“The marshal come over and touched Brown’s shoulder and he got up.
When they went out the door the ones that had been watching through the window crowded up:
‘Have you got him, Buck?
Is he the one that done it?’
“ ‘No,’ Buck says. ‘You boys get on home.
Get on to bed, now.’ ”
Byron’s voice ceases.
Its flat, inflectionless, country. bred singsong dies into silence.
He is now looking at Hightower with that look compassionate and troubled and still, watching across the desk the man who sits there with his eyes closed and the sweat running down his face like tears.
Hightower speaks:
“Is it certain, proved, that he has negro blood?
Think, Byron; what it will mean when the people—if they catch ...
Poor man.
Poor mankind.”
“That’s what Brown says,” Byron says, his tone quiet, stubborn, convinced. “And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as a honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”
“Yes,” Hightower says.
He sits with his eyes closed, erect. “But they have not caught him yet.
They have not caught him yet, Byron.”
Neither is Byron looking at the other.
“Not yet.
Not the last I heard.
They took some bloodhounds out there today.
But they hadn’t caught him when I heard last.”
“And Brown?”
“Brown,” Byron says. “Him.
He went with them.
He may have helped Christmas do it.
But I don’t reckon so.
I reckon that setting fire to the house was about this limit.
And why he done that, if he did, I reckon even he don’t know.
Unless maybe he thought that if the whole thing was just burned up, it would kind of not ever been at all, and then him and Christmas could go on riding around in that new car.
I reckon he figured that what Christmas committed was not so much a sin as a mistake.” His face is musing, downlooking; again it cracks faintly, with a kind of sardonic weariness. “I reckon he’s safe enough.
I reckon she can find him now any time she wants, provided him and the sheriff ain’t out with the dogs.
He ain’t trying to run—not with that thousand dollars hanging over his head, you might say.
I reckon he wants to catch Christmas worse than any man of them.
He goes with them.
They take him out of the jail and he goes along with them, and then they all come back to town and lock Brown up again.
It’s right queer.
Kind of a murderer trying to catch himself to get his own reward.
He don’t seem to mind though, except to begrudge the time while they ain’t out on the trail, the time wasted setting down.
Yes.
I’ll tell her tomorrow.
I’ll just tell her that he is in hock for the time being, him and them two dogs.
Maybe I’ll take her to town where she can see them, all three of them hitched to the other men, a-straining and yapping.”
“You haven’t told her yet.”
“I ain’t told her.
Nor him.
Because he might run again, reward or no reward.
And maybe if he can catch Christmas and get that reward, he will marry her in time.
But she don’t know yet, no more than she knowed yesterday when she got down from that wagon on the square.