In the sky no star showed, and the sky was the sagging corpse of itself. It lay upon the earth like a deflated balloon; into it the dark shape of the kitchen rose without depth, and the trees beyond, and homely shapes like chill ghosts in the cold corpse-light—the woodpile; a farming tool; a barrel beside the broken stoop at the kitchen door, where he had stumbled, supperward. The gray chill seeped into him like water into sand, with short trickling runs; halting, groping about an obstruction, then on again, trickling at last along his unimpeded bones. He was shaking slowly and steadily with cold; beneath his hands his flesh was rough and without sensation, yet still it jerked and jerked as though something within the dead envelope of him strove to free itself. Above his head, upon the wooden roof, there sounded a single light tap, and as though at a signal, the gray silence began to dissolve. He shut the door silently and returned to bed.
In the bed he lay shaking more than ever, to the cold derision of the shucks under him, and he lay quietly on his back, hearing the winter rain whispering on the roof. There was no drumming, as when summer rain falls through the buoyant air, but a whisper of unemphatic sound, as though the atmosphere lying heavily upon the roof dissolved there and dripped sluggishly and steadily from the eaves. His blood flowed again, and the covers felt like iron or like ice; but while he lay motionless beneath the rain his blood warmed yet more, until at last his body ceased trembling and he lay presently in something like a tortured and fitful doze, surrounded by coiling images and shapes of stubborn despair and the ceaseless striving for…not vindication so much as comprehension, a hand, no matter whose, to touch him out of his black chaos. He would spurn it, of course, but it would restore his cold sufficiency again.
The rain dripped on, dripped and dripped; beside him Buddy breathed placidly and steadily: he had not even changed his position. At times Bayard dozed fitfully: dozing, he was wide awake; waking, he lay in a hazy state filled with improbable moiling and in which there was neither relief nor rest: drop by drop the rain wore the night away, wore time away. But it was so long, so damn long. His spent blood, wearied with struggling, moved through his body in slow beats, like the rain, wearing his flesh away. It comes to all...Bible...some preacher, anyway. Maybe he knew. Peace. It comes to all.
At last, from beyond walls, he heard movement. It was indistinguishable, yet he knew it was of human origin, of people he knew ‘waking again into the world he had not been able even temporarily to lose, people to whom he was...and he was comforted. The sounds continued, and at last and unmistakably he heard a door, and a voice Which he knew that with a slight effort of concentration he” could name; and best of all, that he could rise and go where they were gathered about a crackling fire. Arid he lay, at ease at last, intending to rise the next moment and go to them, putting it off a little longer while his blood beat slowly through his body and his heart was quieted. Buddy breathed steadily beside him, and his own breath was quiet now as Buddy’s while the human sounds came murmurously into the cold room with grave and homely reassurance. It comes to all, it comes to all, his tired heart comforted him, and at last he slept.
He waked in the gray morning, his body weary and heavy and dulclass="underline" his sleep had not rested him. Buddy was gone, and it still rained, though now it was a definite sound on the roof and the air was warmer, with a rawness that probed into the very bones of him; and in his stockings and carrying his scarred, expensive boots in his hands, he traversed the cold room where Lee and Rafe and Stuart slept, and found Rafe and Jackson before the living-room fire.
“We let you sleep,” Rafe said, then he said: “Good Lord, boy, you look like a hant. Didn’t you sleep last night?”
“Yes, I slept all right,” Bayard answered. He sat down and stamped into his boots, and buckled the thongs below his knees. Jackson sat at one side of the hearth; in the shadowy corner near his feet a number of small, living creatures moiled silently, and still bent over his boots Bayard said:
“What you got there, Jackson? What sort of puppies are them?”
“New breed Tin trying Jackson answered, and Rafe approached with a half a tumbler of Henry’s pale amber whisky.
“Them’s Ethel’s pups,” he said. “Git Jackson to tell you about ‘em after you eat Here, drink this. You look all wore but. Buddy must a kept you awake, talkin’,” he added, with dry irony.
Bayard accepted the glass and emptied it, and lit a cigarette. “Mandy’s got yo’ breakfast on the stove,” ‘ Rafe added.
‘‘Ethel?’’ Bayard repeated. “Oh, that fox. I aimed to ask about her, last night.”
“Yes, Jackson aims to revolutionize the huntin’ business, with her. Aims to raise a breed of animals with a hound’s wind and bottom, and a fox’s smartness and speed.”
Bayard approached the shadowy corner and examined the small creatures with interest and curiosity.
“I never saw many fox pups,” he said at last, “but I never saw any that looked like them.”
“That’s what Gen’ral seems to think,” Rafe answered,
Jackson spat into the fire and stooped over the creatures. They knew his hands, and the moiling of them became more intense, and Bayard then noticed that they made no sound at all, not even puppy whimperings. “Hit’s a experiment,” Jackson explained. “The boys makes fun of ‘em, but they haint no more’n weaned, yet. You wait and see.”
“Don’t know what you’ll do with ‘em,” Rafe said brutally. “They won’t be big enough for work stock. Better git yo’ breakfast, Bayard.”
“You wait and see,” Jackson repeated. He touched the scramble of small bodies with his hands, in a gentle, protective gesture. “You can’t tell nothin’ ‘bout a dawg ‘twell hit’s at least two months old, can you?” he appealed to Bayard, looking up at him with his vague, intense gaze from beneath his shaggy brows.
“Go git yo’ breakfast, Bayard,” Rafe repeated. “Buddy’s done gone and left you.”
He bathed his face with icy water in a tin pan on the porch, and ate his breakfast—ham and eggs and flapjacks and sorghum and coffee—while Mandy talked to him about his brother. When he returned to the house old Mr. MacCallum was there. The puppies moiled inextricably in their corner, and the old man sat with his hands on his knees, watching them with bluff and ribald merriment, while Jackson sat nearby in a sort of Covering concern, like a hen,
“Come hyer, boy,” the old man ordered when Bayard appeared “Hyer, Rafe, git me that ‘ere bait line.” Rafe went out, returning presently with a bit of pork rind on the end of a string. The old man took it and rose, and hauled the puppies ungently into the light, where they crouched abjectly moiling—as strange a litter as Bayard had ever seen. No two of them looked alike, and none of them looked like anything else. Neither fox nor hound; partaking of both, yet neither; and despite their soft infancy, there was about them something monstrous and contradictory and obscene. Here a fox’s keen, cruel muzzle between the melting, sad eyes of a hound and its mild ears; there limp fears tried valiantly to stand erect and failed ignobly in flapping points; shoebutton eyes in meek puppy faces, and limp brief tails brushed over with a faint, golden fuzz like the inside of a chestnut burr. As regards color,, they ranged from pure reddish brown through ail indiscriminate brindle to pure ticked beneath a faint dun cast; and one of them had, feature for feature, old General’s face in comical miniature, even to his expression of sad and dignified disillusion. “Watch ‘em, now,” the old man ordered.
He got them all facing forward, then he dangled the meat directly behind them. Not one noticed it; he swept it back and forth above their heads; not one looked up. Then he swung it directly before their eyes; still they crouched diffidently on their young, unsteady legs and gazed at the meat with curiosity but without any interest at all and fell again to moiling soundlessly among themselves.