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.