Back home.
It was all right for just me.
I never minded.
But it’s different now.
I reckon I got a right to worry now.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “That.
Don’t you worry about that.
Just let me get this here business cleaned up and get my hands on that money.
It’s mine by right.
There can’t nere a bastard one of them—” He stopped.
His voice had begun to rise, as though he had forgot where he was and had been thinking aloud.
He lowered it; he said: “You just leave it to me.
Don’t you worry none.
I ain’t never give you no reason yet to worry, have I?
Tell me that.”
“No.
I never worried.
I knowed I could depend on you.”
“Sho you knowed it.
And these here bastards—these here—” He had risen from the chair. “Which reminds me—” She neither looked up nor spoke while he stood above her with those eyes harried, desperate, and importunate.
It was as if she held him there and that she knew it.
And that she released him by her own will, deliberately.
“I reckon you are right busy now, then.”
“For a fact, I am.
With all I got to bother me, and them bastards—” She was looking at him now.
She watched him as he looked at the window in the rear wall.
Then he looked back at the closed door behind him.
Then he looked at her, at her grave face which had either nothing in it, or everything, all knowledge.
He lowered his voice. “I got enemies here.
Folks that don’t want me to get what I done earned.
So I am going to—” Again it was as though she held him, forcing him to trying him with, that final lie at which even his sorry dregs of pride revolted; held him neither with rods nor cords but with something against which his lying blew trivial as leaves or trash.
But she said nothing at all.
She just watched him as he went on’ tiptoe to the window and opened it without a sound.
Then he looked at her.
Perhaps he thought that he was safe then, that he could get out the window before she could touch him with a physical hand.
Or perhaps it was some sorry tagend of shame, as a while ago it had been pride.
Because he looked at her, stripped naked for the instant of verbiage and deceit.
His voice was not much louder than a whisper: “It’s a man outside.
In front, waiting for me.” Then he was gone, through the window, without, a sound, in a single motion almost like a long snake.
From beyond the window she heard a single faint sound as he began to run.
Then only did she move, and then but to sigh once, profoundly.
“Now I got to get up again,” she said, aloud.
When Brown emerges from the woods, onto the railroad right-of-way, he is panting.
It is not with fatigue, though the distance which he has covered in the last twenty minutes is almost two miles and the going was not smooth.
Rather, it is the snarling and malevolent breathing of a fleeing animal: while he stands looking both ways along the empty track his face, his expression, is that of an animal fleeing alone, desiring no fellowaid, clinging to its solitary dependence upon its own muscles alone and which, in the pause to renew breath, hates every tree and grassblade in sight as if it were a live enemy, hates the very earth it rests upon and the very air it needs to renew breathing.
He has struck the railroad within a few hundred yards of the point at which he aimed.
This is the crest of a grade where the northbound freights slow to a terrific and crawling gait of almost less than that of a walking man.
A short distance ahead of him the twin bright threads appear to, have been cut short off as though with scissors.
For a while he stands just within the screen of woods beside the right-of-way, still hidden.
He stands like a man in brooding and desperate calculation, as if he sought in his mind for some last desperate cast in a game already lost.