“Maybe he’s taking them shovels out there for Nub Gowrie and them boys of his to practice with,” the second said.
“Then it’s a good thing Hope’s taking shovel hands too,” the third said. “If he’s depending on anybody named Gowrie to dig a hole or do anything else that might bring up a sweat, he’ll sure need them.”
“Or maybe they aint shovel hands,” the fourth said. “Maybe it’s them the Gowries are going to practice on.” Yet even though one guffawed they were not laughing, more than a dozen now crowded around the car to take one quick all-comprehensive glance into the back of it where the two Negroes sat immobile as carved wood staring straight ahead at nothing and no movement even of breathing other than an infinitesimal widening and closing of the whites around their eyeballs, then looking at the sheriff again with almost exactly the expression he had seen on the faces waiting for the spinning tapes behind a slotmachine’s glass to stop.
“I reckon that’ll do,” the sheriff said. He thrust his head and one vast arm out the window and with the arm pushed the nearest ones back and away from the car as effortlessly as he would have opened a curtain, raising his voice but not much: “Willy.” The marshal came up; he could already hear him:
“Gangway, boys. Lemme see what the high sheriff’s got on his mind this morning.”
“Why dont you get these folks out of the street so them cars can get to town?” the sheriff said. “Maybe they want to stand around and look at the jail too.”
“You bet,” the marshal said. He turned, shoving his hands at the nearest ones, not touching them, as if he were putting into motion a herd of cattle. “Now boys,” he said.
They didn’t move, looking past the marshal still at the sheriff, not at all defiant, not really daring anyone: just tolerant, goodhumored, debonair almost.
“Why, Sheriff,” a voice said, then another.
“It’s a free street, aint it, Sheriff? You town folks wont mind us just standing on it long as we spend our money with you, will you?”
“But not to block off the other folks trying to get to town to spend a little,” the sheriff said. “Move on now. Get them out of the street, Willy.”
“Come on, boys,” the marshal said. “There’s other folks besides you wants to get up where they can watch them bricks.” They moved then but still without haste, the marshal herding them back across the street like a woman driving a flock of hens across a pen, she to control merely the direction not the speed and not too much of that, the fowls moving ahead of her flapping apron not recalcitrant, just unpredictable, fearless of her and not yet even alarmed; the halted car and the ones behind it moved too, slowly, dragging at creeping pace their loads of craned faces; he could hear the marshal shouting at the drivers: “Get on. Get on. There’s cars behind you—”
The sheriff was looking at his uncle again. “Where’s the other one?”
“The other what?” his uncle said.
“The other detective. The one that can see in the dark.”
“Aleck Sander,” his uncle said. “You want him too?”
“No,” the sheriff said. “I just missed him. I was just surprised to find one human in this county with taste and judgment enough to stay at home today. You ready? Let’s get started.”
“Right,” his uncle said. The sheriff was notorious as a driver who used up a car a year as a heavy-handed sweeper wears out brooms: not by speed but by simple friction; now the car actually shot away from the curb and almost before he could watch it, was gone. His uncle went to theirs and opened the door. “Jump in,” his uncle said.
Then he said it; at least this much was simple: “I’m not going.”
His uncle paused and now he saw watching him the quizzical saturnine face, the quizzical eyes which given a little time didn’t miss much; had in fact as long as he had known them never missed anything until last night.
“Ah,” his uncle said. “Miss Habersham is of course a lady but this other female is yours.”
“Look at them,” he said, not moving, barely moving his lips even. “Across the street. On the Square too and nobody but Willy Ingrum and that damn cap—”
“Didn’t you hear them talking to Hampton?” his uncle said.
“I heard them,” he said. “They were not even laughing at their own jokes. They were laughing at him.”
“They were not even taunting him,” his uncle said. “They were not even jeering at him. They were just watching him. Watching him and Beat Four, to see what would happen. These people just came to town to see what either or both of them are going to do.”
“No,” he said. “More than that.”
“All right,” his uncle said, quite soberly too now. “Granted. Then what?”
“Suppose—” But his uncle interrupted:
“Suppose Beat Four comes in and picks up your mother’s and Miss Habersham’s chairs and carries them out into the yard where they’ll be out of the way? Lucas aint in that cell. He’s in Mr. Hampton’s house, probably sitting in the kitchen right now eating his breakfast. What did you think Will Legate was doing coming in by the back door within fifteen minutes of when we got there and told Mr. Hampton? Aleck Sander even heard him telephoning.”
“Then what’s Mr. Hampton in such a hurry for?” he said: and his uncle’s voice was quite sober now: but just sober, that was alclass="underline"
“Because the best way to stop having to suppose or deny either is for us to get out there and do what we have to do and get back here. Jump in the car.”
Chapter Seven
THEY NEVER SAW the sheriff’s car again until they reached the church. Nor for him was the reason sleep who in spite of the coffee might have expected that and in fact had. Up to the moment when at the wheel of the pickup he had got near enough to see the Square and then the mass of people lining the opposite side of the street in front of the jail he had expected that as soon as he and his uncle were on the road back to the church, coffee or no coffee he would not even be once more fighting sleep but on the contrary would relinquish and accept it and so in the nine miles of gravel and the one of climbing dirt regain at least a half-hour of the eight he had lost last night and—it seemed to him now—the three or four times that many he had spent trying to quit thinking about Lucas Beauchamp the night before.
And when they reached town a little before three this morning nobody could have persuaded him that by this time, almost nine oclock, he would not have made back at least five and a half hours of sleep even if not the full six, remembering how he—and without doubt Miss Habersham and Aleck Sander too—had believed that as soon as they and his uncle entered the sheriff’s house that would be all of it; they would enter the front door and lay into the sheriff’s broad competent ordained palm as you drop your hat on the hall table in passing, the whole night’s nightmare of doubt and indecision and sleeplessness and strain and fatigue and shock and amazement and (he admitted it) some of fear too. But it hadn’t happened and he knew now that he had never really expected it to; the idea had ever entered their heads only because they had been worn out, spent not so much from sleeplessness and fatigue and strain as exhausted by shock and amazement and anticlimax; he had not even needed the massed faces watching the blank brick front of the jail nor the ones which had crossed the street and even blocked it while they crowded around the sheriff’s car, to read and then dismiss its interior with that one mutual concordant glance comprehensive abashless trustless and undeniable as the busy parent pauses for an instant to check over and anticipate the intentions of a loved though not too reliable child. If he needed anything he certainly had that—the faces the voices not even taunting and not even jeering: just perspicuant jocular and without pity—poised under the first relaxation of succumbence like a pin in the mattress so he was as wide awake as his uncle even who had slept all night or at least most of it, free of town now and going fast now, passing within the first mile the last of the cars and trucks and then no more of them because all who would come to town today would by this time be inside that last rapidly contracting mile—the whole white part of the county taking advantage of the good weather and the good allweather roads which were their roads because their taxes and votes and the votes of their kin and connections who could bring pressure on the congressmen who had the giving away of the funds had built them, to get quickly into the town which was theirs too since it existed only by their sufferance and support to contain their jail and their courthouse, to crow and jam and block its streets too if they saw fit: patient biding and unpitying, neither to be hurried nor checked nor dispersed nor denied since theirs was the murdered and the murderer too; theirs the affronter and the principle affronted: the white man and the bereavement of his vacancy, theirs the right not just to mere justice but vengeance too to allot or withhold.