But he moved, though he still watched the deputy suspiciously.
“This here is a funny way to go about it,” he said. “Keeping me shut up in jail while them bastards tries to beat me out of it.”
“I reckon the bastard ain’t been whelped yet that can beat you at anything,” the deputy said. “Come on.
They’re waiting on us.”
They emerged from the jail.
In the sunlight Brown blinked, looking this way and that, then he jerked his head up, looking back over his shoulder with that horselike movement.
The car was waiting at the curb.
Brown looked at the car and then at the deputy, quite sober, quite wary.
“Where are we going in a car?” he said. “It wasn’t too far for me to walk to the courthouse this morning.”
“Watt sent the car to help bring back the reward in,” the deputy said. “Get in.”
Brown grunted.
“He’s done got mighty particular about my comfort all of a sudden.
A car to ride in, and no handcuffs.
And. just one durn fellow to keep me from running away.”
“I ain’t keeping you from running,” the deputy said.
He used in the act of starting the car. “You want to run now?”
Brown looked at him, glaring, sullen, outraged, suspicious.
“I see,” he said. “That’s his trick.
Trick me into running and then collect that thousand dollars himself.
How much of it did he promise you?”
“Me?
I’m going to get the same as you, to a cent.”
For a moment longer Brown glared at the deputy.
He cursed, pointless, in a weak, violent way.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go if we are going.”
They drove out to the scene of the fire and the murder.
At steady, almost timed intervals Brown jerked his head up and back with that movement of a free mule running in front of a car in a narrow road.
“What are we going out here for?”
“To get your reward,” the deputy said.
“Where am I going to get it?”
“In that cabin yonder.
It’s waiting for you there.”
Brown looked about, at the blackened embers which had once been a house, at the blank cabin in which he had lived for four months sitting weathered and quiet in the sunlight.
His face was quite grave, quite alert.
“There’s something funny about this.
If Kennedy thinks he can tromple on my rights, just because he wears a durn little tin star …”
“Get on,” the deputy said. “If you don’t like the reward, I’ll be waiting to take you back to jail any time you want.
Just any time you want.” He pushed Brown on, opening the cabin door and pushing him into it and closing the door behind him and sitting on the step.
Brown heard the door close behind him.
He was still moving forward.
Then, in the midst of one of those quick, jerking, allembracing looks, as if his eyes could not wait to take in the room, he stopped dead still.
Lena on the cot watched the white scar beside his mouth vanish completely, as if the ebb of blood behind it had snatched the scar in passing like a rag from a clothesline.
She did not speak at all.
She just lay there, propped on the pillows, watching him with her sober eyes in which there was nothing at all—joy, surprise, reproach, love—while over his face passed shock, astonishment, outrage, and then downright terror, each one mocking in turn at the telltale little white scar, while ceaselessly here and there about the empty room went his harried and desperate eyes.
She watched him herd them by will, like two terrified beasts, and drive them up to meet her own.
“Well, well,” he said. “Well, well, well.
It’s Lena.” She watched him, holding his eyes up to hers like two beasts about to break, as if he knew that when they broke this time he would never catch them, turn them again, and that he himself would be lost.
She could almost watch his mind casting this way and that, ceaseless, harried, terrified, seeking words which his voice, his tongue, could speak. “If it ain’t Lena.
Yes, sir.
So you got my message.