'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,'