There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything, given time, but to what it can accept, a limit hi time, in the very time which nourishes the believing of the incredible. And I was still a child at that moment when Father's and my horses came over the hill and seemed to cease galloping and to float, hang suspended rather in a dimension without time in it while Father held my horse reined back with one hand and I heard Ringo's half-blind beast crashing and blundering among the trees to our right and Ringo yelling, and looked quietly down at the scene beneath rather than before us—the dusk, the fire, the creek running quiet and peaceful beneath a bridge, the muskets all stacked carefully and neatly and nobody within fifty feet of them; and the men, the faces, the blue Yankee coats and pants and boots, squatting about the fire with cups in their hands and looking toward the crest of the hill with the same peaceful expression on all their faces like so many dolls. Father's hat was flung onto his head now, his teeth were showing and his eyes were bright as a cat's.
"Lieutenant," he said, loud, jerking my horse around, "ride back up the hill and close in with your troop on their right. Git!" he whispered, slapping my horse across the rump with his hand. "Make a fuss! Holler! See if
you can keep up with Ringo.------Boys," he said, while
they still looked up at him; they hadn't even put the cups down: "Boys, I'm John Sartoris, and I reckon I've got you."
Ringo was the only difficult one to capture. The rest of Father's men came piling over the hill, reining back, and I reckon that for a minute their faces looked about
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like the Yankees' faces did, and now and then I would quit thrashing the bushes and I could hear Ringo on his side hollering and moaning and hollering again, "Marse John! You, Marse John! You come here quick!" and hollering for me, calling Bayard and Colonel and Marse John and Granny until it did sound like a company at least, and then hollering at his horse again, and it running back and forth. I reckon he had forgotten again and was trying to get up on the nigh side again, until at last Father said, "All right, boys. You can come on in."
It was almost dark then. They had built up a fire, and the Yankees still sitting around it and Father and the others standing over them with then- pistols while two of them were taking the Yankees' pants and boots off. Ringo was still hollering off in the trees. "I reckon you better go and extricate Lieutenant Marengo," Father said. Only about that time Ringo's horse came bursting out with his blind eye looking big as a plate and still trotting in a circle with his knees up to his chin, and then Ringo came out. He looked wilder than the horse; he was already talking, he was saying, "I'm gonter tell Granny
on you, making my horse run------" when he saw the
Yankees. His mouth was already open, and he kind of squatted for a second, looking at them. Then he hollered, "Look out! Ketch um! Ketch urn, Marse John! They stole Old Hundred and Tinney!"
We all ate supper together—Father and us and the Yankees hi their underclothes.
The officer talked to Father. He said, "Colonel, I believe you have fooled us. I don't believe there's another man of you but what I see."
"You might try to depart, and prove your point," Father said.
"Depart? Like this? And have every darky and old woman between here and Memphis shooting at us for ghosts? ... I suppose we can have our blankets to sleep hi, can't we?"
"Certainly, Captain," Father said. "And with your permission, I shall now retire and leave you to set about that business."
We went back into the darkness. We could see them about the fire, spreading their blankets on the ground.
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THE UNVANQUISHED
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"What in the tarnation do you want with sixty prisoners, John?" one of Father's men said.
"I don't," Father said. He looked at me and Ringo. "You boys captured them. What do you want to do with them?"
"Shoot 'em," Ringo said. "This ain't the first time me and Bayard ever shot Yankees."
"No," Father said. "I have a better plan than that. One that Joe Johnston will thank us for." He turned to the others behind him. "Have you got the muskets and ammunition?"
"Yes, Colonel," somebody said.
"Grub, boots, clothes?"
"Everything but the blankets, Colonel."
"We'll pick them up in the morning," Father said. "Now wait."
We sat there in the dark. The Yankees were going to bed. One of them went to the fire and picked up a stick. Then he stopped. He didn't turn his head and we didn't hear anything or see anybody move. Then he put the stick down again and came back to his blanket. "Wait," Father whispered. After a while the fire had died down. "Now listen," Father whispered. So we sat there in the dark and listened to the Yankees sneaking off into the bushes in their underclothes. Once we heard a "splash and somebody cursing, and then a sound like somebody had shut his hand over his mouth. Father didn't laugh out loud; he just sat there shaking.
"Look out for moccasins," one of the others whispered behind us.
It must have taken them two hours to get done sneaking off into the bushes. Then Father said, "Everybody get a blanket and let's go to bed."
The sun was high when he waked us. "Home for dinner," he said. And so, after a while, we came to the creek; we passed the hole where Ringo and I learned to swim and we began to pass the fields, too, and we came to where Ringo and I hid last summer and saw the first Yankee we ever saw, and then we could see the house, too, and Ringo said, "Sartoris, here we is; let them that want Memphis take hit and keep hit bofe." Because we were looking at the house, it was like that
day when we ran across the pasture and the house would not seem to get any nearer at all. We never saw the wagon at all; it was Father that saw it; it was com- -ing up the road from Jefferson, with Granny sitting thin and straight on the seat with Mrs. Compson's rose cuttings wrapped in a new piece of paper in her hand, and Joby yelling and lashing the strange horses, and Father stopping us at the gate with his hat raised while the wagon went hi first. Granny didn't say a word. She just looked at Ringo and me, and went on, with us coming behind, and she didn't stop at the house. The wagon went on into the orchard and stopped by the hole where we had dug the trunk up, and still Granny didn't say a word; it was Father that got down and got into the wagon and took up one end of the trunk and said over his shoulder,
"Jump up here, boys."
We buried the trunk again, and we walked behind the wagon to the house. We went into the back parlor, and Father put the musket back onto the pegs over the mantel, and Granny put down Mrs. Compson's rose cuttings and took off her hat and looked at Ringo and me. "Get the soap," she said. "We haven't cussed any," I said. "Ask Father." "They behaved all right, Miss Rosa," Father said. Granny looked at us. Then she came and put her hand
on me and then on Ringo. "Go upstairs------" she said.
"How did you and Joby manage to get those horses?" Father said.
Granny was looking at us. "I borrowed them," she
said.------"upstairs and take off your------"
"Who from?" Father said.
Granny looked at Father for a second, then back at
us. "I don't know. There was nobody there.------take
off your Sunday clothes," she said.
It was hot the next day, so we only worked on the new pen until dinner and quit. It was even too hot for Ringo and me to ride our horses. Even at six o'clock it was still hot; the rosin was still cooking out of the front steps at six o'clock. Father was sitting hi his shirt sleeves and his stockings, with his feet on the porch railing, and Ringo and I were sitting on the steps wait-