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,'