"No," I said, "I want------"
He looked at me from under the crokersack. "You want what? You want to lay your two hands on the
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man that shot Rosa Millard, don't you?" He looked at me. I sat there on the mule in the slow gray cold rain, in the dying daylight. Maybe it was the cold. I didn't feel cold, but I could feel my bones jerking and shaking. "And then what you going to do with him?"
Uncle Buck said. He was almost whispering now. "Hey? Hey?"
"Yes," I said. "Yes."
"Yes. That's what. Now you and Ringo stay back.
I'll do this."
It was just a cabin. I reckon there were a thousand of them just like it about our hills, with the same canted plow lying under a tree and the same bedraggled chickens roosting on the plow and the same gray twilight dissolving onto the gray shingles of the roof. Then we saw a faint crack of fire and a woman's face looking at us around the crack of the door.
"Mr. Snopes ain't here, if that's what you want," she said. "He's done gone to Alabama on a visit."
"Sho, now," Uncle Buck said. "To Alabama. Did he leave any word when to expect him home?"
"No," the woman said.
"Sho, now," Uncle Buck said. "Then I reckon we better get on back home and out of the rain."
"I reckon you had," the woman said. Then the door closed.
We rode away. We rode back toward home. It was like it had been while we waited at the old compress; it hadn't got darker exactly, the twilight had just thickened.
"Well, well, well," Uncle Buck said. "They ain't in Alabama, because she told us so. And they ain't toward Memphis, because there are still Yankees there yet. So I reckon we better try down toward Grenada first. By Godfrey, I'll bet this mule against that nigger's pocket knife that we won't ride two days before we come on a mad woman hollering down the road with a handful of chicken feathers in her hand. You come on here and listen to me. By Godfrey, we're going to do this thing but by Godfrey we're going to do it right."
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so WE didn't get Ab Snopes that day. We didn't get him
for a lot of days, and nights too—days in which we
rode, the three of us, on relays of Granny's and Ringo's
Yankee mules along the known roads and the unknown
(and sometimes unmarked) trails and paths, in the
wet and the iron frost, and nights when we slept in the
same wet and the same freeze and (once) in the snow,
beneath whatever shelter we found when night found us.
They had neither name nor number. They lasted from
that December afternoon until late February, until one
night we realised that we had been hearing geese and
ducks going north for some time. At first Ringo kept a
pine stick and each night he would cut a notch in it,
with a big one for Sunday and two long ones which
meant Christmas and New Year's. But one night when
the stick had almost forty notches in it, we stopped in
the rain to make camp without any roof to get under and
we had to use the stick to start a fire, because of Uncle
Buck's arm. And so, when we came to where we could
get another pine stick, we couldn't remember whether
it had been five or six or ten days, and so Ringo didn't
start another. Because he said he would fix the stick
up the day we got Grumby and that it wouldn't need
but two notches on it—one for the day we got him and
one for the day Granny died.
We had two mules apiece, to swap onto at noon each day. We got the mules back from the hill people; we could have got a cavalry regiment if we had wanted it —of old men and women and children, too—with cotton bagging and flour sacking for uniforms and hoes and axes for arms, on the Yankee mules that Granny had loaned to them. But Uncle Buck told them that we didn't need any help; that three was enough to catch Grumby.
They were not hard to follow. One day we had about twenty notches on the stick and we came onto a house where the ashes were still smoking and a boy almost as big as Ringo and me still unconscious in the stable with even his shirt cut to pieces like they had had a 128
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wire snapper on the whip, and a woman with a little thread of blood still running out of her mouth and her voice sounding light and far away like a locust from across the pasture, telling us how many there were and which way they would likely go saying,
"Kill them. Kill them."
It was a long way, but it wasn't far. You could have put a silver dollar down on the geography page with the center of it at Jefferson and we would have never ridden out from under it. And we were closer behind them than we knew, because one night we had ridden late without coming to a house or a shed to camp in, and so we stopped and Ringo said he would scout around a little, because all we had left to eat was the bone of a ham; only it was more likely Ringo was trying to dodge helping to get in the firewood. So Uncle Buck and I were spreading down pine branches to sleep on when we heard a shot and then a sound like a brick chimney falling onto a rotten shingle roof, and then the horses, starting fast and dying away, and then I could hear Ringo yelling. He had come onto a house; he thought it was deserted, and then he said it looked too dark, too quiet. So he climbed onto a shed against the back wall, and he said he saw the crack of light and he was trying to pull the shutter open careful, but it came loose with abound like a shot, and he was looking into a room with a candle stuck into a bottle and either three or thirteen men looking right at him; and how somebody hollered, "There they are!" and another man jerked out a pistol and one of the others grabbed his arm as it went off, and then the whole shed gave way under him, and he said how he lay there hollering and trying to get untangled from the broken planks and heard them ride away.
"So he didn't shoot at you," Uncle Buck said. "Hit warn't none of his fault if he never,"
Ringo said. "But he didn't," Uncle Buck said. But he wouldn't let us go on that night. "We won't lose any distance," he said. "They are flesh and blood, the same as we are. And we ain't scared."
So we went on at daylight, following the hoofprints now. Then we had three more notches in the stick; that
night Ringo put the last notch in it that he was going to, but we didn't know it. We were sitting in front of a cotton pen where we were going to sleep, eating a shote that Ringo had found, when we heard the horse. Then the man begun to holler, "Hello! Hello!" and then we watch him ride up on a good short-coupled sorrel mare, with his neat little fine made boots, and his linen shirt without any collar, and a coat that had been good, too, once, and a broad hat pulled down so that ah1 we could see was his eyes and nose between the hat and his black beard.
"Howdy, men," he said.
"Howdy," Uncle Buck said. He was eating a sparerib; he sat now with the rib in his left hand and his right hand lying on his lap just inside his coat; he wore the pistol on a loop of lace leather around his neck and stuck into his pants like a lady's watch. But the stranger wasn't looking at him; he just looked at each of us once and then sat there on the mare, with both his hands on the pommel in front of him.
"Mind if I light and warm?" he said.
"Light," Uncle Buck said.
He got off. But he didn't hitch the mare. He led her up and he sat down opposite us with the reins in his hand. "Give the stranger some meat, Ringo," Uncle Buck said. But he didn't take it. He didn't move. He just said that he had eaten, sitting there on the log with his little feet side by side and his elbows out a little and his two hands on his knees as small as a woman's hands and covered with a light mat of fine black hair right down to the finger nails, and not looking at any of us now. I don't know what he was looking at now.