He feels no particular pain now, but better than that, he feels no haste, no urgency, to do anything or go anywhere.
He just lies bleeding and quiet, knowing that after a while will be time enough to reenter the world and time.
He does not, even wonder where Brown has gone.
He does not have to think about Brown now.
Again his mind is filled with still shapes like discarded and fragmentary toys of childhood piled indiscriminate and gathering quiet dust in a forgotten closet—Brown. Lena Grove. Hightower. Byron Bunch—all like small objects which had never been alive, which he had played with in childhood and then broken and forgot.
He is lying so when he hears the train whistle for a crossing a half mile away.
This rouses him; this is the world and time too.
He sits up, slowly, tentatively.
‘Anyway, I ain’t broke anything,’ he thinks. ‘I mean, he ain’t broke anything that belongs to me.’
It is getting late: it is time now, with distance, moving, in it.
‘Yes.
I’ll have to be moving.
I’ll have to get on so I can find me something else to meddle with.’
The train is coming nearer.
Already the stroke of the engine has shortened and become heavier as it begins to feel the grade; presently he can see the smoke.
He seeks in his pocket for a handkerchief.
He has none, so he tears the tail from his shirt and dabs at his face gingerly, listening to the short, blasting reports of the locomotive exhaust just over the grade.
He moves to the edge of the undergrowth, where he can see the track.
The engine is in sight now, almost headon to him beneath the spaced, heavy blasts of black smoke.
It has an effect of terrific nomotion.
Yet it does move, creeping terrifically up and over the crest of the grade.
Standing now in the fringe of bushes he watches the engine approach and pass him, laboring, crawling, with the rapt and boylike absorption (and perhaps yearning) of his country raising.
It passes; his eye moves on, watching the cars as they in turn crawl up and over the crest, when for the second time that afternoon he sees a man materialise apparently out of air, in the act of running.
Even then he does not realise what Brown is about.
He has progressed too far into peace and solitude to wonder.
He just stands there and watches Brown run to the train, stooping, fleeing, and grasp the iron ladder at the end of a car and leap upward and vanish from sight as though sucked into a vacuum.
The train is beginning to increase its speed; he watches the approach of the car where Brown vanished.
It passes; clinging to the rear of it, between it and the next car, Brown stands, his face leaned out and watching the bushes.
They see one another at the same moment: the two faces, the mild, nondescript, bloody one and the lean, harried, desperate one contorted now in a soundless shouting above the noise of the train, passing one another as though on opposite orbits and with an effect as of phantoms or apparitions.
Still Byron is not thinking.
“Great God in the mountain,” he says, with childlike and almost ecstatic astonishment; “he sho knows how to jump a train.
He’s sho done that before.”
He is not thinking at all.
It is as though the moving wall of dingy cars were a dyke beyond which the world, time, hope unbelievable and certainty incontrovertible, waited, giving him yet a little more of peace.
Anyway, when the last car passes, moving fast now, the world rushes down on him like a flood, a tidal wave.
It is too huge and fast for distance and time; hence no path to be retraced, leading the mule for a good way before he remembers to get on it and ride.
It is as though he has already and long since outstripped himself, already waiting at the cabin until he can catch up and enter.
And then Iwill stand there and I will ...
He tries it again: ThenI will stand there and I will ...
But he can get no further than that.
He is in the road again now, approaching a wagon homeward bound from town.
It is about six o’clock.
He does not give up, however.
Even if I can’t seem to get any further than that: when I will open the door and come in and stand there.
And then I will.
Look at her.
Look as her.
Look at her— The voice speaks again:
“—excitement, I reckon.”
“What?” Byron says.