“You want to turn state’s evidence?” the sheriff asked him.
“I don’t want to turn nothing,” Brown said, harsh, hoarse, a little wild in the face. “I know who done it and when I get my reward, I’ll tell.”
“You catch the fellow that done it, and you’ll get the reward,” the sheriff said. So they took Brown to the jail for safekeeping. “Only I reckon it ain’t no actual need of that,” the sheriff said. “I reckon as long as that thousand dollars is where he can smell it, you couldn’t run him away from here.” When Brown was taken away, still hoarse, still gesticulant and outraged, the sheriff telephoned to a neighboring town, where there was a pair of bloodhounds. The dogs would arrive on the early morning train.
About the bleak platform, in the sad dawn of that Sunday morning, thirty or forty men were waiting when the train came in, the lighted windows fleeing and jarring to a momentary stop. It was a fast train and it did not always stop at Jefferson. It halted only long enough to disgorge the two dogs: a thousand costly tons of intricate and curious metal glaring and crashing up and into an almost shocking silence filled with the puny sounds of men, to vomit two gaunt and cringing phantoms whose droopeared and mild faces gazed with sad abjectness about at the weary, pale faces of men who had not slept very much since night before last, ringing them about with something terrible and eager and impotent. It was as if the very initial outrage of the murder carried in its wake and made of all subsequent actions something monstrous and paradoxical and wrong, in themselves against both reason and nature.
It was just sunrise when the posse reached the cabin behind the charred and now cold embers of the house. The dogs, either gaining courage from the light and warmth of the sun or catching the strained and tense excitement from the men, began to surge and yap about the cabin. Snuffing loudly and as one beast they took a course, dragging the man who held the leashes. They ran side by side for a hundred yards, where they stopped and began to dig furiously into the earth and exposed a pit where someone had buried recently emptied food tins. They dragged the dogs away by main strength. They dragged them some distance from the cabin and made another cast. For a short time the dogs moiled, whimpering, then they set off again, fulltongued, drooling, and dragged and carried the running and cursing men at top speed back to the cabin, where, feet planted and with backflung heads and backrolled eyeballs, they bayed the empty doorway with the passionate abandon of two baritones singing Italian opera. The men took the dogs back to town, in cars, and fed them. When they crossed the square the church bells were ringing, slow and peaceful, and along the streets the decorous people moved sedately beneath parasols, carrying Bibles and prayerbooks.
That night a youth, a countryboy, and his father came in to see the sheriff. The boy told of having been on the way home in a car late Friday night, and of a man who stopped him a mile or two beyond the scene of the murder, with a pistol. The boy believed that he was about to be robbed and even killed, and he told how he was about to trick the man into permitting him to drive right up into his own front yard, where he intended to stop the car and spring out and shout for help, but that the man suspected something and forced him to stop the car and let him out. The father wanted to know how much of the thousand dollars would become theirs.
“You catch him and we’ll see,” the sheriff said. So they waked the dogs and put them into another car and the youth showed them where the man had got out, and they cast the dogs, who charged immediately into the woods and with their apparent infallibility for metal in any form, found the old pistol with its two loaded chambers almost at once.
“It’s one of them old Civil War, cap-and-ball pistols,” the deputy said. “One of the caps has been snapped, but it never went off. What do you reckon he was doing with that?”
“Turn them dogs loose,” the sheriff said. “Maybe them leashes worry them.” They did so. The dogs were free now; thirty minutes later they were lost. Not the men lost the dogs; the dogs lost the men. They were just across a small creek and a ridge, and the men could hear them plainly. They were not baying now, with pride and assurance and perhaps pleasure. The sound which they now made was a longdrawn and hopeless wailing, while steadily the men shouted at them. But apparently the animals could not hear either. Both voices were distinguishable, yet the belllike and abject wailing seemed to come from a single throat, as though the two beasts crouched flank to flank. After a while the men found them so, crouched in a ditch. By that time their voices sounded almost like the voices of children. The men squatted there until it was light enough to find their way back to the cars. Then it was Monday morning.
the temperature began to rise monday. on tuesday, the night, the darkness after the hot day, is close, still, oppressive; as soon as Byron enters the house he feels the corners of his nostrils whiten and tauten with the thick smell of the stale, mankept house. And when Hightower approaches, the smell of plump unwashed flesh and unfresh clothing—that odor of unfastidious sedentation, of static overflesh not often enough bathed—is well nigh overpowering. Entering, Byron thinks as he has thought before: ‘That is his right. It may not be my way, but it is his way and his right.’ And he remembers how once he had seemed to find the answer, as though by inspiration, divination: ‘It is the odor of goodness. Of course it would smell bad to us that are bad and sinful.’
They sit again opposite one another in the study, the desk, the lighted lamp, between. Byron sits again on the hard chair, his face lowered, still. His voice is sober, stubborn: the voice of a man saying something which will be not only unpleasing, but will not be believed. “I am going to find another place for her. A place where it will be more private. Where she can …”
Hightower watches his lowered face. “Why must she move? When she is comfortable there, with a woman at hand if she should need one?” Byron does not answer. He sits motionless, downlooking; his face is stubborn, still; looking at it, Hightower thinks, ‘It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.’ He watches Byron. “Is Mrs. Beard the only reason why she is going to move?”
Still Byron does not look up, speaking in that still, stubborn voice: “She needs a place where it will be kind of home to her. She ain’t got a whole lot more time, and in a boarding house, where it’s mostly just men … A room where it will be quiet when her time comes, and not every durn horsetrader or courtjury that passes through the hallway …”
“I see,” Hightower says. He watches Byron’s face. “And you want me to take her in here.” Byron makes to speak, but the other goes on: his tone too is cold, level: “It won’t do, Byron. If there were another woman here, living in the house. It’s a shame too, with all the room here, the quiet. I’m thinking of her, you see. Not myself. I would not care what was said, thought.”
“I am not asking that.” Byron does not look up. He can feel the other watching him. He thinks He knows that is not what I meant, too. He knows. He just said that. I know what he is thinking. I reckon I expected it. I reckon it is not any reason for him to think different from other folks, even about me “I reckon you ought to know that.” Perhaps he does know it. But Byron does not look up to see. He talks on, in that dull, flat voice, downlooking, while beyond the desk Hightower, sitting a little more than erect, looks at the thin, weatherhardened, laborpurged face of the man opposite him. “I ain’t going to get you mixed up in it when it ain’t none of your trouble. You haven’t even seen her, and I don’t reckon you ever will. I reckon likely you have never seen him to know it either. It’s just that I thought maybe …” His voice ceases. Across the desk the unbending minister looks at him, waiting, not offering to help him. “When it’s a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get. But I ain’t going to mix you up in it. I don’t want you to worry about that.”