He called my attention to it. “Say, Mr. Ward, your keys fell out.”
“Oh.” I picked them up. “Thanks. Wouldn’t do to lose them. We d be stranded.”
“Your car’s down at the camp-ground, I reckon?”
“That’s right,” I said. I picked up the jacket again, dropped the keys in one of the pockets, and tossed it back on the bed. We went out. He picked up a short-handled shovel.
It was late afternoon now, and shadows were long across the clearing. We started out through the timber with Cliffords leading the way, going generally north but angling gradually way from the lake.
“Is Haig up this way, too?” I asked.
“No, sir.” He pointed off to the right. “Up there. Not too far from that road, and about a mile this side of the highway.”
“Well, we won’t bother with him today,” I said. “We’ll bring you out tomorrow or the next day and you can show us where. The local District Attorney wants to be represented, anyway, and there’s the coroner.”
“What could they tell now?” he asked, plodding purposefully ahead and not looking around. “I mean, it’s been a year and a half.”
“Probably not much,” I replied. “Of course, if you had shot him and the bullet struck a bone. . . . That would show up, naturally.”
“But I didn’t shoot him, Mr. Ward! I’m telling you the truth about the whole thing. I was out huntin’ squirrels and I seen all them birds circlin’ around. . . .”
“We’d assume it was that way,” I said. “Had they bothered him?”
“No. They was just beginning to light in the trees— “Then you could form a pretty good idea as to what did kill him?”
“Sure. He’d been in a bad wreck, and he’d bled to death. Anybody could see that. I wondered how he’d ever made it that far from the highway. He was pretty well banged up all over, but the worst was the cut on his right arm.”
“And the suitcase was near him?”
“His head and shoulders was lying on it, and he still had his hand through the handle. Like he was trying to get up with it.”
I had a momentary flash of what it was probably like, bleeding to death at night in the rain, and wondered as to the nature of Haig’s particular coconut farm, but gave it up. There was never much profit in that type of speculation, and the ivory tower boys could handle it without help.
“Well, it’s too bad,” I said. “And it’s hard to understand why you did it. As far as we’ve been able to determine, you’ve never been in trouble before.”
“No, sir. I worked all my life. Section hand for the S.P.”
“You’ve never been in prison at all, have you?”
“No, sir.”
Plodding on ahead of me through the timber in that big hat, he reminded me of some rotund and ineffably earnest gnome who’d just been handed an important assignment by the Fairy Princess.
“Don’t let it get you down,” I said. “You’ll make out all right.”
“Is it very bad?” he asked.
“We-ell,” I said thoughtfully, keeping one pace behind him, “naturally, it’s not any fun. It’s not supposed to be. But plenty of people come through it in fine shape.”
He said nothing.
“There’s been too much written and said about it by people who don’t know what they’re talking about,” I went on. “They distort the picture. They over-emphasize things that really aren’t too bad, and play down others that are worse. It’s not so much the bad food and the monotony and the overcrowding they talk about all the time, as it is other things they minimize and try to hush up. The homosexuals, for instance. They make it bad for everybody.”
”They . . . they do?”
“Yes. In this way. You have to watch out for them continually. They’re after you all the time, and the only effective way to discourage them is to fight. But fighting is against the rules, so you lose your privileges. The warden’s staff is too badly overworked and short-handed to hold a two-day hearing to determine who was at fault in a brawl. They merely penalize both parties and let it go. And if you get a reputation for being a trouble-maker you get the guards down on you, too. But don’t let it throw you. You’ll come through it all right.”
He made no reply. We changed direction a little to circle the end of a slough that still had water in it.
“How do you find your way around down here?” I asked. “I’d be lost in five minutes.”
“Oh, there ain’t nothin’ to it,” he replied. “You just remember which way you’re goin’ all the time.”
“It sounds easy,” I said. “But I’d probably be two days trying to find my way back to the cabin.”
“We’re nearly there,” he said. “You see the roots of that down tree, up ahead?”
I saw it. It was less than a hundred yards ahead in a heavy stand of oaks. One of them had fallen, apparently several years ago, carrying down a smaller one with it and creating a tangle of broken limbs and brush at the top. We hurried up. It would be sunset in about an hour, I thought, appraising the flat angle of the shafts of sunlight slanting down through the foliage overhead.
“It’s under this big one,” Cliffords said. He walked up alongside the bole of it to the first limb. I watched him, trying not to show my excitement. The trunk was about six inches off the ground here, supported by the welter of broken limbs beyond, and the ground was covered with a heavy carpet of old leaves.
He raked the leaves back, under the overhang of the round trunk, and I could see the depression where the earth had settled. He dropped to his knees and began scraping the dirt away with the edge of the shovel. I heard it strike metal. I leaned over his shoulder, staring down intently.
“I dug it up about five months ago and put it in new buckets,” he said. “They rust out pretty fast.”
He threw the shovel aside and started scooping the earth out with his hands. I could see them now, all three of them. They were buried in a row, vertically, with the bottoms up. He tugged at the first one, rocking it back and forth to free it from the ground. I dropped to my knees and did the same with the one on the other end. His came free, and then mine. He lifted out the middle one, which was free now that the others were removed. They lay side by side on the old leaves in a shaft of sunlight. They had brownish splotches of rust on them and were encrusted with the damp black sod in which they had lain, but to me they were more beautiful than three Grecian urns. I lit a cigarette, suddenly conscious that my shirt was stuck to me with perspiration, and knelt there just staring at them and savoring the tremendous exultation of the moment.
They were the standard one-gallon pails used in that part of the country for storing syrup, the same as the ones I’d seen in his cabin. Each had a wire handle and a tight, press-fit lid of the same diameter as the pad. I saw that after he had pressed on the lids he had dipped the tops in melted paraffin. Not bad, I thought; if he’d known about silica-gel dehydrators he could have eliminated rust altogether on the inside.
“You want to open ’em?” he asked.
I nodded. “Just one.”
I set one of them upright between us. He took out his knife, scraped away some of the paraffin, and used the back of the blade to pry up the lid. It came free at last and fell to the ground. I looked inside, and for an instant I was almost afraid he’d hear the pounding of my heart. There was only one way to describe it, I thought; it was a gallon of money.
It was full. It was jammed with packages of fives, tens, twenties, and fifties. They were laid in flat, they were bent to fit the curve of the pail, they were doubled, they were put in every way imaginable to take advantage of every bit of space. Tens were jammed against fifties, and when I lifted a package of fives, there was a sheaf of hundreds under it. I tossed it back in. I didn’t want him to see the trembling of my hands.