If it had got through then.’
He thought this quietly, in aghast despair, regret.
‘Yes.
I would have turned my back and rode the other way.
Beyond the knowing and memory of man forever and ever I reckon I would have rode.’
But he did not.
He passed the cabin at a gallop, with thinking going smooth and steady, he not yet knowing why.
‘If I can just get past and out of hearing before she hollers again,’ he thought. ‘If I can just get past before I have to hear her again.’
That carried him for a while, into the road, the hardmuscled small beast going fast now, thinking, the oil, spreading steady and smooth:
‘I’ll go to Hightower first.
I’ll leave the mule for him.
I must remember to remind him about his doctor book.
I mustn’t forget that,’ the oil said, getting him that far, to where he sprang from the still running mule and into Hightower’s house.
Then he had something else.
‘Now that’s done,’ thinking Even if I can’t get a regular doctor That got him to the square and then betrayed him; he could feel it, clawed with lurking, thinking Even if I don’t get a regular doctor.
Because I have never believed that I would need one.
I didn’t believe It was in his mind, galloping in yoked and headlong paradox with the need for haste while he helped the old doctor hunt for the key to the strongbox in order to get the switch key for the car.
They found it at last, and for a time the need for haste went hand in hand with movement, speed, along the empty road beneath the empty dawn that, or he had surrendered all reality, all dread and fear, to the doctor beside him, as people do.
Anyway it got him back to the cabin, where the two of them left the car and approached the cabin door, beyond which the lamp still burned: for that interval he ran in the final hiatus of peace before the blow fell and the clawed thing overtook him from behind.
Then he heard the child cry.
Then he knew.
Dawn was making fast.
He stood quietly in the chill peace, the waking quiet—small, nondescript, whom no man or woman had ever turned to look at twice anywhere.
He knew now that there had been something all the while which had protected him against believing, with the believing protected him.
With stern and austere astonishment he thought It was like it was not until Mrs. Hines called me and I heard her and saw her face and knew that Byron Bunch was nothing in this world to her right then, that I found out that she is not a virgin And he thought that that was terrible, but that was not all.
There was something else.
His head was not bowed.
He stood quite still in the augmenting dawn, while thinking went quietly And this too is reserved for me, as Reverend Hightower says.
I’ll have totell him now.
I’ll have to tell Lucas BurchIt was not unsurprise now.
It was something like the terrible and irremediable despair of adolescence Why, I didn’t even believe until now that he was so.
It was like me, and her, and all the other folks that I had to get mixed up in it, were just a lot of words that never even stood for anything, were not even us, while all the time what was us was going on and going on without even missing the lack of words.
Yes.
It ain’t until now that I ever believed that he is Lucas Burch.
That there ever was a Lucas Burch.
‘Luck,’ Hightower says; ‘luck.
I don’t know whether I had it or not.’
But the doctor has gone on into the cabin.
Looking back for another moment, Hightower watches the group about the cot, hearing still the doctor’s cheery voice.
The old woman now sits quietly, yet looking back at her it seems but a moment ago that he was struggling with her for the child, lest she drop it in her dumb and furious terror.
But no less furious for being dumb it was as, the child snatched almost from the mother’s body, she held it high aloft, her heavy, bearlike body crouching as she glared at the old man asleep on the cot.
He was sleeping so when Hightower arrived.
He did not seem to breathe at all, and beside the cot the woman was crouching in a chair when he entered.
She looked exactly like a rock poised to plunge over a precipice, and for an instant Hightower thought She has already killed him.
She has taken her precautions well beforehand this time Then he was quite busy; the old woman was at his elbow without his being aware of it until she snatched the still unbreathing child and held it aloft, glaring at the old sleeping man on the other cot with the face of a tiger. Then the child breathed and cried, and the woman seemed to answer it, also in no known tongue, savage and triumphant.
Her face was almost maniacal as he struggled with her and took the child from her before she dropped it.
“See,” he said. “Look!
He’s quiet.
He’s not going to take it away this time.”
Still she glared at him, dumb, beastlike, as though she did not understand English.