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.
“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.