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just one mistake: You drawed them last nineteen mules just too late to have anybody to sell them back to."
3
IT WAS a bright warm day; we saw the guns and the bits shining a long way down the road. But this time Ringo didn't even move. He just quit drawing and looked up from the paper and said, "So Ab Snopes was lying. Gre't God, ain't we gonter never get shet of them?" It was just a lieutenant; by this time Ringo and I could tell the different officers'
ranks better than we could tell Confederate ranks, because one day we counted up and the only Confederate officers we had ever seen were Father and the captain that talked to us with Uncle Buck McCaslin that day in Jefferson before Grant burned it. And this was to be the last tune we would see any uniforms at all except as the walking symbols of defeated men's pride and indomitable unregret, but we didn't know that now.
So it was just a lieutenant. He looked about forty, and kind of mad and gleeful, both at the same time. Ringo didn't recognise him because he had not been in the wagon with us, but I did:—from the way he sat •the horse, or maybe from the way he looked mad and happy both, like he had been mad for several days, thinking about how much he was going to enjoy being mad when the right time came. And he recognised me, too; he looked at me once and said "Hah!" with his teeth showing, and pushed his horse up and looked at Ringo's picture. There were maybe a dozen cavalry behind him; we never noticed especially. "Hah!" he said again, then he said, "What's that?"
"A house," Ringo said. Ringo had never even looked at him good yet; he had seen even more of them than I had. "Look at it."
The lieutenant looked at me and said "Hah!" again behind his teeth; every now and then while he was talking to Ringo he would do that. He looked at Ringo's picture. Then he looked up the grove to where the chimneys rose out of the pile of rubble and ashes. Grass and weeds had come up out of the ashes now, and unless you RIPOSTE IN TERTIO
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knew better, all you saw was the four chimneys. Some of the goldenrod was still in bloom. "Oh," the officer said. "I see. You're drawing it like it used to be."
"Co-rect," Ringo said. "What I wanter draw hit like hit is now? I can walk down here ten tunes a day and look at hit like hit is now. I can even ride in that gate on a horse and do that."
The lieutenant didn't say "Hah!" this time. He didn't do anything yet; I reckon he was still enjoying waiting a little longer to get good and mad. He just kind of grunted. "When you get done here, you can move into town and keep busy all winter, can't you?" he said.
Then he sat back in the saddle. He didn't say "Hah!" now either; it was his eyes that said it, looking at me. They were a kind of thin milk color, like the chine knucklebone hi a ham. "All right," he said. "Who lives up there now? What's her name today, hey?"
Ringo was watching him now, though I don't think he suspected yet who he was. "Don't nobody," he said. "The roof leaks." One of the men made a kind of sound; maybe it was laughing. The lieutenant started to whirl around, and then he started not to; then he sat there glaring down at Ringo with his mouth beginning to open. "Oh," Ringo said, "you mean way back yonder, in the quarters. I thought you was still worrying about them chimneys."
This time the soldier did laugh, and this time the lieutenant did whirl around, cursing at the soldier; I would have known him now even if I hadn't before. He cursed at them all now, sitting there with his face swelling up. "Blank-blank-blank!" he shouted. "Get to hell on out of here! He said that pen is down there in the creek bottom beyond the pasture. If you meet man, woman or child and they so much as smile at you, shoot them!
Get!" The soldiers went on, galloping up the drive; we watched them scatter out across the pasture. The lieutenant looked at me and Ringo; he said "Hah!" again, glaring at us.
"You boys come with me. Jump!"
He didn't wait for us; he galloped, too, up the drive. We ran; Ringo looked at me. " 'He'
said the pen was
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in the creek bottom," Ringo said. "Who you reckon 'he'is?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Well, I reckon I know," Ringo said. But we didn't talk any more. We ran on up the drive.
The lieutenant had reached the cabin now, and Granny came out the door. I reckon she had seen him, too, because she already had her sunbonnet on. They looked at us once, then Granny went on, too, walking straight, not fast, down the path toward the lot, with the lieutenant behind her on the horse. We could see his shoulders and his head, and now and then his hand and arm, but we couldn't hear what he was saying. "I reckon this does complete hit," Ringo said.
But we could hear him before we reached the new fence. Then we could see them standing at the fence that Joby and I had just finished—Granny straight and still, with her sunbonnet on and the shawl drawn tight over her shoulders where she had her arms folded in it so that she looked littler than anybody I could remember, like during the four years she hadn't got any older or weaker, but just littler and littler and straighter and straighter and more and more indomitable; and the lieutenant beside her with one hand on his hip and waving a whole handful of letters at Granny's face with the other.
"Look like he got all we ever wrote there," Ringo said. The soldiers' horses were all tied along the fence; they were inside the pen now, and they and Joby and Ab Snopes had the forty-odd old mules and the nineteen new ones hemmed into the corner. The mules were still trying to break out, only it didn't look like that. It looked like every one of them was trying to keep the big burned smear where Granny and Ringo had blotted the U. S. brand turned so that the lieutenant would have to look at it.
"And I guess you will call those scars left-handed trace galls!" the lieutenant said. "You have been using cast-off band-saw bands for traces, hey? I'd rather engage Forrest's whole brigade every morning for six months than spend that same length of time trying to protect United States property from defenseless South-T
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ern women and niggers and children. Defenseless!" he shouted. "Defenseless! God help the North if Davis and Lee had ever thought of the idea of forming a brigade of grandmothers and nigger orphans, and invading us with it!" he hollered, shaking the letters at Granny.
In the pen the mules huddled and surged, with Ab Snopes waving his arms at them now and then. Then the lieutenant quit shouting; he even quit shaking the letters at Granny.
"Listen," he said. "We are on evacuation orders now. Likely I am the last Federal soldier you will have to look at. And I'm not going to harm you—orders to that effect too. All I'm going to do is take back this stolen property. And now I want you to tell me, as enemy to enemy, or even man to man, if you like. I know from these forged orders how many head of stock you have taken from us, and I know from the records how many times you have sold a few of them back to us; I even know what we paid you. But how many of them did you actually sell back to us more than one time?"
"I don't know," Granny said.
"You don't know," the lieutenant said. He didn't start to shout now, he just stood there, breathing slow and hard, looking at Granny; he talked now with a kind of furious patience, as if she were an idiot or an Indian: "Listen. I know you don't have to tell me, and you know I can't make you. I ask it only out of pure respect. Respect? Envy. Won't you tell me?"