They passed the jail.
Standing along the fence were the loafers, the countrymen, the blackguard boys and youths who had followed Goodwin and the deputy from the courthouse.
Beside the gate the woman stood, in the gray hat with the veil, carrying the child in her arms.
“Standing where he can see it through the window,” Horace said.
“I smell ham, too.
Maybe he’ll be eating ham before we get home.”
Then he began to cry, sitting in the car beside his sister.
She drove steadily, not fast.
Soon they had left the town and the stout rows of young cotton swung at either hand in parallel and diminishing retrograde.
There was still a little snow of locust blooms on the mounting drive.
“It does last,” Horace said.
“Spring does.
You’d almost think there was some purpose to it.”
He stayed to supper.
He ate a lot.
“I’ll go and see about your room,” his sister said, quite gently.
“All right,” Horace said.
“It’s nice of you.”
She went out.
Miss Jenny’s wheel chair sat on a platform slotted for the wheels.
“It’s nice of her,” Horace said.
“I think I’ll go outside and smoke my pipe.”
“Since when have you quit smoking it in here?” Miss Jenny said.
“Yes,” Horace said.
“It was nice of her.”
He walked across the porch.
“I intended to stop here,” Horace said.
He watched himself cross the porch and then tread the diffident snow of the last locusts; he turned out of the iron gates, onto the gravel.
After about a mile a car slowed and offered him a ride.
“I’m just walking before supper,” he said;
“I’ll turn back soon.”
After another mile he could see the lights of town. It was a faint glare, low and close.
It got stronger as he approached.
Before he reached town he began to hear the sound, the voices.
Then he saw the people, a shifting mass filling the street, and the bleak, shallow yard above which the square and slotted bulk of the jail loomed.
In the yard, beneath the barred window, a man in his shirt sleeves faced the crowd, hoarse, gesticulant.
The barred window was empty.
Horace went on toward the square.
The sheriff was among the drummers before the hotel, standing along the curb. He was a fat man, with a broad, dull face which belied the expression of concern about his eyes.
“They wont do anything,” he said.
“There is too much talk.
Noise.
And too early.
When a mob means business, it dont take that much time and talk.
And it dont go about its business where every man can see it.”
The crowd stayed in the street until late.
It was quite orderly, though.
It was as though most of them had come to see, to look at the jail and the barred window, or to listen to the man in shirt sleeves.
After a while he talked himself out.
Then they began to move away, back to the square and some of them homeward, until there was left only a small group beneath the arc light at the entrance to the square, among whom were two temporary deputies, and the night marshal in a broad pale hat, a flash light, a time clock and a pistol.