It was new, painted red, with gilt trim and a handpower siren and a bell gold in color and in tone serene, arrogant, and proud.
About it hatless men and youths clung with the astonishing disregard of physical laws that flies possess.
It had mechanical ladders that sprang to prodigious heights at the touch of a hand, like opera hats; only there’ was now nothing for them to spring to. It had neat and virgin coils of hose evocative of telephone trust advertisements in the popular magazines; but there was nothing to hook them to and nothing to flow through them.
So the hatless men, who had deserted counters and desks, swung down, even including the one who ground the siren.
They came too and were shown several different places where the sheet had lain, and some of them with pistols already in their pockets began to canvass about for someone to crucify.
But there wasn’t anybody.
She had lived such a quiet life, attended so to her own affairs, that she bequeathed to the town in which she had been born and lived and died a foreigner, an outlander, a kind of heritage of astonishment and outrage, for which, even though she had supplied them at last with an emotional barbecue, a Roman holiday almost, they would never forgive her and let her be dead in peace and quiet.
Not that.
Peace is not that often.
So they moiled and clotted, believing that the flames, the blood, the body that had died three years ago and had just now begun to live again, cried out for vengeance, not believing that the rapt infury of the flames and the immobility of the body were both affirmations of an attained bourne beyond the hurt and harm of man.
Not that.
Because the other made nice believing.
Better than the shelves and the counters filled with longfamiliar objects bought, not because the owner desired them or admired them, could take any pleasure in the owning of them, but in order to cajole or trick other men into buying them at a profit; and who must now and then contemplate both the objects which had not yet sold and the men who could buy them but had not yet done so, with anger and maybe outrage and maybe despair too. Better than the musty offices where the lawyers waited lurking among ghosts of old lusts and lies, or where the doctors waited with sharp knives and sharp drugs, telling man, believing that he should believe, without resorting to printed admonishments, that they labored for that end whose ultimate attainment would leave them with nothing whatever to do.
And the women came too, the idle ones in bright and sometimes hurried garments, with secret and passionate and glittering looks and with secret frustrated breasts (who have ever loved death better than peace) to print with a myriad small hard heels to the constant murmur Who did it?
Who did it? periods such as perhaps Is he still free?
Ah.
Is he?
Is he?
The sheriff also stared at the flames with exasperation and astonishment, since there was no scene to investigate.
He was not yet thinking of himself as having been frustrated by a human agent.
It was the fire.
It seemed to him that the fire had been selfborn for that end and purpose.
It seemed to him that that by and because of which he had had ancestors long enough to come himself to be, had allied itself with crime.
So he continued to walk in a baffled and fretted manner about that heedless monument of the color of both hope and catastrophe until a deputy came up and told how he had discovered in a cabin beyond the house, traces of recent occupation.
And immediately the countryman who had discovered the fire (he had not yet got to town; his wagon had not progressed one inch since he descended from it two hours ago, and he now moved among the people, wildhaired, gesticulant, with on his face a dulled, spent, glaring expression and his voice hoarsed almost to a whisper) remembered that he had seen a man in the house when he broke in the door.
“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.”