“A white man?” the sheriff said.

“Yes, sir. Blumping around in the hall like he had just finished falling down the stairs. Tried to keep me from going upstairs at all. Told me how he had already been up there and it wasn’t nobody up there. And when I come back down, he was gone.”

The sheriff looked about at them. “Who lived in that cabin?”

“I didn’t know anybody did,” the deputy said. “Niggers, I reckon. She might have had niggers living in the house with her, from what I have heard. What I am surprised at is that it was this long before one of them done for her.”

“Get me a nigger,” the sheriff said. The deputy and two or three others got him a nigger. “Who’s been living in that cabin?” the sheriff said.

“I don’t know, Mr. Watt,” the negro said. “I ain’t never paid it no mind. I ain’t even knowed anybody lived in it.”

“Bring him on down here,” the sheriff said.

They were gathering now about the sheriff and the deputy and the negro, with avid eyes upon which the sheer prolongation of empty flames had begun to pall, with faces identical one with another. It was as if all their individual five senses had become one organ of looking, like an apotheosis, the words that flew among them wind– or air-engendered Is that him? Is that the one that did it? Sheriff’s got him. Sheriff has already caught him The sheriff looked at them. “Go away,” he said. “All of you. Go look at the fire. If I need any help, I can send for you. Go on away.” He turned and led his party down to the cabin. Behind him the repulsed ones stood in a clump and watched the three white men and the negro enter the cabin and close the door. Behind them in turn the dying fire roared, filling the air though not louder than the voices and much more unsourceless By God, if that’s him, what are we doing, standing around here? Murdering a white woman the black son of a None of them had ever entered the house. While she was alive they would not have allowed their wives to call on her. When they were younger, children (some of their fathers had done it too) they had called after her on the street, “Nigger lover! Nigger lover!”

In the cabin the sheriff sat down on one of the cots, heavily. He sighed: a tub of a man, with the complete and rocklike inertia of a tub. “Now, I want to know who lives in this cabin,” he said.

“I done told you I don’t know,” the negro said. His voice was a little sullen, quite alert, covertly alert. He watched the sheriff. The other two white men were behind him, where he could not see them. He did not look back at them, not so much as a glance. He was watching the sheriff’s face as a man watches a mirror. Perhaps he saw it, as in a mirror, before it came. Perhaps he did not, since if change, flicker, there was in the sheriff’s face it was no more than a flicker. But the negro did not look back; there came only into his face when the strap fell across his back a wince, sudden, sharp, fleet, jerking up the corners of his mouth and exposing his momentary teeth like smiling. Then his face smoothed again, inscrutable.

“I reckon you ain’t tried hard enough to remember,” the sheriff said.

“I can’t remember because I can’t know,” the negro said. “I don’t even live nowhere near here. You ought to know where I stay at, white folks.”

“Mr. Buford says you live right down the road yonder,” the sheriff said.

“Lots of folks live down that road. Mr. Buford ought to know where I stay at.”

“He’s lying,” the deputy said. His name was Buford. He was the one who wielded the strap, buckle end outward. He held it poised. He was watching the sheriff’s face. He looked like a spaniel waiting to be told to spring into the water.

“Maybe so; maybe not,” the sheriff said. He mused upon the negro. He was still, huge, inert, sagging the cot springs. “I think he just don’t realise yet that I ain’t playing. Let alone them folks out there that ain’t got no jail to put him into if anything he wouldn’t like should come up. That wouldn’t bother to put him into a jail if they had one.” Perhaps there was a sign, a signal, in his eyes again; perhaps not. Perhaps the negro saw it; perhaps not. The strap fell again, the buckle raking across the negro’s back. “You remember yet?” the sheriff said.

“It’s two white men,” the negro said. His voice was cold, not sullen, not anything. “I don’t know who they is nor what they does. It ain’t none of my business. I ain’t never seed them. I just heard talk about how two white men lived here. I didn’t care who they was. And that’s all I know. You can whup the blood outen me. But that’s all I know.”

Again the sheriff sighed. “That’ll do. I reckon that’s right.”

“It’s that fellow Christmas, that used to work at the mill, and another fellow named Brown,” the third man said. “You could have picked out any man in Jefferson that his breath smelled right and he could have told you that much.”

“I reckon that’s right, too,” the sheriff said.

He returned to town. When the crowd realised that the sheriff was departing, a general exodus began. It was as if there were nothing left to look at now. The body had gone, and now the sheriff was going. It was as though he carried within him, somewhere within that inert and sighing mass of flesh, the secret itself: that which moved and evoked them as with a promise of something beyond the sluttishness of stuffed entrails and monotonous days. So there was nothing left to look at now but the fire; they had now been watching it for three hours. They were now used to it, accustomed to it; now it had become a permanent part of their lives as well as of their experiences, standing beneath its windless column of smoke taller than and impregnable as a monument which could be returned to at any time. So when the caravan reached town it had something of that arrogant decorum of a procession behind a catafalque, the sheriffs car in the lead, the other cars honking and blatting behind in the sheriff’s and their own compounded dust. It was held up momentarily at a street intersection near the square by a country wagon which’ had stopped to let a passenger descend. Looking out, the sheriff saw a young woman climbing slowly and carefully down from the wagon, with that careful awkwardness of advanced pregnancy. Then the wagon pulled aside; the caravan went on, crossing the square, where already the cashier of the bank had taken from the vault the envelope which the dead woman had deposited with him and which bore the inscription To be opened at my death. Joanna Burden The cashier was waiting at the sheriffs office when the sheriff came in, with the envelope and its contents. This was a single sheet of paper on which was written, by the same hand which inscribed the envelope Notify E. E. Peebles, Attorney,—Beale St., Memphis, Tenn., and Nathaniel Burrington,—St. Exeter, N. H. That was all.

“This Peebles is a nigger lawyer,” the cashier said.

“Is that so?” the sheriff said.

“Yes. What do you want me to do?”

“I reckon you better do what the paper says,” the sheriff said. “I reckon maybe I better do it myself.” He sent two wires. He received the Memphis reply in thirty minutes. The other came two hours later; within ten minutes afterward the word had gone through the town that Miss Burden’s nephew in New Hampshire offered a thousand dollars’ reward for the capture of her murderer. At nine o’clock that evening the man whom the countryman had found in the burning house when he broke in the front door, appeared. They did not know then that he was the man. He did not tell them so. All they knew was that a man who had resided for a short time in the town and whom they knew as a bootlegger named Brown, and not much of a bootlegger at that, appeared on the square in a state of excitement, seeking the sheriff. Then it began to piece together. The sheriff knew that Brown was associated somehow with another man, another stranger named Christmas about whom, despite the fact that he had lived in Jefferson for three years, even less was known than about Brown; it was only now that the sheriff learned that Christmas had been living in the cabin behind Miss Burden’s house for three years. Brown wanted to talk; he insisted on talking, loud, urgent; it appeared at once that what he was doing was claiming the thousand dollars’ reward.