About the walls, huddling, clotted, the others watched him the girls in stiff offcolors and mail-order stockings and heels; the men, young men in illcut and boardlike garments also from the mail-order, with hard, ruined hands and eyes already revealing a heritage of patient brooding upon endless furrows and the slow buttocks of mules.
Joe began to run, brandishing the chair.
“Let her go!” he said.
At once she ceased struggling and turned on him the fury, the shrieking, as if she had just seen him, realised that he was also there.
“And you!
You brought me here.
Goddamn bastard clodhopper.
Bastard you!
Son of a bitch you and him too.
Putting him at me that never ever saw—” Joe did not appear to be running at anyone in particular, and his face was quite calm beneath the uplifted chair.
The others fell back from about the woman, freeing her, though she continued to wrench her arms as if she did not yet realise it.
“Get out of here!” Joe shouted.
He whirled, swinging the chair; yet his face was still quite calm.
“Back!” he said, though no one had moved toward him at all.
They were all as still and as silent as the man on the floor.
He swung the chair, backing now toward the door.
“Stand back!
I said I would kill him some day!
I told him so!”
He swung the chair about him, calmfaced, backing toward the door.
“Don’t a one of you move, now,” he said, looking steadily and ceaselessly at faces that might have been masks.
Then he flung the chair down and whirled and sprang out the door, into soft, dappled moonlight.
He overtook the waitress as she was getting into the car in which they had come.
He was panting, yet his voice was calm too: a sleeping face merely breathing hard enough to make sounds.
“Get on back to town,” he said. “I’ll be there soon as I ...”
Apparently he was not aware of what he was saying nor of what was happening; when the woman turned suddenly in the door of the car and began to beat him in the face he did not move, his voice did not change:
“Yes.
That’s right.
I’ll be there soon as I—” Then he turned and ran, while she was still striking at him.
I He could not have, known where McEachern had left the horse, nor for certain if it was even there.
Yet he ran straight to it, with something of his adopted father’s complete faith in an infallibility in events.
He got onto it and swung it back toward the road.
The car had already turned into the road.
He saw the taillight diminish and disappear.
The old, strong, farmbred horse returned home at its slow and steady canter.
The youth upon its back rode lightly, balanced lightly, leaning well forward, exulting perhaps at that moment as Faustus had, of having put behind now at once and for all the Shalt Not, of being free at last of honor and law.
In the motion the sweet sharp sweat of the horse blew, sulphuric; the invisible wind flew past.
He cried aloud,
“I have done it!
I have done it!
I told them I would!”
He entered the lane and rode through the moonlight up to the house without slowing.
He had thought it would be dark, but it was not.
He did not pause; the careful and hidden rope were as much a part of his dead life now as honor and hope, and the old wearying woman who had been one of his enemies for thirteen years and who was now awake, waiting for him.
The light was in hers and McEachern’s bedroom and she was standing in the door, with a shawl over her nightdress.
“Joe?” she said.
He came down the hall fast.
His face looked as McEachern had seen it as the chair fell.
Perhaps she could not yet see it good.
“What is it?” she said. “Paw rode away on the horse.