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so we didn't get Ab Snopes that day. We didn't get him
for a lot of days, and nights too—days in which we
rode, the three of us, on relays of Granny's and Ringo's
Yankee mules along the known roads and the unknown
(and sometimes unmarked) trails and paths, in the
wet and the iron frost, and nights when we slept in the
same wet and the same freeze and (once) in the snow,
beneath whatever shelter we found when night found us.
They had neither name nor number. They lasted from
that December afternoon until late February, until one
night we realised that we had been hearing geese and
ducks going north for some time. At first Ringo kept a
pine stick and each night he would cut a notch in it,
with a big one for Sunday and two long ones which
meant Christmas and New Year's. But one night when
the stick had almost forty notches in it, we stopped in
the rain to make camp without any roof to get under and
we had to use the stick to start a fire, because of Uncle
Buck's arm. And so, when we came to where we could
get another pine stick, we couldn't remember whether
it had been five or six or ten days, and so Ringo didn't
start another. Because he said he would fix the stick
up the day we got Grumby and that it wouldn't need
but two notches on it—one for the day we got him and
one for the day Granny died.
We had two mules apiece, to swap onto at noon each day. We got the mules back from the hill people; we could have got a cavalry regiment if we had wanted it —of old men and women and children, too—with cotton bagging and flour sacking for uniforms and hoes and axes for arms, on the Yankee mules that Granny had loaned to them. But Uncle Buck told them that we didn't need any help; that three was enough to catch Grumby.
They were not hard to follow. One day we had about twenty notches on the stick and we came onto a house where the ashes were still smoking and a boy almost as big as Ringo and me still unconscious in the stable with even his shirt cut to pieces like they had had a
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wire snapper on the whip, and a woman with a little thread of blood still running out of her mouth and her voice sounding light and far away like a locust from across the pasture, telling us how many there were and which way they would likely go saying, "Kill them. Kill them."
It was a long way, but it wasn't far. You could have put a silver dollar down on the geography page with the center of it at Jefferson and we would have never ridden out from under it. And we were closer behind them than we knew, because one night we had ridden late without coming to a house or a shed to camp in, and so we stopped and Ringo said he would scout around a little, because all we had left to eat was the bone of a ham; only it was more likely Ringo was trying to dodge helping to get in the firewood. So Uncle Buck and I were spreading down pine branches to sleep on when we heard a shot and then a sound like a brick chimney falling onto a rotten shingle roof, and then the horses, starting fast and dying away, and then I could hear Ringo yelling. He had come onto a house; he thought it was deserted, and then he said it looked too dark, too quiet. So he climbed onto a shed against the back wall, and he said he saw the crack of light and he was trying to pull the shutter open careful, but it came loose with abound like a shot, and he was looking into a room with a candle stuck into a bottle and either three or thirteen men looking right at him; and how somebody hollered, "There they are!" and another man jerked out a pistol and one of the others grabbed his arm as it went off, and then the whole shed gave way under him, and he said how he lay there hollering and trying to get untangled from the broken planks and heard them ride away.
"So he didn't shoot at you," Uncle Buck said. "Hit warn't none of his fault if he never," Ringo said. "But he didn't," Uncle Buck said. But he wouldn't let us go on that night. "We won't lose any distance," he said. "They are flesh and blood, the same as we are. And we ain't scared."
So we went on at daylight, following the hoofprints now. Then we had three more notches in the stick; that
night Ringo put the last notch in it that he was going to, but we didn't know it. We were sitting in front of a cotton pen where we were going to sleep, eating a shote that Ringo had found, when we heard the horse. Then the man begun to holler, "Hello! Hello!" and then we watch him ride up on a good short-coupled sorrel mare, with his neat little fine made boots, and his linen shirt without any collar, and a coat that had been good, too, once, and a broad hat pulled down so that ah1 we could see was his eyes and nose between the hat and his black beard.
"Howdy, men," he said.
"Howdy," Uncle Buck said. He was eating a sparerib; he sat now with the rib in his left hand and his right hand lying on his lap just inside his coat; he wore the pistol on a loop of lace leather around his neck and stuck into his pants like a lady's watch. But the stranger wasn't looking at him; he just looked at each of us once and then sat there on the mare, with both his hands on the pommel in front of him.
"Mind if I light and warm?" he said.
"Light," Uncle Buck said.
He got off. But he didn't hitch the mare. He led her up and he sat down opposite us with the reins in his hand. "Give the stranger some meat, Ringo," Uncle Buck said. But he didn't take it. He didn't move. He just said that he had eaten, sitting there on the log with his little feet side by side and his elbows out a little and his two hands on his knees as small as a woman's hands and covered with a light mat of fine black hair right down to the finger nails, and not looking at any of us now. I don't know what he was looking at now.
"I have just ridden out from Memphis," he said. "How far do you call it to Alabama?"
Uncle Buck told him, not moving either, with the sparerib still raised in his left hand and the other hand lying just inside his coat. "You going to Alabama, hey?"
"Yes," the stranger said. "I'm looking for a man." And now I saw that he was looking at me from under his hat. "A man named Grumby. You people in these parts may have heard of him too."
"Yes," Uncle Buck said, "we have heard of him."
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"Ah," the stranger said. He smiled; for a second his teeth looked white as rice inside his ink-colored beard. "Then what I am doing does not have to be secret." He looked at Uncle Buck now. "I live up in Tennessee. Grumby and his gang killed one of my niggers and ran my horses off. I'm going to get the horses back. If I have to take Grumby hi the bargain, that will suit me too."
"Sho, now," Uncle Buck said. "So you look to find him hi Alabama?"
"Yes. I happen to know that he is now headed there. I almost caught him yesterday; I did get one of his men, though the others escaped me. They passed you all sometime last night, if you were in this neighborhood then. You would have heard them, because when I last saw them, they were not wasting any time. I managed to persuade the man I caught to tell me where they are to rondyvoo."
"Alabama?" Ringo said. "You mean they headed back toward Alabama?"
"Correct," the stranger said. He looked at Ringo now. "Did Grumby steal your hog, too, boy?" "Hawg," Ringo said. "Hawg?"
"Put some wood on the fire," Uncle Buck told Ringo. "Save your breath to snore with tonight."
'Ringo hushed, but he didn't move; he sat there staring back at the stranger, with his eyes looking a little red in the firelight.
"So you folks are out to catch a man, too, are you?" the stranger said.
"Two is correct," Ringo said. "I reckon Ab Snopes can pass for a man."
So then it was too late; we just sat there, with the stranger facing us across the fire with the mare's reins hi his little still hand, looking at the three of us from between his hat and h
is beard. "Ab Snopes," he said. "I don't believe I am acquainted with Ab Snopes. But I know Grumby. And you want Grumby too." He was looking at all of us now. "You want to catch Grumby. Don't you think that's dangerous?"
"Not exactly," Uncle Buck said. "You see, we done got a little Alabama Grumby evidence ourselves. That
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something or somebody has give Grumby a change of heart about killing women and children." He and the stranger looked at each other. "Maybe it's the wrong season for women and children. Or maybe it's public opinion, now that Grumby is what you might call a public character. Folks hereabouts is got used to having their menfolks killed and even shot from behind. But even the Yankees never got them used to the other. And evidently somebody has done reminded Grumby of this. Ain't that correct?"
They looked at each other; they didn't move. "But you are neither a woman nor a child, old man," the stranger said. He stood up, easy; his eyes glinted in the firelight as he turned and put the reins over the mare's head. "I reckon I'll get along," he said. We watched him get into the saddle and sit there again, with his little black-haired hands lying on the pommel, looking down at us—at me and Ringo now. "So you want Ab Snopes," he said. "Take a stranger's advice and stick to him."
He turned the mare. I was watching him, then I was thinking "I wonder if he knows that her off back shoe is gone," when Ringo hollered, "Look out!" and then it seemed to me that I saw the spurred mare jump before I saw the pistol flash; and then the mare was galloping and Uncle Buck was lying on the ground cussing and yelling and dragging at his pistol, and then all three of us were dragging and fighting over it, but the front sight was caught in his suspenders, and the three of us fighting over it, and Uncle Buck panting and cussing, and the sound of the galloping mare dying away.
The bullet went through the flesh of the inner side of the arm that had the rheumatism; that was why Uncle Buck cussed so bad; he said the rheumatism was bad enough, and the bullet was bad enough, but to have them both at once was too much for any man. And then, when Ringo told him he ought to be thankful, that suppose the bullet had hit his good arm and then he wouldn't even be able to feed himself, he reached back and, still lying down, he caught up a stick of firewood and tried to hit Ringo with it. We cut his sleeve away and stopped the blood, and he made me cut a
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strip off his shirt tail, and Ringo handed him his stick and he sat there cussing us while we soaked the strip in hot salt water, and he held the arm himself with his good hand, cussing a steady streak, and made us run the strip back and forth through the hole the bullet had made. He cussed then sure enough, looking a little like Granny looked, like all old people look when they have been hurt, with his beard jerking and his eyes snapping and his heels and the stick jabbing into the ground like the stick had been with him so long that it felt the rag and the salt too.
And at first I thought that the black man was Grumby, like I had thought that maybe Ab Snopes was. But Uncle Buck said not. It was the next morning; we hadn't slept much because Uncle Buck wouldn't go to sleep; only we didn't know then that it was his arm, because he wouldn't even let us talk about taking him back home. And now we tried again, after we had finished breakfast, but he wouldn't listen, already on his mule with his left arm tied across his chest and the pistol stuck between the arm and his chest, where he could get to it quick, saying, "Wait. Wait," and his eyes hard and snapping with thinking. "It's something I ain't quite got yet," he said. "Something he was telling us last night without aiming to have us know yet that he had told us. Something that we are going to find out today."
"Likely a bullet that's fixing to hit you halfway betwixt both arms stid of halfway betwixt one," Ringo said.
Uncle Buck rode fast; we could watch his stick rising and falling against the mule's flank, not hard, just steady and fast, like a crippled man hi a hurry that has used the stick so long he don't even know it any more. Because we didn't know that his arm was making him sick yet; he hadn't given us tune to realise it. So we hurried on, riding along beside a slough, and then Ringo saw the snake. It had been warm for a week, until last night. But last night it made ice, and now we saw the moccasin where it had crawled out and was trying to get back into the water when the cold got it, so that it lay with its body on the land and its head fixed in the skim ice like it was set into a mirror, and Uncle Buck turned sideways on his mule, hollering at us:
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"There it is, by Godfrey! There's the sign! Didn't I tell you we would------"
We all heard it at once—the three or maybe four shots and then the sound of horses galloping, except that some of the galloping came from Uncle Buck's mule, and he had his pistol out now before he turned from the road and into the trees, with the stick jammed under his hurt arm and his beard flying back over his shoulder. j But we didn't find anything. We saw the marks in the
[ mud where the five horses had stood while the men
that rode them had watched the road, and we saw the sliding tracks where the horses had begun to gallop, and I thinking quietly, "He still don't know that that shoe is gone." But that was all, and Uncle Buck sitting on his mule with the pistol raised in his hand and his beard blown back over his shoulder and the leather thong of the pistol hanging down his back like a girl's pigtail, and his mouth open and his eyes blinking at me and Ringo.
"What in the tarnation hell!" he said. "Well, let's go back to the road. Whatever it was has done gone that way too."
So we had turned. Uncle Buck had put the pistol up and his stick had begun to beat the mule again when we saw what it was, what it meant.
It was Ab Snopes. He was lying on his side, tied hand and foot, and hitched to a sapling; we could see the marks in the mud where he had tried to roll back into the underbrush until the rope stopped him. He had been watching us all the time, lying there with his face in the shape of snarling and not making a sound after he found out he could not roll out of sight. He was watching our mules' legs and feet under the bushes; he hadn't thought to look any higher yet, and so he did not know that we could see him; he must have thought that we had just spied him, because all of a sudden he began to jerk and thrash on the ground, hollering, "Help! Help! Help!"
We untied him and got him onto his feet, and he was still hollering, loud, with his face and his arms jerking, about how they had caught and robbed him, and they would have killed him if they hadn't heard us coming
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and run away; only his eyes were not hollering. They were watching us, going fast and quick from Ringo to me to Uncle Buck, and then at Ringo and me again, and they were not hollering, like his eyes belonged to one man and his gaped and yelling mouth belonged to another.
"So they caught you, hey?" Uncle Buck said. "A Innocent and unsuspecting traveler. I reckon the name of them would never be Grumby now, would it?"
It was like we might have stopped and built a fire and thawed out that moccasin—just enough for it to find out where it was, but not enough for it to know what to do about it. Only I reckon it was a high compliment to set Ab Snopes xip with a moccasin, even a little one. I reckon it was bad for him. I reckon he realised that they had thrown him back to us without mercy, and that if he tried to save himself from us at their expense, they would come back and kill him. I reckon he decided that the worst thing that could happen to him would be for us not to do anything to him at all. Because he quit jerking his arms; he even quit lying; for a minute his eyes and his mouth were telling the
same thing.
"} made a mistake," he said. "I admit hit. I reckon everybody does. The question is, what are you fellows going to do about hit?"
"Yes," Uncle Buck said. "Everybody makes mistakes. Your trouble is, you make too many. Because mistakes are bad. Look at Rosa Millard. She just made one, and look at her. And you have made two."
Ab Snopes watched Uncle Buck. "What's them?"
&nbs
p; "Being born too soon and dying too late," Uncle
Buck said.
He looked at all of us, fast; he didn't move, still talking to Uncle Buck. "You ain't going to kill me. You
don't dast."
"I don't even need to," Uncle Buck said. "It wasn't my grandmaw you sicked onto that snake den."
He looked at me now, but his eyes were going again, back and forth across me at Ringo and Uncle Buck; it was the two of them again now, the eyes and the voice. "Why, then I'm all right. Bayard ain't got no hard feel-
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ings against me. He knows hit was a pure accident; that we was doing hit for his sake and his paw a.nd them niggers at home. Why, here hit's a whole year and it was me that holp and tended Miss Rosa when she
never had ara living soul but them chil-------" Now the
voice began to tell the truth again; it was the eyes and the voice that I was walking toward. He fell back, crouching, his hands flung up.
Behind me, Uncle Buck said, "You, Ringo! Stay back."
He was walking backward now, with his hands flung up, hollering, "Three on one! Three on one!"
"Stand still," Uncle Buck said. "Ain't no three on you. I don't see nobody on you but one of them children you was just mentioning." Then we were both down in the mud; and then I couldn't see him, and I couldn't seem to find him any more, not even with the hollering; and then I was fighting three or four for a long time before Uncle Buck and Ringo held me, and then I cuukl see him again, lying on the ground with his arms over his face. "Get up," Uncle Buck said.
"No," he said. "Three of you can jump on me and knock me down again, but you got to pick me up first to do hit. I ain't got no rights and justice here, but you can't keep me from protesting hit."
"Lift him up," Uncle Buck said. "I'll hold Bayard."
Ringo lifted him; it was like lifting up a half-filled cotton sack. "Stand up, Mr. Ab Snopes," Ringo said. But he would not stand, not even after Ringo and Uncle Buck tied him to the sapling and Ringo had taken off his and Uncle Buck's and.Ab Snopes' galluses and knotted them together with the bridle reins from the mules. He just hung there in the rope, not even flinching when the lash fell, saying, "That's hit. Whup me. Lay hit on me; you got me three to one."
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