That’s it.
They are oblivious of him.
‘Don’t know and don’t care,’ he thinks. ‘Like they were saying All right.
You say you suffer.
All right.
But in the first place, all we got is your naked word for it.
And in the second place, you just say that you are Byron Bunch.
And in the third place, you are just the one that calls yourself Byron Bunch today, now, this minute. ...
‘Well,’ he thinks, ‘if that’s all it is, I reckon I might as well have the pleasure of not being able to bear looking back too.’
He halts the mule and turns in the saddle.
He did not realise that he has come so far and that the crest is so high.
Like a shallow bowl the once broad domain of what was seventy years ago a plantation house lies beneath him, between him and the opposite ridge upon which is Jefferson.
But the plantation is broken now by random negro cabins and garden patches and dead fields erosion gutted and choked with blackjack and sassafras and persimmon and brier.
But in the exact center the clump of oaks still stand as they stood when the house was built, though now there is no house among them.
From here he cannot even see the scars of the fire; he could not even tell where. it used to stand if it were not for the oaks and the position of the ruined stable and the cabin beyond, the cabin toward which he is looking.
It stands full and quiet in the afternoon sun, almost toylike; like a toy the deputy sits on the step.
Then, as Byron watches, a man appears as though by magic at the rear of it, already running, in the act of running out from the rear of the cabin while the unsuspecting deputy sits quiet and motionless on the front step.
For a while longer Byron too sits motionless, half turned in the saddle, and watches the tiny figure flee on across the barren slope behind the cabin, toward the woods.
Then a cold, hard wind seems to blow through him.
It is at once violent and peaceful, blowing hard away like chaff or trash or dead leaves all the desire and the despair and the hopelessness and the tragic and vain imagining too.
With the very blast of it he seems to feel himself rush back and empty again, without anything in him now which had not been there two weeks ago, before he ever saw her.
The desire of this moment is more than desire: it is conviction quiet and assured; before he is aware that his brain has telegraphed his hand he has turned the mule from the road and is galloping along the ridge which parallels the running man’s course when he entered the woods.
He has not even named the man’s name to himself.
He does not speculate at all upon where the man is going, and why.
It does not once enter his head that Brown is fleeing again, as he himself had predicted.
If he thought about it at all, he probably believed that Brown was engaged, after his own peculiar fashion, in some thoroughly legitimate business having to do with his and Lena’s departure.
But he was not thinking about that at all; he was not thinking about Lena at all; she was as completely out of his mind as if he had never seen her face nor heard her name.
He is thinking:
‘I took care of his woman for him and I borned his child for him.
And now there is one more thing I can do for him.
I can’t marry them, because I ain’t a minister.
And I may not can catch him, because he’s got a start on me.
And I may not can whip him if I do, because he is bigger than me.
But I can try it.
I can try to do it.’
When the deputy called for him at the jail, Brown asked at once where they were going.
Visiting, the deputy told him.
Brown held back, watching the deputy with his handsome, spuriously bold face.
“I don’t want to visit nobody here.
I’m a stranger here.”
“You’d be strange anywhere you was at,” the deputy said. “Even at home.
Come on.”
“I’m a American citizen,” Brown said. “I reckon I got my rights, even if I don’t wear no tin star on my galluses.”
“Sho,” the deputy said. “That’s what I am doing now: helping you get your rights.”
Brown’s face lighted: it was a flash.
“Have they— Are they going to pay—”
“That reward?
Sho.
I’m going to take you to the place myself right now, where if you are going to get any reward, you’ll get it.”
Brown sobered.