I used to live in Jefferson yonder; I’m on my way there now.
Anybody in this county can tell you I am harmless.
If it’s whiskey, I dont care how much you all make or sell or buy.
I just stopped here for a drink of water.
All I want to do is get to town, to Jefferson.”
Popeye’s eyes looked like rubber knobs, like they’d give to the touch and then recover with the whorled smudge of the thumb on them.
“I want to reach Jefferson before dark,” Benbow said.
“You cant keep me here like this.”
Without removing the cigarette Popeye spat past it into the spring.
“You cant stop me like this,” Benbow said.
“Suppose I break and run.”
Popeye put his eyes on Benbow, like rubber.
“Do you want to run?”
“No,” Benbow said.
Popeye removed his eyes.
“Well, dont, then.”
Benbow heard the bird again, trying to recall the local name for it.
On the invisible highroad another car passed, died away. Between them and the sound of it the sun was almost gone.
From his trousers pocket Popeye took a dollar watch and looked at it and put it back in his pocket, loose like a coin.
Where the path from the spring joined the sandy byroad a tree had been recently felled, blocking the road.
They climbed over the tree and went on, the highroad now behind them.
In the sand were two shallow parallel depressions, but no mark of hoof.
Where the branch from the spring seeped across it Benbow saw the prints of automobile tires.
Ahead of him Popeye walked, his tight suit and stiff hat all angles, like a modernist lampstand.
The sand ceased.
The road rose, curving, out of the jungle. It was almost dark.
Popeye looked briefly over his shoulder.
“Step out, Jack,” he said.
“Why didn’t we cut straight across up the hill?” Benbow said.
“Through all them trees?” Popeye said.
His hat jerked in a dull, vicious gleam in the twilight as he looked down the hill where the jungle already lay like a lake of ink.
“Jesus Christ.”
It was almost dark.
Popeye’s gait had slowed.
He walked now beside Benbow, and Benbow could see the continuous jerking of the hat from side to side as Popeye looked about with a sort of vicious cringing.
The hat just reached Benbow’s chin.
Then something, a shadow shaped with speed, stooped at them and on, leaving a rush of air upon their very faces, on a soundless feathering of taut wings, and Benbow felt Popeye’s whole body spring against him and his hand clawing at his coat.
“It’s just an owl,” Benbow said.
“It’s nothing but an owl.”
Then he said: “They call that Carolina wren a fishing-bird.
That’s what it is.
What I couldn’t think of back there,” with Popeye crouching against him, clawing at his pocket and hissing through his teeth like a cat.
He smells black, Benbow thought; he smells like that black stuff that ran out of Bovary’s mouth and down upon her bridal veil when they raised her head.
A moment later, above a black, jagged mass of trees, the house lifted its stark square bulk against the failing sky.
The house was a gutted ruin rising gaunt and stark out of a grove of unpruned cedar trees.
It was a landmark, known as the Old Frenchman place, built before the Civil War; a plantation house set in the middle of a tract of land; of cotton fields and gardens and lawns long since gone back to jungle, which the people of the neighborhood had been pulling down piecemeal for firewood for fifty years or digging with secret and sporadic optimism for the gold which the builder was reputed to have buried somewhere about the place when Grant came through the county on his Vicksburg campaign.
Three men were sitting in chairs on one end of the porch.
In the depths of the open hall a faint light showed.
The hall went straight back through the house.
Popeye mounted the steps, the three men looking at him and his companion.