Perhaps Hoke heard Belle also then, the single prohibitive outcry from somewhere behind him as she hastened across the field herself. Hoke was panting, and his chest filled and fell, but he did not wait. He did not even listen.
Steadying the Smith and Wesson in both hands, aiming with infinite deliberation, Hoke emptied all charged chambers into the narrow well.
The shots banged and echoed in the shaft, reverberating out across the low hills, repeating fitfully. Hoke Birdsill filled his lungs hungrily with the sweet warm air, with the pure cleansing taste of exoneration at last, of release. He did not look; there could scarcely be less need. With his shoulders squared as if for the first time in decades, unabashed by even the dress now, he strode back to meet Belle.
She had stopped some yards away. Nor did she move now, facing him with a kind of grim, constrained ferocity as he approached. Finally, wearily, she sobbed once. “Find it,” she said.
“What’s that, Belle?”
“What we came after, you banana-head. The safe. My money. You can use that shovel he ought to have brained you with. It shouldn’t take you more than eight or ten months to dig up every square foot of ground out here that he might have picked to—”
“But—”
She got around to hitting him then, a response he was growing accustomed to. He went down stifflegged, precisely as he had the last time, save with no wall to slump against. It didn’t hurt. He sat forlornly for a moment or two just watching while she herself gazed stolidly about, wishing remotely that he were back in Yerkey’s Hole with young Fiedler and his womenless troopers. The captain seemed intelligent, the last sort to be engulfed in such sexual maelstroms. Hoke wished advice.
“All right,” Belle was saying at last, “maybe we’ll have some luck. Maybe we’ll find fresh dirt, if the rat-holing little exhibitionist didn’t have time to disguise it proper.”
“I were digging up graves and making them look ordinary again when I weren’t but eight years old,” the voice informed them then, distantly, muffled and hollow yet hideously, sickeningly familiar. “You kin poke around from now ‘til Doomsday and you ain’t gonter find it, not unless I get drugged up out’n here first.”
Slack-jawed, Hoke had sprung to his hands and knees. This time when she hit him it was only out of relief.
“Get a ladder,” she told him disgustedly. “There must be one in the barn. If you can find the barn.”
“And git me some new boots,” the voice contributed. “You mule-sniffing blind cockroach, you done put a leak in the toe of one of’em—”
It was a cemetery in actual fact, roughly a quarter of a mile beyond the barn itself, where four rotted wood crosses marked the remains of the family whose farm it was, or had been. And he was right. The grave he had contrived for the trunk was identical with the others, undiscernible as new.
Belle stood above him with the shotgun while he performed the excavation, although Hoke had to help with the lifting. “But I weren’t never very exceptional at physical doings,” Dingus said. When they finished hoisting it aboard the surrey he turned to grin at them affably.
“Sort of a shame you caught up so quick,” he decided, “since it would of nacherly been a even pleasanter joke if’n I dint return it fer a week or so, like I planned. Oh well, it were enjoyable anyways. But seeing as how it’s terminated, I’ll jest mosey on along then, I reckon—”
“Say your prayers,” Belle told him.
“Aw now, Belle, you’re smiling when you say that, I reckon—”
“I’ll give you three minutes, twerp.”
“But—”
Dingus studied her dubiously, then looked to Hoke instead, although Hoke had hardly anything more comforting to offer. In fact he had begun to nibble his mustache in anticipation, all the promise renewed again despite its brief debacle. He was even eyeing the shotgun greedily.
Belle merely gazed at him askance.
“Aw, shucks now,” Hoke pleaded, “them durned forty-fours jest weren’t never worth much fer accuracy to start with. But if’n I had a chance with that there scattershooter— especially it still being me he done give the heartache to fer the longest spell. On top of which I could get them rewards again, and—”
“We’ll both do it,” Belle decided abruptly. “Why, sure. A gentleman and a lady planning to get spliced, they ought to start sharing their satisfactions early anyways—”
“Married?” Dingus popped back into the conversation eagerly. “Well, say now, let me be the first to—”
“You’d put a curse on it,” Belle said. “And that’s a minute gone now. You better get to praying, I reckon.”
“Oh, I weren’t never the praying sort,” Dingus went on undeterred. “Jest sort of a old Emersonian, were all. But lookie here, I ain’t truly a bad nipper at heart. Matter of fact I doubtless wouldn’t of never wound up the way I done, if’n I’d had a mother to guide me in this life. And jest to show you there’s no hard feelings — why, here, I’d be obliged if’n I could give you a wedding present. It’s—”
The shotgun lifted threateningly as Dingus fumbled in his skirts, but it was only a watch. “Don’t keep time too hot,” he admitted, “sort of antique. But it’s all engraved right smartly too. Here, what it says, it’s ‘To my darling Ding, he rings the bell.’ It were my—”
“What?”
Belle snatched the object from his hand. Then, inexplicably, staring at it, she turned livid. “Why, you immoral, dirty-livered skunk, where’d you get this? You even went and stole this somewheres too, didn’t you? Well, hang it all, that’s the end now, the absolute mother-loving end. Because if—”
“Huh?” Dingus backed off more in perplexity than protest as she glared at him. “Now confound it, Belle, I never done stole it neither. Like I jest started to remark, that watch belong to—”
“Lissen, you lying-mouthed little pussy-poacher, I gave this identical timepiece to somebody exactly twenty years ago, before the ornery polecat went and lost me to a white slaver in a faro game and started me on the road to ruin. Here, where it says he rings the bell, it was supposed to say Belle, with an e, but the jeweler made a mistake. From me to him, my first husband. And Ding was short for—”
“Dilinghaus? You? You done give that watch to—”
“What? Dilinghaus, sure. Of course. But how the thun-deration would you know that, you conniving little—”
“But that were my daddy’s name. That were—”
“Your da— But then — but then you’re—not the beautiful baby son they made me leave behind? Not the baby I’ve wept for in my secret misery for all these long, long years—”
“And then you’re my — my—”
“My baby! Oh, my precious, precious baby!”
“Mommy! Oh, my very own, my long-lost mommy!” Belle threw aside the shotgun. Dingus discarded the Colt he had been surreptitiously manipulating from beneath his skirts. Hoke stood amazed with the wonder of it, but already beginning to sob for a sentimental old fool himself, as they rushed to each other, as they embraced.
It was well after midnight before he was able to slip from the farmhouse. Stealthily he led one of the horses to the road.
There were no saddles, so he was still busily improvising a workable bit and reins when Dingus approached with another of the animals. For a time they gazed at each other without expression.