“I reckon he was desperate by then.
I reckon he could not only see that thousand dollars getting further and further away from him, but that he could begin to see somebody else getting it.
I reckon it was like he could see himself with that thousand dollars right in his hand for somebody else to have the spending of it.
Because they said it was like he had been saving what he told them next for just such a time as this.
Like he had knowed that if it come to a pinch, this would save him, even if it was almost worse for a white man to admit what he would have to admit than to be accused of the murder itself.
‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Go on.
Accuse me.
Accuse the white man that’s trying to help you with what he knows.
Accuse the white man and let the nigger go free.
Accuse the white and let the nigger run.’
“ ‘Nigger?’ the sheriff said. ‘Nigger?’
“It’s like he knew he had them then.
Like nothing they could believe he had done would be as bad as what he could tell that somebody else had done.
‘You’re so smart,’ he says. ‘The folks, in this town is so smart.
Fooled for three years.
Calling him a foreigner for three years, when soon as I watched him three days I knew he wasn’t no more a foreigner than I am.
I knew before he even told me himself.’
And them watching him now, and looking now and then at one another.
“ ‘You better be careful what you are saying, if it is a white man you are talking about,’ the marshal says. ‘I don’t care if he is a murderer or not.’
“ ‘I’m talking about Christmas,’ Brown says. ‘The man that killed that white woman after he had done lived with her in plain sight of this whole town, and you all letting him get further and further away while you are accusing the one fellow that can find him for you, that knows what he done.
He’s got nigger blood in him.
I knowed it when I first saw him.
But you folks, you smart sheriffs and such.
One time he even admitted it, told me he was part nigger.
Maybe he was drunk when he done it: I don’t know.
Anyway, the next morning after he told me he come to me and he says (Brown was talking fast now, kind of glaring his eyes and his teeth both around at them, from one to another), he said to me,
“I made a mistake last night.
Don’t you make the same one.”
And I said,
“How do you mean a mistake?” and he said,
“You think a minute,” and I thought about something he done one night when me and him was in Memphis and I knowed my life wouldn’t be worth nothing if I ever crossed him and so I said,
“I reckon I know what you mean.
I ain’t going to meddle in what ain’t none of my business.
I ain’t never done that yet, that I know of.”
‘And you’d have said that, too,’ Brown says, ‘way out there, alone in that cabin with him and nobody to hear you if you was to holler.
You’d have been scared too, until the folks you was trying to help turned in and accused you of the killing you never done.’
And there he sat, with his eyes going and going, and them in the room watching him and the faces pressed against the window from outside.
“ ‘A nigger,’ the marshal said. ‘I always thought there was something funny about that fellow.’
“Then the sheriff talked to Brown again.
‘And that’s why you didn’t tell what was going on out there until tonight?’
“And Brown setting there in the midst of them, with his lips snarled back and that little scar by his mouth white as a popcorn.
‘You just show me the man that would a done different,’ he says.
‘That’s all I ask.
Just show me the man that would a lived with him enough to know him like I done, and done different.’
“ ‘Well,’ the sheriff says, ‘I believe you are telling the truth at last.
You go on with Buck, now, and get a good sleep.
I’ll attend to Christmas.’
“ ‘I reckon that means the jail,’ Brown says. ‘I reckon you’ll lock me up in jail while you get the reward.’
“ ‘You shut your mouth,’ the sheriff says, not mad. ‘If that reward is yours, I’ll see that you get it.
Take him on, Buck.’