'His heart?' the runner said, 'Yes,' the old Negro said. Then he did vanish, because the next time they seed him they wouldn't have knowcd him except for the cap, the coat and them Irish britches gone now and wearing over-halls and a hickory shirt. Except that they would have had to gone out there to seen that, because he was a farmer now, a wage-hand, likely not getting much more than his board and lodging and washing because the place he was working on hadn't hardly sup-ported the two folks that was already trying to live on it-' the runner seeing that now almost as well as the Federal ex-deputy could have seen it-a childless couple of arthritic middle age: two heirs of misfortune drawn as though by some mutual last resort into the confederation of matrimony as inversely two heirs of great wealth or of royalty might have been-a one-room-and-leanto cabin, a hovel almost, clinging paintless to a sheer pitch of mountainside in a straggling patch of corn standing in niggard monument to the incredible, the not just back- but heart-breaking labor which each meagre stalk represented: moloch-efEgy of self-sustenance which did not reward man's sweat but merely consumed his flesh;--the man who ten months ago had walked in the company of giants and heroes and who even yesterday, even without the horse and Tuesday solitary and alone, had still walked in its magnificent gigantic shadow, now in faded overalls milking a gaunt hill cow and split-ting firewood and (the three of them, distinguishable at any dis-tance from one another only because one wore the checked cap and another a skirt) hoeing the lean and tilted corn, coming down the mountain to squat, not talking yet not actually mute either, among them on the gallery of the store on Saturday afternoon; and on the next morning, Sunday, again in his back pew in the church, always in that clean fresh rotation of faded blue which was not the regalia of his metamorphosis and the badge of all plodding enduring husbandry, but which hid and concealed even the horse-warped curvature of his legs, obliterating, effacing at last the last breath or recollection of the old swaggering aura bachelor, footfree and cavalier, so that (it was July now) there remained (not the heart) only the foul raked heavily-checked cap talking (not the heart talking of passion and bereavement) among the empty Ten-nessee hills of the teeming metropolitan outland: Then he was gone. It was August; the mail rider had brought the Chattanooga and Knoxville papers back over the Gap that week and the next Sunday the preacher made the prayer for all the folks across the water swamped again in battle and murder and sudden death, and the next Saturday night they told me how he taken his last degree in Masonry and how that time they tried to talk to him because the Chattanooga and Knoxville papers was coming over the Gap every day now and they was reading them too: about that battle-'
'Mons,' the runner said.
'Mons,' the old Negro said, '-saying to him, "Them was your folks too, wasn't they?" and getting the sort of answer there wasn't no reply to except just to hit him. And when the next Sunday came, he was gone. Though at least this time they knowed where, so that when we finally got there that day-'
'What?' the runner said. 'It took you from June until August to travel from Missouri to Tennessee?'
'It wasn't August,' the old Negro said. 'It was October. We walked. We would have to stop now and then to find work to earn money to eat on. That taken a while, because this boy never had no size then, and I never knowed nothing but horses and preaching, and any time I stopped to do either one, somebody might have asked me who I was.'
'You mean you had to bring the money to him first before you could even draw travel expenses from it?'
There wasn't no money,' the old Negro said. "There never was none, except just what we needed, had to have. Never nobody but that New Orleans lawyer ever believed there was. We never had time to bother with winning a heap of money to have to take care of. We had the horse. To save that horse that never wanted nothing and never knowed nothing but just to run out in front of all the other horses in a race, from being sent back to Kentucky to be just another stud-horse for the rest of its life. We had to save it until it could die still not knowing nothing and not wanting nothing but just to run out in front of everything else. At first he thought different, aimed different. But not long. It was during that time when we was walking to Texas. We was hiding in the woods one clay by a creek and I talked to him and that evening I bap-tised him in the creek into my church. And after that he knowed too that betting was a sin. We had to do a little of it, win a little money to live on, buy feed for it and grub for us. But that was all. God knowed that too. That was all right with Him.'
'Are you an ordained minister?' the runner said.
'I bears witness,' the old Negro said.
'But you're not an ordained priest. Then how could you confirm him into your church?'
'Hush, Pappy,' the youth said.
'Wait,' the runner said. 'I know. He made you a Mason too,'
'Suppose he did,' the old Negro said. 'You and this boy are alike. You think maybe I never had no right to make him a Chris-tian, but you know he never had no business making me a Mason. But which do you think is the lightest to undertake: to tell a man to act like the head Mason thinks he ought to act, that's just an- Tuesday other man trying to know what's right to do, or to tell him how the head of Heaven knows he ought to act, that's God and fcnows what's right to ease his suffering and save him?'
'All right,' the runner said. 'It was October-'
'Only this time they knowed where he was. "France?" I says, with this boy already jerking at my sleeve and saying, "Come on, Grampaw. Come on, Grampaw."
"Which way is that?" I says. "Is that in Tennessee too?"
'"Come on, Grampaw," this boy says. "I knows where it is."'
'Yes,' the runner said to the youth. Til get to you in a moment too.' He said to the old Negro: 'So you came to France. I wont even ask how you did that with no money. Because that was God. Wasn't it?'
'It was the Society,' the youth said. Only he didn't say 'society': he said 'socictc'
'.
'Yes,' the runner said to the youth. He said in French, his best French: the glib smart febrile argot immolated into the international salons via the nightclubs from the Paris gutter: 'I wondered who did the talking for him. It was you, was it?'
'Someone had to,' the youth said, in still better French, the French of the Sorbonne, the Institute, the old Negro listening, peaceful and serene, until he said: 'His mamma was a New Orleans girl. She knowed gobble talk. That's where he learned it.'
'But not the accent,' the runner said. 'Where did you get that?'
'I clout know,' the youth said. 'I just got it.'
'Could you "just get" Greek or Latin or Spanish the same way?'
'I aint tried,' the youth said. 'I reckon I could, if they aint no harder than this one.'
'All right,' the runner said, to the old Negro now. 'Did you have the Society before you left America?' and heard that, without order or emphasis, like dream too: they were in New York, who a year ago had not known that the earth extended farther than the dis-tance between Lexington, Kentucky, and Louisville until they walked on it, trod with their actual feet the hard enduring ground bearing the names Louisiana and Missouri and Texas and Arkansas and Ohio and Tennessee and Alabama and Mississippi-words which until then had been as foundationless and homeless as the ones meaning Avalon or Astalot or Ultima Thule. Then immediately there was a woman in it, a 'lady', not young, richly in furs-'I know,' the runner said. 'She was in the car with you that day last spring when you came up to Amiens. The one whose son is in the French air squadron that she is supporting,'