And her standing there, in that purple dress and the plume not even nodding and bending, she was that still.
‘Where is the sheriff?’ she said.
“ ‘He might be in his office,’ Metcalf said. ‘You find him and get permission from him.
Then you can see the nigger.’
Metcalf thought that that would finish it.
So he watched her turn and go out and walk through the crowd in front of the jail and go back up the street toward the square.
The plume was nodding now.
He could see it nodding along above the fence.
And then he saw her go across the square and in to the courthouse.
The folks didn’t know what she was doing, because Metcalf hadn’t had time to tell them what happened at the jail. They just watched her go on into the courthouse, and then Russell said how he was in the office and he happened to look up and there that hat was with the plume on it just beyond the window across the counter.
He didn’t know how long she had been standing there, waiting for him to look up.
He said she was just tall enough to see over the counter, so that she didn’t look like she had any body at all. It just looked like somebody had sneaked up and set a toy balloon with a face painted on it and a comic hat set on top of it, like the Katzenjammer kids in the funny paper.
‘I want to see the sheriff,’ she says.
“ ‘He ain’t here,’ Russell says. ‘I’m his deputy.
What can I do for you?’
“He said she didn’t answer for a while, standing there.
Then she said,
‘Where can I find him?’
“ ‘He might be at home,’ Russell says. ‘He’s been right busy, this week.
Up at night some, helping those Jefferson officers.
He might be home taking a nap.
But maybe I can—’ But he said that she was already gone.
He said he looked out the window and watched her go on across the square and turn the corner toward where the sheriff lived.
He said he was still trying to place her, to think who she was.
“She never found the sheriff.
But it was too late then, anyway.
Because the sheriff was already at the jail, only Metcalf hadn’t told her, and besides she hadn’t got good away from the jail before the Jefferson officers came up in two cars and went into the jail.
They came up quick and went in quick.
But the word had already got around that they were there, and there must have been two hundred men and boys and women too in front of the jail when the two sheriffs come out onto the porch and our sheriff made a speech, asking the folks to respect the law and that him and the Jefferson sheriff both promised that the nigger would get a quick and fair trial; and then somebody in the crowd says,
‘Fair, hell.
Did he give that white woman a fair trial?’
And they hollered then, crowding up, like they were hollering for one another to the dead woman and not to the sheriffs.
But the sheriff kept on talking quiet to them, about how it was his sworn word given to them on the day they elected him that he was trying to keep.
‘I have no more sympathy with nigger murderers than any other white man here,’ he says.
‘But it is my sworn oath, and by God I aim to keep it.
I don’t want no trouble, but I ain’t going to dodge it.
You better smoke that for awhile.’
And Halliday was there too, with the sheriffs.
He was the foremost one about reason and not making trouble.
‘Yaaah,’ somebody hollers; ‘we reckon you don’t want him lynched.
But he ain’t worth any thousand dollars to us.
He ain’t worth a thousand dead matches to us.’
And then the sheriff says quick:
‘What if Halliday don’t want him killed?
Don’t we all want the same thing?
Here it’s a local citizen that will get the reward: the money will be spent right here in Mottstown.
Just suppose it was a Jefferson man was going to get it.
Ain’t that right, men?
Ain’t that sensible?’
His voice sounded little, like a doll’s voice, like even a big man’s voice will sound when he is talking not against folks’ listening but against their already half-made-up minds.