Then he turned, already walking fast again.
“All right,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it.
I don’t interfere with you and you don’t interfere with me, then.” It didn’t sound like a threat.
It was too flat, too final, too without heat.
He went on, rapidly.
The sheriff watched him; then he called.
Grimm turned.
“You leave yours at home, too,” the sheriff said. “You hear me?” Grimm didn’t answer.
He went on.
The sheriff watched him out of sight, frowning.
That evening after supper the sheriff went back downtown—something he had not done for years save when urgent and inescapable business called.
He found a picket of Grimm’s men at the jail, and another in the courthouse, and a third patrolling the square and the adjacent streets.
The others, the relief, they told the sheriff, were in the cotton office where Grimm was employed, which they were using for an orderly room, a P.C.
The sheriff met Grimm on the street, making a round of inspection.
“Come here, boy,” the sheriff said.
Grimm halted.
He did not approach; the sheriff went to him.
He patted Grimm’s hip with a fat hand. “I told you to leave that at home,” he said. Grimm said nothing.
He watched the sheriff levelly.
The sheriff sighed. “Well, if you won’t, I reckon I’ll have to make you a special deputy. But you ain’t to even show that gun unless I tell you to.
You hear me?”
“Certainly not,” Grimm said. “You, certainly—wouldn’t want me to draw it if I didn’t see any need to.”
“I mean, not till I tell you to.”
“Certainly,” Grimm said, without heat, patiently, immediately. “That’s what we both said.
Don’t you worry.
I’ll be there.”
Later, as the town quieted for the night, as the picture show emptied and the drug stores closed one by one, Grimm’s platoon began to drop off too.
He did not protest, watching them coldly; they became a little sheepish, defensive.
Again without knowing it he had played a trump card.
Because of the fact that they felt sheepish, feeling that somehow they had fallen short of his own cold ardor, they would return tomorrow if just to show him.
A few remained; it was Saturday night anyhow, and someone got more chairs from somewhere and they started a poker game.
It ran all night, though from time to time Grimm (he was not in the game; neither would he permit his second in command, the only other there who held the equivalent of commissioned rank, to engage) sent a squad out to make a patrol of the square.
By this time the night marshal was one of them, though he too did not take a hand in the game.
Sunday was quiet.
The poker game ran quietly through that day, broken by the periodical patrols, while the quiet church bells rang and the congregations gathered in decorous clumps of summer colors.
About the square it was already known that the special Grand Jury would meet tomorrow.
Somehow the very sound of the two words with their evocation secret and irrevocable and something of a hidden and unsleeping and omnipotent eye watching the doings of men, began to reassure Grimm’s men in their own makebelieve.
So quickly is man unwittingly and unpredictably moved that without knowing that they were thinking it, the town had suddenly accepted Grimm with respect and perhaps a little awe and a deal of actual faith and confidence, as though somehow his vision and patriotism and pride in the town, the occasion, had been quicker and truer than theirs.
His men anyway assumed and accepted this; after the sleepless night, the tenseness, the holiday, the suttee of volition’s surrender, they were almost at the pitch where they might die for him, if occasion rose.
They now moved in a grave and slightly aweinspiring reflected light which was almost as palpable as the khaki would have been which Grimm wished them to wear, wished that they wore, as though each time they returned to the orderly room they dressed themselves anew in suave and austerely splendid scraps of his dream.
This lasted through Sunday night.
The poker game ran.
The caution, the surreptitiousness, which had clothed it was now gone.
There was something about it too assured and serenely confident to the braggadocio; tonight when they heard the marshal’s feet on the stairs, one said,
“Ware M.P.’s” and for an instant they glanced at one another with hard, bright, daredevil eyes; then one said, quite loud:
“Throw the son of a bitch out,” and another through pursed lips made the immemorial sound.
And so the next morning, Monday, when the first country cars and wagons began to gather, the platoon was again intact.
And they now wore uniforms.
It was their faces.
Most of them were of an age, a generation, an experience.