

Mr. MacCallum continued to rumble and shake. “Well, I don’t blame the old feller,” he said. “Ef I had to look around on a passel of chaps like them and say to myself Them’s my boys—” But Jackson was gone. The old man sat and rumbled again, with enjoyment.

“Yes, suh, I reckon I’d feel ‘bout as proud as he does. Rafe, han’ me down my pipe.”

All that day it rained, and the following day and the day after that. The dogs lurked about the house all morning, underfoot, or made brief excursions into the weather, returning to sprawl before the fire, drowsing and malodorous and steaming, until Henry came along and drove them out; twice from the door Bayard saw the fox, Ethel, fading with brisk diffidence across the yard. With the exception of Henry and Jackson, who had a touch of rheumatism, the others were somewhere out in the rain most of the day. But at mealtimes they gathered again, shucking their wet outer garments on the porch and stamping in to thrust their muddy, smoking boots to the fire while Henry was fetching, the kettle and the jug. And last of all, Buddy, soaking wet.

Buddy had a way of getting his lean length up from his niche beside the chimney at any hour of the day and departing without a word, to return in an hour or six hours, or twelve or twenty-four or forty-eight, during which periods and despite the presence of Jackson and Henry and usually Lee, the place had a vague air of vacancy, until Bayard realized that the majority of the dogs were absent also. Hunting, they told Bayard when Buddy had been missing since breakfast.

“Why didn’t he let me know?” he demanded.

“Maybe he thought you wouldn’t keen to be out in the weather,” Jackson suggested.

“Buddy don’t mind weather,” Henry explained. “One day’s like another to him.”

“Nothing ain’t anything to Buddy,” Lee put in, in his bitter, passionate voice. He sat brooding in the fire, his womanish hands moving restlessly on his knees. “He’s spent his whole life in that ‘ere river bottom, with a hunk of cold cawnbread to eat and a passel of dawgs fer comp’ny.” He rose abruptly and quitted the room. Lee was in the late thirties. As a child he had been sickly. He had a good tenor voice and lie was much in demand at Sunday singings. He was supposed to be keeping company with a young woman living in the hamlet of Mount Vernon, six miles away. He spent much of his time tramping moodily and alone about the countryside.

Henry spat into the fire and jerked his head after tie departing brother. “He been to Vernon lately?”

“Him and Rale was there two days ago,” Jackson answered.

Bayard said; “Well, I won’t melt. I wonder if I could catch up with him now?” They pondered for a while, spitting gravely into the fire. “I misdoubt it,” Jackson said at last “Buddy’s liable to be ten mile away by now. You ketch ‘im next time ‘fo’ he starts out.”

After that Bayard did so, and he and Buddy tried for birds in the ragged, skeletoned fields in the rain, in which the guns made a flat, mournful sound that lingered in the streaming air like a spreading stain, or tried the stagnant backwaters along the river channel for duck and geese; ‘or, accompanied now and then by Rafe, hunted ‘coon and wildcat in the bottom. At times and far away, they would hear the shrill yapping of the young dogs in mad career. “There goes Ethel,” Buddy would remark. Then toward the end of the week the weather cleared, and in a twilight imminent with frost and while the scent lay well upon the muddy earth, old General started the red fox that had baffled him so many times.

All through the night the ringing, bell-like tones quavered and swelled and echoed among the hills, and all of them save Henry followed on horseback, guided by the cries of the hounds but mostly by the old man’s and Buddy’s uncanny and seemingly clairvoyant skill, in anticipating the course of the race. Occasionally they stopped while Buddy and his father wrangled about where the quarry would head next, but usually they agreed, apparently anticipating the animal’s movements before it knew them itself; and once and again they halted their horses upon a hill and sat so in the frosty starlight until the dogs’ voices welled out of the darkness mournful and chiming, swelled louder and nearer and swept invisibly past not half a mile away; faded diminishing and with a falling suspense, as of bells, into the darkness again.

“Thar, now!” the old man exclaimed, shapeless in his overcoat, upon his white horse. “Ain’t that music fer a man, now?”

“I hope they git ‘im this time,” Jackson said. “Hit hurts Gen’ral’s conceit so much every time he fools ‘im.”

“They won’t git ‘im,” Buddy said. “Soon’s he gits tired, he’ll hole up in them rocks.”

“I reckon we’ll have to wait till them pups of Jackson’s gits big enough,” the old man agreed. “Unless they’ll refuse to run they own gran’pappy. They done refused ever’ tiling else excep’ vittles “

“You jest wait,” Jackson repeated, indefatigable. “When them puppies git old enough to—”

“Listen.”

The talking ceased, and again across the silence the dogs’ voices rang among the hills. Long, ringing cries fading, falling with a quavering suspense, like touched bells or strings, repeated and sustained by bell-like echoes repeated and dying among the dark hills beneath the stars, lingering yet in the ears crystal-clear, mournful and valiant and a little sad.

“Too bad Johnny ain’t here,” Stuart said quietly. “He’d enjoy this race.”

“He was a feller far huntin’, now,” Jackson agreed. “He’d keep up with Buddy, even.”

“John was a fine boy,” the old man said.

“Yes, suh,” Jackson repeated. “A right warmhearted boy. Henry says he never come out hyer withouten he brung Mandy and the boys a little sto’-bought somethin’.”

“He neve’ sulled on a hunt,” Stuart said. “No matter how cold and wet it was, even when he was a little chap, with that ‘ere single bar’l he bought with his own money, that kicked ‘im so hard every time he shot it. And yit he’d tote it around, instead of that ‘ere sixteen old Colonel give ‘im, jest because he saved his money and bought hit hisself.”

“Yes,” Jackson agreed, “ef a feller gits into some-thin’ on his own accord, he ought to go through with hit cheerful.”

“He was sho’ a feller fer singin’ and shoutin’,” Mr. MacCallum said. “Skeer all the game in ten mile. I mind that night he headed off a race down at Samson’s bridge, and next we knowed, here him and the fox come a-floatin’ down river on that ‘ere drift lawg.”

“That ‘uz Johnny, all over,” Jackson agreed. “Gittin’ a whoppin’ big time outen ever’ thing that come up.”

“He was a fine boy,” Mr. MacCallum said again.

“Listen.”

Again the hounds gave tongue in the darkness below them. The sound floated up upon the chill air, died into echoes that repeated the sound again until its source was lost and the very earth itself might have found voice, mournful and sad and wild with all regret.

Christmas was two days away, and they sat again about the fire after supper; again old General dozed at his master’s feet. Tomorrow was Christmas eve and the wagon was going into town, and although, with that grave and unfailing hospitality of theirs, no word had been said to Bayard about his departure, he believed that in all their minds it was taken for granted that he would return home the following day for Christmas; and, since he had not mentioned it himself, a little curiosity and quiet speculation also.

It was cold again, with a vivid chill that caused the blazing logs to pop and crackle with vicious sparks and small glowing embers that leaped out upon the floor, to be crushed out by a lazy boot, and Bayard sat drowsily in a drowse of heat, his tired muscles relaxed in the cumulate waves of it as in a warm bath, and the stubborn struggling of his heart glozed over too, for the time. Time enough tomorrow to decide whether to go or not. Perhaps he’d just stay on, without offering that explanation that would never be demanded of him. Then he realized that Rafe, Lee, whoever went, would talk to people, would learn about that which he had not the courage to tell them.

Buddy had come out of his shadowy niche and he now squatted in the center of the. semicircle, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees, with his motionless and seemingly tireless ability for sitting timelessly on his heels. He was the baby, twenty years old. His mother was the old man’s second wife, and his hazel eyes and the reddish thatch cropped closely to his round head was a noticeable contrast to the others’ brown eyes and black hair. But the old man had stamped Buddy’s face as clearly as ever a one of the other boys, and despite its youth, it too was like the others—aquiline and spare, reserved and grave though a trifle ruddy with his fresh coloring and finer skin.

The others were of medium height or under, ranging from Jackson’s faded, vaguely ineffectual lank-ness, through Henry’s placid rotundity and Rafe’s (Raphael Semmes he was) and Stuart’s poised and stocky muscularity, to Lee’s thin and fiery unrepose; but Buddy with his sapling-like leanness stood eye to eye with that father who wore his eighty-two years as though they were a thin shirt. “Long, spindlin’ scoundrel,” the old man would say, with bluff, assumed derogation. “Keeps hisself wore to a shadder totin’ around all that ‘ere grub he eats.” And they would sit in silence, looking at Buddy’s lean, jack-knifed length with the same identical thought, a thought which each believed peculiar to himself and which none ever divulged—that someday Buddy would marry and perpetuate the name.

Buddy also bore his father’s name, though it is doubtful if anyone outside the family and the War Department knew it. He had run away at eighteen and enlisted; at the infantry concentration camp in Arkansas to which he had been sent, a fellow recruit called him Virge and Buddy had fought him steadily and without anger for seven minutes; at the New Jersey embarkation depot another man had done the same thing, and Buddy had fought him, again steadily and thoroughly and without anger. In Europe, still following the deep but uncomplex compulsions of his nature, he had contrived, unwittingly perhaps, to perpetrate something which was later ascertained by authority to have severely annoyed the enemy, for which Buddy had received his charm, as he called it. What it was he did, he could never be brought to tell, and the gaud not only failing to placate his father’s rage over the fact that a son of his had joined the Federal army, but on the contrary adding fuel to it, the bauble languished among Buddy’s sparse effects and his military career was never mentioned in the family circle; and now as usual Buddy squatted among them, his back to the fire and his arms around his knees^ while they sat about the hearth with their bedtime toddies, talking of Christmas.

“Turkey,” the old man was saying, with fine and rumbling disgust. “With a pen full of ‘possums, and a river bottom full of squir’ls and ducks and a smokehouse full of hawg meat, you damn boys have got to go clean to town and buy a turkey fer Christmas dinner.”

“Christmas ain’t Christmas lessen a feller has a little somethin’ different from ever’ day,” Jackson pointed out mildly.

“You boys jest wants a excuse to git to town and loaf around all day and spend money,” the old man retorted. “I’ve seen a sight mo’ Christmases than you have, boy, and ef hit’s got to be sto’-bought, hit ain’t Christmas.”

“How ‘bout town-folks?” Rafe asked. “You ain’t allowin’ them no Christmas a-tall.”

“Don’t deserve none,” the old man snapped. “Livin’ on a little two-by-fo’ lot, jam right up in the next feller’s back do’, eatin’outen tin cans.”

“Sposin’ they all broke up in town,” Stuart said, “and moved out here and took up land; you’d hear pappy cussin’ town then. You couldn’t git along without town to keep folks bottled up in, pappy, and you knows it.”

“Buyin’ turkeys,” Mr. MacCallum repeated with savage disgust. “Buyin’ ‘em. I mind the time when I could take a gun and step out that ‘ere do’ and git a gobbler in thirty minutes. And a venison ham in a hour mo’. Why, you fellers don’t know nothin’ about Christmas. All you knows is a sto’ winder full of cocoanuts and Yankee-made popguns and sich.”

“Yes, suh,” Rafe said, and he winked at Bayard, “that was the biggest mistake the world ever made, when Lee surrendered. The country ain’t never got over it.”

The old man snorted again. “I’ll be damned ef I ain’t raised the damdest smartest set of boys in the world. Can’t tell ‘em nothin’, can’t learn ‘em nothin’; can’t even set in front of my own fire fer the whole passel of ‘em tellin’ me how to run the whole damn country. Hyer, you boys, git on to bed.”

Next morning Jackson and Rafe and Stuart and Lee left for town at sunup in the wagon. Still none of . them had made any sign, expressed any curiosity as to whether they would find him there when they returned that night, or whether it would be another three years before they saw him again. And Bayard stood on the frost-whitened porch, smoking a cigarette in the chill, vivid air while the yet hidden sun painted the eastern hills, and looked after the wagon and the four muffled figures in it and wondered if it would be three years again, or ever. The hounds came and nuzzled about him and he dropped his hand among their icy noses and the warm flicking of their tongues, gazing after the wagon, hidden now among the trees from which the dry rattling of it came unimpeded upon the soundless clear morning. “Ready to go?” Buddy said behind him, and he turned and picked up his shotgun where it leaned against the wall The hounds surged about them with eager whimperings and frosty breaths and Buddy led them across to a shed and huddled them inside and fastened the door upon their surprised protests. From another kennel he unfastened the young pointer, Dan. Behind them the hounds continued to raise their baffled and mellow expostulations.

Until noon they hunted the ragged, fallow fields and woods-edges in the warming am The frost was soon gone, and the air warmed to a windless languor; and twice in brier thickets they saw redbirds darting like arrows of scarlet flame. At last Bayard lifted his eyes unwinking into the sun.

“I must go back, Buddy,” he said. “Tin going home this afternoon.”

“All right,” Buddy agreed without protest, and he called the dog in. “You come back next month.”

Mandy got them some cold food and they ate, and while Buddy went to saddle Perry, Bayard went into the house where he found Henry laboriously soling fr pair of shoes and the old man reading a week-old . newspaper through steel-bowed spectacles.

“I reckon yo’ folks will be lookin’ fer you,” Mr. MacCallum agreed. “We’ll be expectin’ you back nest month, though, to git that ‘ere fox. Ef we don’t git ‘im soon, Gen’ral won’t be able to hold up his head befo’ them puppies.”

“Yes, sir,” Bayard answered, “I will.”

“And try to git yo’ gran’pappy to come with you. He kin lay around hyer and eat his head off well as he kin in town.”

“Yes, sir, I will.”

Then Buddy led the pony up to the door, and the old man extended his hand without rising, and Henry put aside his cobbling and followed him onto the porch. “Come out again,” he said diffidently, giving Bayard’s hand a single pump-handle shake; and from a slobbering inquisitive surging of half-grown hounds Buddy reached up his hand

“Be lookin’ fer you,” he said briefly, and together they stood and watched Bayard wheel away, and when he looked back they lifted their hands gravely. Then Buddy shouted after him and he reined Perry about and returned. Henry had vanished, and he reappeared with a weighted tow sack.

“I nigh fergot it,” he said. “Jug of cawn pappy’s sendin’ in to yo’ gran’paw. You won’t git no better in Looeyvul or nowhar else, neither,” he added with quiet pride. Bayard thanked him, and Buddy fastened the sack to the pommel, where it lay solidly against his leg.

“There. That’ll ride. So long.”

“So long.”

Perry moved on, and he looked back. They still stood there, quiet and grave and steadfast. Beside the kitchen door the fox, Ethel, sat, looking at him covertly; near her the half-grown puppies moved about in the sun. The sun was an hour above the western hills; the road wound on into the trees. He looked back again, the house sprawled its rambling length against the further trees, its smoke like a balanced plume against the windless sky. The door was empty again. He shook Perry into his easy, tireless foxtrot, the jug of whisky jouncing a little against his knee.