Hoke said nothing. He hadn’t for most of the day and night of the waiting. Now he simply rocked in place, not even jouncing with the sway of the surrey either, but almost as if in some esoteric, mystical periodicity of his own, like a creature irretrievably lost to meditation. He still wore the dress, the bonnet, but he had stopped thinking about both. He clutched his Smith and Wesson in his right hand, its hammer uncocked but with his finger welded against the trigger for so long that he had lost all feeling there without knowing it.
They were perhaps four hours into daylight when they met the wagon, a dilapidated old Conestoga, creaking in desultory indolence toward them behind equally aged, imperturbable mules. There were two women aboard, neither of them young but not old either, wholly anonymous, undifferentiated in their drabness as well. Hoke did not even avert his face now, did not hide his mustache as Belle questioned them. “Why, yes,” one of them acknowledged, “no more than an hour ago. Indeed, a lovely girl. We chatted briefly. Her husband recently passed away, and she’s returning home to Wounded Knee.”
Then Hoke awoke to something after all, remembered it, dissuading Belle with a gesture even as she was about to urge
the horses onward again. “Yair,” he said. “Because it’s a day and a half already, and I’m about to start on the harness.” He restrained the two drab women in the covered wagon. “I ain’t particular,” he said. “Hardtack or jerky or—”
They gave him biscuits and cheese, willingly enough, if still dubious about his costume. And then Hoke refused to eat while riding too. “Because it ain’t good fer what ails me,” he said, “not after what he done put my intestines through already. But anyways, time don’t matter no more. Sooner or later, that’s all that matters. Today or next week or someyear when Mister Chester Arthur ain’t even President no longer. Because I got a whole lifetime I’m gonter be contented to devote to it now.”
So he was standing at the side of the Cones toga, dipping water from a lashed-down canister, when he overheard the conversation. The women had paused to rest now themselves, although their dialogue meant nothing to him:
“Oh, dear, sometimes I’m afraid we just won’t find him after all—”
“And it’s our own fault too, for waiting so long to look Six wasted years, when we should never have let him leave to begin with. Never—”
“Yet it frightens me at times, the extent of our obsession. Why, even that young girl these people are following, would you believe that even she reminded me of him slightly?”
“Oh, but by now he must be far too manly to resemble any young lady—”
“Of course, it was only illusion. But I’ve longed for him so deeply, so deeply—”
“I too, I too!”
“Well, shall we move on, Miss Youngblood?”
“Let’s, Miss Grimshaw.”
Hoke strolled back to the surrey.
Three hours later it happened. Afterward, Hoke would find it difficult to remember how, since he was never aware of the exact point at which logic ceased and the other, the intuitive, took hold.
Because he had been squinting ahead at the abandoned farmhouse for some time before it did. They were going fast also, passing only the first of the once-cultivated fields in fact, and there were no signs at all, nothing to indicate that Dingus had even taken this same road, let alone might have stopped. Yet suddenly Hoke knew, felt it even before realizing that he felt anything at all, because his left hand had already lifted involuntarily to obstruct Belle’s right, staying the whip. “Hang it,” she demanded, “now what the—?”
And then it must have been in his face too, the same certainty, although he still could not have explained, nor did he even glance toward her. But somehow there was contagion in it, in his posture alone perhaps, because Belle slowed the team at once. The house itself was roughly a hundred yards off the road, the gutted barn beyond that, and they were only now abreast of both. “What?” she whispered. “Do you see—?”
They went another thirty or forty yards before they stopped completely, and after that several moments elapsed in which neither of them moved, in which only the horses snorted and heaved in their traces. Belle was clutching her shotgun. A single jay swooped by in the heat, in the hot bright calm afternoon glare.
Then Hoke was running. And this too, this without question now was instinct, some queer spontaneous impulse beyond thought, because still he had not seen him yet at all — had bolted from the surrey and was sprinting across the eroded ancient plowditches and had actually covered one third of the distance to the house before he did, before Dingus appeared. Dingus still wore the red dress, although without the bonnet now, without the pillow as well. He had emerged leisurely, carrying a shovel, strolling toward the barn.
And then perhaps Hoke was thinking again at last, had begun to think, to remember, the lost money, rewards gained and stolen and re-established and lost again, frustration that seeped to the deepest marrow of his bones, the aggregate affront to his soul itself. Perhaps he was, because he told himself, “Yair, but he’s kilt now, at last he’s kilt and I kin get some peace.” But there remained something scarcely rational about him at the same time, even then, since he did not shoot but merely continued to run, if not quite without reason then recklessly at the very least since the furrowed earth had begun to give beneath his boots now, was crumbling with every stride so that he slipped and flailed and almost fell more than once. But he was lucky too. Dingus himself had still failed to notice him, still strolled there casually.
Then Hoke saw Dingus see him. And still he ran, heedless, the Smith and Wesson cocked in his fist now but with that still not raised for use yet either, toward where the other had abruptly whirled, where Dingus himself now stood likewise without firing or possibly even unarmed since he made no move to withdraw a weapon from his garments, from the red frills. Probably it was incredulity more than surprise which held him, momentary incapacity at the sight of Hoke in a dress of his own and with the irrationality patent in his very headlong attitude itself, as he stumbled and tripped yet came on maniacally like some infuriated hellbent mad scarecrow and still not firing but worse, looking as if he did not intend to fire at all but instead would obliterate Dingus through the sheer lunatic inertia of the rush alone. Hoke plunged on as if to run right over him.
Dingus threw the shovel. He was at last turning to flee then, however, so that Hoke did not have to swerve or even falter as the ponderous spinning missile shot wildly past his ear. Dingus darted back toward the house, his skirts sailing. Hoke was less than a dozen strides behind him.
He had closed half of that gap when Dingus disappeared as if swallowed by the earth itself.
Hoke pitched onto his face. In less than the duration of a blink against the sun, against the flung dirt from his heels, miraculously, Dingus was gone, Hoke was absolutely alone in the field.
But Hoke was truly thinking again now after all. Or perhaps not, perhaps this too was intuition, since it came so quickly that even bafflement was precluded for more than the first fleeting instant and after that he was up and plunging onward as before. “Because it’s jest a well,” he told himself and it was, although the mortared stones that had once encircled it had crumbled away and lay now scattered some distance beyond the pit itself. It was not wide, not four feet across. It was not deep either, clogged with earth and debris. From perhaps eight feet down Dingus was gaping wide-eyed, truly astonished — and at his own predicament rather than at the sight of Hoke now — but with his hands already braced against the shaft at his either side and posed as if to defy gravity and human capability and his own bewilderment at once, as if set to sprint back up and out again. “Now Hoke,” he said. “Now Hoke—”