'More,' the old Negro said.
'A thousand?'
'More than that': and now indeed there was no stir, no breath: only one vast suspension as if the whole bright April morning leaned: 'Was it forty thousand?... All right. Was it half of forty thousand? How much did you see? How much did you count? Can you count to a thousand dollars?'
'It was a heap,' the old Negro said: and now they breathed: one Tuesday stir, one exhalation, one movement; the day, the morning once more relinquished, the voice its valedictory: 'There'll be a train at the depot in twenty-five minutes. You be on it when it leaves and dont come back. We dont like rich niggers here,'
'So we got on the train,'the old Negro said, 'and rode to the next station. Then we got out and walked. It was a far piece, but we knowed where he would be now, if they would just let him alone-' the blue haze-cradled valley where the corners of Georgia and Tennessee and Carolina meet, where he had appeared sud-denly from nowhere that day last summer with a three-legged race-horse and an old Negro preacher and the Negro child who rode the horse, and stayed two weeks during which the horse outran every other one within fifty miles, and finally one brought all the way from Knoxville to try to cope with it, then (the four of them) vanished again overnight six hours ahead of a horde of Federal agents and sheriffs and special officers like the converging packs of a state- or nation-wide foxhunt.
'And we was right; he must a come straight back there from the Missouri jail because it was still June. They told us about it: a Sunday morning in the church and likely it was the preacher that seen him first because he was already facing that way, before the rest of them turned their heads and recognised him too standing against the back wall just inside the door like he hadn't never left-' the runner seeing it too, seeing almost as much as the Fed-eral ex-deputy would have seen if he had been there:--the morose, savage, foul-mouthed, almost inarticulate (only the more so for the fact that occasionally a fragment of what he spoke sounded a little like what the valley knew as English) foreigner who moved, breathed, not merely in an aura of bastardy and bachelordom but of homelessness too, like a half-wild pedigreeless pariah dog: father- less, wifeless, sterile and perhaps even impotent too, misshapen, savage and fouclass="underline" the world's portionless and intractable and incon-solable orphan, who brought without warning into that drowsing vacuum an aggregation bizarre, mobile and amazing as a hippo-drome built around a comet: two Negroes and the ruined remnant of the magnificent and incredible horse whose like even on four legs the valley or the section either had never seen before, into a country where a horse was any milkless animal capable of pulling a plow or a cart on weekdays and carrying sacks of corn to the mill on Saturdays and bearing as many of the family as could cling to its gaunt ridgepole to the church on Sundays, and where there not only were none, but there never had been any Negroes; whose people man and boy from sixty-odd down to fourteen and thirteen, had fifty years ago quitted their misty unmapped eyries to go for miles and even weeks on foot to engage in a war in which they had no stake and, if they had only stayed at home, no contact, in order to defend their land from Negroes; not content merely to oppose and repudiate their own geopolitical kind and their com-mon economic derivation, they must confederate with its embat-tled enemies, stealing, creeping (once at a crossroads tavern a party of them fought something resembling a pitched battle with a Confederate recruiting party) by night through the Confederate lines to find and join a Federal army, to fight not against slavery but against Negroes, to abolish the Negro by freeing him from them who might bring Negroes among them exactly as they would have taken their rifles clown from the pegs or deer antlers above hearth and doorway to repel, say, a commercial company talking about bringing the Indians back.
Hearing it too: 'Except it wasn't two weeks we was there that first time. It was fifteen days. The first two they spent just looking at us. They would come from all up and down the valley, walking or on horses and mules or the whole family in the wagon, to set in the road in front of the store where we would be squatting on the gallery eating cheese and crackers and sardines, looking at us. Then the men and boys would go around behind the store where we had Tuesday built a pen out of rails and scraps of boards and pieces of rope, to stand and look at the horse. Then we begun to run and by the fifth day we had outrun every horse in the whole valley and had done won even one mortgage on a ten-acre corn-patch up on the moun-tain, and by the seventh day we was running against horses brought all the way in from the next counties across what they called the Gap. rien six days more, with the folks in the valley betting on our horse now, until the fifteenth clay when they brought that horse from Knoxville that had run at Churchill Downs back home once, and this time it was not just the valley folks but folks from all that part of Tennessee watching that three-legged horse without even no saddle (we never used no bridle neither: just a one-rein hackamore and a belly-band for this boy to hold on to) outrun that Knoxville horse the first time at five furlongs and the next time at a full mile for double stakes, with not just the folks in the valley but the folks from the other counties too betting on it now, so that everybody or anyway every family in that part of Tennessee had a share in what it won-'
'That's when he was taken into the Masons,' the runner said. 'During that two weeks,'
'Fifteen days,' the old Negro said. 'Yes, there was a lodge there.-Then just before daylight the next morning a man on a mule rid down from the Gap, just about a hour ahead of them-' the runner hearing this too as the old Negro himself had heard it a year afterward: when the sun rose the automobile itself stood In front of the store-the first automobile which the soil of the val-ley had ever imprinted and which some of the old people and children had ever seen, driven part of the way over the gap trail but indubitably hauled and pushed and probably even carried here and there for the rest of the distance, and inside the store the sher-iff of the county and the city strangers in their city hats and neck-ties and shoes, smelling, stinking of excise officers, revenuers, while already the horses and mules and wagons of yesterday flowed back down from the coves and hills, the riders and occupants dismounting at once now, to pause for a moment to look quietly and curi- ously at the automobile as though at a medium-sized rattlesnake, then crowding into the store until it would hold no more of them, facing not the city strangers standing in a tight wary clump in front of the cold spit-marked stove in its spit-marked sandbox, they had looked at them once and then no more, but rather the sheriff, so that, since the sheriff was one of them, bore one of the names which half the valley bore and the valley had all voted for him and in fact, except for his dime-store cravat and their overalls, even looked like them, it was as though the valley merely faced itself.
They stole the horse,' the sheriff said. 'All the man wants is just to get it back,' But no reply: only the quiet, grave, courteous, not really listening but just waiting faces, until one of the city strangers said in a bitter city voice: 'Wait-' already stepping quickly past the sheriff, his hand al-ready inside the buttoned front of his city coat when the sheriff said in his flat hill voice: 'You wait,' his hand inside the other's buttoned coat too, al-ready covering the other smaller one, plucking it out of the coat and holding easily in the one grasp both the small city hand and the flat city pistol so that they looked like toys in it, not wrenching but merely squeezing the pistol out of the hand and dropping it into his own coat pocket, and said, 'Well, boys, let's get on,' moving, walking, his companions in their white shirts and coat sleeves and pants legs and shoes creased and polished two days ago in Chattanooga hotels, heeling him, compact and close, while the faces, the lane opened: through the store, the lane, the faces closing behind: across the gallery and down the steps, the silent lane still opening and closing behind them until they reached the auto-mobile; then, and young mountain men had not yet learned how to decommission an automobile simply by removing the dis-tributor or jamming the carburetor. So they had used what they did know: a ten-pound hammer from the blacksmith's shop, not knowing even then the secret of the thing's life beneath the hood and so over-finding it: the fine porcelain dust of shattered plugs and wrenched and battered wires and dented pipes and even the Tuesday mute half-horseshoe prints of the hammer punctuating the spew of oil and gasoline and even the hammer itself immobile against an overalled leg in plain view; and now the city man, cursing in his furious bitter voice, was scrabbling with both hands at the sheriff's coat until the sheriff grasped both of them in his one and held the man so; and, facing them now across the ruined engine, again it was merely the valley facing itself. The automobile dont belong to the government,' the sheriff said. 'It belongs to him. He will have to pay to have it fixed,'