“It’s a good price,” the sheriff said.
This time the old man said “Hah!” short and harsh. He unfolded the deed and spun it to face, not the sheriff but Uncle Gavin. “Well?” he said. “You, lawyer?”
“It’s all right, Mr. Pritchel,” Uncle Gavin said. The old man sat back, both hands on the table before him, his head tilted back as he looked up at the sheriff.
“Well?” he said. “Fish, or cut bait.”
“It’s your land,” the sheriff said. “What you do with it is no man’s business else.”
“Hah,” Mr. Pritchel said. He didn’t move. “All right, gentlemen.” He didn’t move at all; one of the strangers came forward and took up the deed. “I’ll be out of the house in thirty minutes. You can take possession then, or you will find the key under the mat tomorrow morning.” I don’t believe he even looked after them as they went out, though I couldn’t be sure because of the glare on his spectacles. Then I knew that he was looking at the sheriff, had been looking at him for a minute or more, and then I saw that he was trembling, jerking and shaking as the old tremble, although his hands on the table were as motionless as two lumps of the clay would have been.
“So you let him get away,” he said.
“That’s right,” the sheriff said. “But you wait, Mr. Pritchel. We’ll catch him.”
“When?” the old man said. “Two years? Five years? Ten years? I am seventy-four years old; buried my wife and four children. Where will I be in ten years?”
“Here, I hope,” the sheriff said.
“Here?” the old man said. “Didn’t you just hear me tell that fellow he could have this house in thirty minutes? I own a automobile truck now; I got money to spend now, and something to spend it for.”
“Spend it for what?” the sheriff said. “That check? Even this boy here would have to start early and run late to get shut of that much money in ten years.”
“Spend it running down the man that killed my Ellie!” He rose suddenly, thrusting his chair back. He staggered, but when the sheriff stepped quickly toward him, he flung his arm out and seemed actually to strike the sheriff back a pace. “Let be,” he said, panting. Then he said, harsh and loud in his cracked shaking voice: “Get out of here! Get out of my house all of you!” But the sheriff didn’t move, nor did we, and after a moment the old man stopped trembling. But he was still holding to the table edge. But his voice was quiet. “Hand me my whiskey. On the sideboard. And three glasses.” The sheriff fetched them — an old-fashioned cut-glass decanter and three heavy tumblers — and set them before him. And when he spoke this time, his voice was almost gentle and I knew what the woman had felt that evening when she offered to come back tomorrow and cook another meal for him: “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m tired. I’ve had a heap of trouble lately, and I reckon I’m wore out. Maybe a change is what I need.”
“But not tonight, Mr. Pritchel,” the sheriff said.
And then again, as when the woman had offered to come back and cook, he ruined it. “Maybe I won’t start tonight,” he said. “And then maybe again I will. But you folks want to get on back to town, so we’ll just drink to goodbye and better days.” He unstoppered the decanter and poured whiskey into the three tumblers and set the decanter down and looked about the table. “You, boy,” he said, “hand me the water bucket. It’s on the back gallery shelf.” Then, as I turned and started toward the door, I saw him reach and take up the sugar bowl and plunge the spoon into the sugar and then I stopped too. And I remember Uncle Gavin’s and the sheriff’s faces and I could not believe my eyes either as he put the spoonful of sugar into the raw whiskey and started to stir it. Because I had not only watched Uncle Gavin, and the sheriff when he would come to play chess with Uncle Gavin, but Uncle Gavin’s father too who was my grandfather, and my own father before he died, and all the other men who would come to Grandfather’s house who drank cold toddies as we call them, and even I knew that to make a cold toddy you do not put the sugar into the whiskey because sugar will not dissolve in raw whiskey but only lies in a little intact swirl like sand at the bottom of the glass; that you first put the water into the glass and dissolve the sugar into the water, in a ritual almost; then you add the whiskey, and that anyone like Old Man Pritchel who must have been watching men make cold toddies for nearly seventy years and had been making and drinking them himself for at least fifty-three, would know this too. And I remember how the man we had thought was Old Man Pritchel realized too late what he was doing and jerked his head up just as Uncle Gavin sprang toward him, and swung his arm back and hurled the glass at Uncle Gavin’s head, and the thud of the flung glass against the wall and the dark splash it made and the crash of the table as it went over and the raw stink of the spilled whiskey from the decanter and Uncle Gavin shouting at the sheriff: “Grab him, Hub! Grab him!”
Then we were all three on him. I remember the savage strength and speed of the body which was no old man’s body; I saw him duck beneath the sheriff’s arm and the entire wig came off; I seemed to see his whole face wrenching itself furiously free from beneath the makeup which bore the painted wrinkles and the false eyebrows. When the sheriff snatched the beard and mustache off, the flesh seemed to come with it, springing quick and pink and then crimson, as though in that last desperate cast he had had to beard, disguise, not his face so much as the very blood which he had spilled.
It took us only thirty minutes to find old Mr. Pritchel’s body. It was under the feed room in the stable, in a shallow and hurried trench, scarcely covered from sight. His hair had not only been dyed, it had been trimmed, the eyebrows trimmed and dyed too, and the mustache and beard shaved off. He was wearing the identical garments which Flint had worn to the jail and he had been struck at least one crushing blow on the face, apparently with the flat of the same axe which had split his skull from behind, so that his features were almost unrecognizable and, after another two or three weeks underground, would perhaps have been even unidentifiable as those of the old man. And pillowed carefully beneath the head was a big ledger almost six inches thick and weighing almost twenty pounds and filled with the carefully pasted clippings which covered twenty years and more. It was the record and tale of the gift, the talent, which at the last he had misapplied and betrayed and which had then turned and destroyed him. It was all there: inception, course, peak, and then decline — the handbills, the theatre programs, the news clippings, and even one actual ten-foot poster:
Last of all was the final clipping, from our Memphis-printed daily paper, under the Jefferson date line, which was news and not press-agentry. This was the account of that last gamble in which he had cast his gift and his life against money, wealth, and lost — the clipped fragment of news-sheet which recorded the end not of one life but of three, though even here two of them cast but one shadow: not only that of the harmless dim-witted woman but of Joel Flint and Signor Canova too, with scattered among them and marking the date of that death too, the cautiously worded advertisements in Variety and Billboard, using the new changed name and no takers probably, since Signor Canova the Great was already dead then and already serving his purgatory in this circus for six months and that circus for eight — bandsman, ringman, Bornean wild man, down to the last stage where he touched bottom: the travelling from country town to country town with a roulette wheel wired against imitation watches and pistols which would not shoot, until one day instinct perhaps showed him one more chance to use the gift again.