“It’s gone,” he said.
“Yes,” his uncle said. “They’re probably all in bed asleep by now. They got home to milk and even have time before dark to chop wood for tomorrow’s breakfast too.”
Which made once though still he didn’t move. “They ran,” he said.
“No,” his uncle said. “It was more than that.”
“They ran,” he said. “They reached the point where there was nothing left for them to do but admit that they were wrong. So they ran home.”
“At least they were moving,” his uncle said: which made twice: who hadn’t even needed the first cue since not only the urgency the need the necessity to move again or rather not really to have stopped moving at all at that moment four or five or six hours or whatever it had been ago when he really believed he was going to lie down for only fifteen minutes (and which incidentally knew fifteen minutes whether he apparently did or not) hadn’t come back, it had never been anywhere to come back from because it was still there, had been there all the time, never for one second even vacated even from behind the bizarre phantasmagoriae whose ragtag and bobends still befogged him, with or among which he had wasted nearer fifteen hours than fifteen minutes; it was still there or at least his unfinished part in it which was not even a minuscule but rather a minutecule of his uncle’s and the sheriff’s in the unfinishability of Lucas Beauchamp and Crawford Gowrie since as far as they knew before he lost track this morning neither of them knew what they were going to do next even before Hampton had disposed of what little of evidence they had by giving it back to old one-armed pistol Gowrie where even two children and an old woman couldn’t get it back this time; the need not to finish anything but just to keep moving not even to remain where they were but just desperately to keep up with it like having to run on a treadmill not because you wanted to be where the treadmill was but simply not to be flung pell-mell still running frantically backward off the whole stage out of sight, and not waiting static for the moment to flow back into him again and explode him up into motion but rather already in endless motion like the treadmill’s endless band less than an inch’s fraction above the ultimate point of his nose and chest where the first full breath would bring him into its snatching orbit, himself lying beneath it like a hobo trapped between the rails under a speeding train, safe only so long as he did not move.
So he moved; he said “Time:” swinging his legs over: “What time is it? I said fifteen minutes. You promised—”