Mail boxes on posts beside the road rushed into the lights and flicked past.
Now and then they passed a dark house.
Again the boy was speaking:
“Now, this here cutoff I was telling you about.
It’s right down here.
I’m going to turn into it.
But it don’t mean I am leaving the road.
I am just going a little way across to a better road.
See?”
“All right,” Christmas said.
Then for no reason he said: “You must live around here somewhere.”
Now it was the girl who spoke.
She turned in the seat, whirling, her small face wan with suspense and terror and blind and ratlike desperation:
“We do!” she cried. “We both do!
Right up yonder!
And when my pappy and brothers—” Her voice ceased, cut short off; Christmas saw the boy’s hand clapped upon her lower face and her hands tugging at the wrist while beneath the hand itself her smothered voice choked and bubbled.
Christmas sat forward.
“Here,” he said. “I’ll get out here.
You can let me out here.”
“Now you’ve done it!” the boy cried, too, thinly, with desperate rage too. “If you’d just kept quiet—”
“Stop the car,” Christmas said. “I ain’t going to hurt either of you.
I just want to get out.”
Again the car stopped with sprawling suddenness.
But the engine still raced, and the car leaped forward again before he was clear of the step; he had to leap forward running for a few steps to recover his balance.
As he did so, something heavy and hard struck him on the flank.
The car rushed on, fading at top speed.
From it floated back the girl’s shrill wailing.
Then it was gone; the darkness, the now impalpable dust, came down again, and the silence beneath the summer stars.
The object which had struck him had delivered an appreciable blow; then he discovered that the object was attached to his right hand.
Raising the hand, he found that it held the ancient heavy pistol.
He did not know that he had it; he did not remember having picked it up at all, nor why.
But there it was.
‘And I flagged that car with my right hand,’ he thought ‘No wonder she ... they …’ He drew his right hand back to throw, the pistol balanced upon it.
Then he paused, and he struck a match and examined the pistol in the puny dying glare.
The match burned down and went out, yet he still seemed to see the ancient thing with its two loaded chambers: the one upon which the hammer had already fallen and which had not exploded, and the other upon which no hammer had yet fallen but upon which a hammer had been planned to fall.
‘For her and for me,’ he said.
His arm came back, and threw.
He heard the pistol crash once through undergrowth.
Then there was no sound again.
‘For her and for me.’ Chapter 13
WITHIN five minutes after the countrymen found the fire, the people began to gather.
Some of them, also on the way to town in wagons to spend Saturday, also stopped.
Some came afoot from the immediate neighborhood.
This was a region of negro cabins and gutted and outworn fields out of which a corporal’s guard of detectives could not have combed ten people, man, woman or child, yet which now within thirty minutes produced, as though out of thin air, parties and groups ranging from single individuals to entire families.
Still others came out from town in racing and blatting cars.
Among these came the sheriff of the county—a fat, comfortable man with a hard, canny head and a benevolent aspect—who thrust away those who crowded to look down at the body on the sheet with that static and childlike amaze with which adults contemplate their own inescapable portraits.
Among them the casual Yankees and the poor whites and even the southerners who had lived for a while in the north, who believed aloud that it was an anonymous negro crime committed not by a negro but by Negro and who knew, believed, and hoped that she had been ravished too: at least once before her throat was cut and at least once afterward. The sheriff came up and looked himself once and then sent the body away, hiding the poor thing from the eyes.
Then there was nothing for them to look at except the place where the body had lain and the fire.
And soon nobody could remember exactly where the sheet had rested, what earth it had covered, and so then there was only the fire to look at.
So they looked at the fire, with that same dull and static amaze which they had brought down from the old fetid caves where knowing began, as though, like death, they had never seen fire before. Presently the fire-truck came up gallantly, with noise, with whistles and bells.