The chauffeur engaged the crank. Then he paused, stooped, his head turned. "Listen," he said.
"What?"
"That horn." The silver sound came again, faint, distant, prolonged.
"What's that?" the other said. "Do they have to keep soldiers here?"
"It's the horn they blow," the chauffeur said. "It means they have caught that fox."
"Jees!" the other said. "Maybe we will go back to town to-morrow."
The two men on the mules recrossed the rice field and mounted the ridge into the pines.
"Well," the youth said, "I reckon he's satisfied now."
"You reckon he is?" the other said. He rode a little in front of the youth. He did not turn his head when he spoke.
"He's run that fox three years," the youth said. "And now he's killed it. How come he ain't satisfied?"
The older man did not look back. He slouched on his gaunt, shabby mule, his overalled legs dangling. He spoke in a tone of lazy and ironical contempt. "I reckon that's something about gentlemen you won't never know."
"Fox is fox, to me," the youth said. "Can't eat it. Might as well pizen it and save them horses."
"Sho," the other said. "That's something else about them you won't never know."
"About who?"
"Gentlemen." They mounted the ridge and turned into the faint, sandy road. "Well," the older man said, "gentleman or not, I reckon that's the only fox in Cal-lina that ever got itself killed that-a-way. Maybe that's the way they kills a fox up north."
"Then I be durn if I ain't glad I don't live up there," the youth said.
"I reckon so," the other said. "I done got along pretty well here for some time, myself."
"I'd like to see it once though," the youth said.
"I don't reckon I would," the other said, "if living there makes a man go to all this trouble to kill a fox."
They were riding up the ridge, among the pines, the holly bushes, the huckleberries and briers. Suddenly the older man checked his mule, extending his hand backward.
"What?" the youth said. "What is it?"
The pause was hardly a pause; again the older man rode on, though he began to whistle, the tone carrying and clear though not loud, the tune lugubrious and hymnlike; from beyond the bushes which bordered the path just ahead of them there came the snort of a horse. "Who is it?" the youth said. The other said nothing. The two mules went on in single file. Then the youth said quietly, "She's got her hair down. It looks like the sun on a spring branch." The mules paced on in the light, whispering soil, their ears bobbing, the two men sitting loose, with dangling, stirrupless feet.
The woman sat the mare, her hair a bright cloud, a copper cascade in the sun, about her shoulders, her arms lifted and her hands busy in it. The man sat the bay horse a short distance away. He was lighting a cigarette. The two mules came up, tireless, shambling, with drooping heads and nodding ears. The youth looked at the woman with a stare at once bold and covert; the older man did not cease his mellow, slow, tuneless whistling; he did not appear to look at them at all. He appeared to be about to ride past without a sign when the man on the bay spoke to him.
"They caught it, did they?" he said. "We heard the horn."
"Yaas," the man in overalls said, in a dry, drawling tone.
"Yaas. It got caught. 'Twarn't nothing else it could do but get caught."
The youth watched the woman looking at the older man, her hands arrested for an instant in her hair.
"What do you mean?" the man on the bay said.
"He rode it down on that black horse," the man in overalls said.
"You mean, there were no dogs there?"
"I reckon not," the other said. "Them dogs never had no black horses to ride." The two mules had halted; the older man faced the man on the bay a little, his face hidden beneath his shapeless hat. "It crossed the old field and dropped over that ditch-bank and hid, allowing for him to jump the ditch, and then it aimed to double back, I reckon. I reckon it wasn't scared of the dogs. I reckon it had fooled them so much it wasn't worried about them. I reckon he was what worried it. I reckon him and it knowed one another after these three years same as you maybe knowed your maw or your wife maybe, only you ain't never been married none to speak of. Anyway it was on the ditch-bank, and he knowed it was there and he cut straight across the field without giving it no spell to breathe in. I reckon maybe yawl seen him, riding straight across that field like he could see like a hawk and smell like a dog. And the fox was there, where it had done fooled the dogs. But it never had no spell to breathe in, and when it had to run again and dropped over the ditch-bank, it dropped into the briers, I reckon, and it was too tired to get out and run. And he come up and jumped that ditch, just like that fox aimed for him to. Only the fox was still in the briers, and while he was going through the air he looked down and seen the fox and he dumb off the horse while it was jumping and dropped feet first into the briers like the fox done. Maybe it dodged some then; I don't know. He says it just swirled and jumped at his face and he knocked it down with his fist and trompled it dead with his boot-heels. The dogs hadn't got there then. But it so happened he never needed them." He ceased talking and sat for a moment longer, sloven and inert upon the shabby, patient mule, his face shadowed beneath his hat. "Well," he said, "I reckon I'll get on. I ain't had ne'er a bite of breakfast yet. I'll bid yawl good morning." He put his mule into motion, the second mule following. He did not look back.
But the youth did. He looked back at the man on the bay horse, the cigarette burning in his hand, the plume of smoke faint and windless in the sunny silence, and at the woman on the chestnut, her arms lifted and her hands busy in her bright, cloudy hair; projecting, trying to project, himself, after the way of the young, toward that remote and inaccessible she, trying to encompass the vain and inarticulate instant of division and despair which, being young, was very like rage: rage at the lost woman, despair of the man in whose shape there walked the tragic and inescapable earth her ruin. "She was crying," he said, then he began to curse, savagely, without point or subject.
"Come on," the older man said. He did not look back. "I reckon them hunt breakfast hoe-cakes will be about ready time we get home."
Pennsylvania Station
THEY SEEMED to bring with them the smell of the snow falling in Seventh Avenue. Or perhaps the other people who had entered before them had done it, bringing it with them in their lungs and exhaling it, filling the arcade with a stale chill like that which might lie unwinded and spent upon the cold plains of infinity itself. In it the bright and serried shopwindows had a fixed and insomniac glare like the eyes of people drugged with coffee, sitting up with a strange corpse.
In the rotunda, where the people appeared as small and intent as ants, the smell and sense of snow still lingered, though high now among the steel girders, spent and vitiated too and filled here with a weary and ceaseless murmuring, like the voices of pilgrims upon the infinite plain, like the voices of all the travelers who had ever passed through it quiring and ceaseless as lost children.