Requiem for a Nun

188 WILLIAM FAULKNER

simple infancy as to be the worn and weary ancestor of all subsequent life.

They pointed out to old Alec that the only reason the lock could be missing

was that the bandits had not had time or been able to cut it out of the

door, and that even three fleeing madmen on stolen horses would not carry a

six-foot oak door very far, and that a party of Ikkernotubbe's young men

were even now trailing the horses westward toward the River and that without

doubt the lock would be found at any moment, probably under the first bush

at the edge of the settlement: knowing better, knowing that there was no

limit to the fantastic and the terrifying and the bizarre, of which the men

were capable who already, just to escape from a log jail, had quietly

removed one entire wall and stacked it in neat piecemeal at the roadside,

and that they nor old Alec neither would ever see his lock again;

Nor did they; the rest of that afternoon and all the next day too, while old

Alec still smoked his pipe in front of his smoldering log, the settlement's

sheepish and raging elders hunted for it, with (by now: the next afternoon)

Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaws helping too, or anyway present, watching: the wild

men, the wilderness's tameless evictant children loooking only the more wild

and homeless for the white man's denim and butternut and felt and straw

which they wore, standing or squatting or following, grave, attentive and

interested, while the white men sweated and cursed among the bordering

thickets of their punily-clawed foothold; and always the rider, Pettigrew,

ubiquitous, everywhere, not helping search himself and never in anyone's

way, but always present, inscrutable, saturnine, missing nothing: until at

last toward sundown Compson crashed savagely out of the last bramble-brake

and flung the sweat from his face with a full-armed sweep sufficient to

repudiate a throne, and said.

'All right, god damn it, we'll pay him for it.' Because they had already

considered that last gambit; they had already realized its seriousness from

the very fact that Peabody had tried to make a joke about it which everyone

knew that even Peabody did not think humorous:

'Yes-and quick too, before he has time to advise with Pettigrew and price

it by the pound.'

'By the pound?' Compson said.

'Pettigrew just weighed it by the three hundred miles from Nashville. Old

Alec might start from Carolina. That's fifteen thousand pounds.'

'Oh,' Compson said. So he blew in his men by means of a foxhom which one of

the Indians wore on a thong around his