“Are you another detective?”
“Yes,” Horace said, “yes.
No matter.
It doesn’t matter.”
Then he was walking quietly down the steps, into the sunlight again.
He stood there while on both sides of him they passed in a steady stream of little colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright heads, with that identical cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in their eyes, above the savage identical paint upon their mouths; like music moving, like honey poured in sunlight, pagan and evanescent and serene, thinly evocative of all lost days and outpaced delights, in the sun.
Bright, trembling with heat, it lay in open glades of miragelike glimpses of stone or brick: columns without tops, towers apparently floating above a green cloud in slow ruin against the southwest wind, sinister, imponderable, bland; and he standing there listening to the sweet cloistral bell, thinking Now what?
What now? and answering himself: Why, nothing.
Nothing.
It’s finished.
He returned to the station an hour before the train was due, a filled but unlighted cob pipe in his hand.
In the lavatory he saw, scrawled on the foul, stained wall, her pencilled name. Temple Drake.
He read it quietly, his head bent, slowly fingering the unlighted pipe.
A half hour before the train came they began to gather, strolling down the hill and gathering along the platform with thin, bright, raucous laughter, their blonde legs monotonous, their bodies moving continually inside their scant garments with that awkward and voluptuous purposelessness of the young.
The return train carried a pullman.
He went on through the day coach and entered it.
There was only one other occupant: a man in the center of the car, next the window, bareheaded, leaning back, his elbow on the window sill and an unlighted cigar in his ringed hand.
When the train drew away, passing the sleek crowns in increasing reverse, the other passenger rose and went forward toward the day coach.
He carried an overcoat on his arm, and a soiled, light-colored felt hat.
With the corner of his eye Horace saw his hand fumbling at his breast pocket, and he remarked the severe trim of hair across the man’s vast, soft, white neck.
Like with a guillotine, Horace thought, watching the man sidle past the porter in the aisle and vanish, passing out of his sight and his mind in the act of flinging the hat onto his head.
The train sped on, swaying on the curves, flashing past an occasional house, through cuts and across valleys where young cotton wheeled slowly in fanlike rows.
The train checked speed; a jerk came back, and four whistle-blasts.
The man in the soiled hat entered, taking a cigar from his breast pocket.
He came down the aisle swiftly, looking at Horace.
He slowed, the cigar in his fingers.
The train jolted again.
The man flung his hand out and caught the back of the seat facing Horace.
“Aint this Judge Benbow?” he said.
Horace looked up into a vast, puffy face without any mark of age or thought whatever—a majestic sweep of flesh on either side of a small blunt nose, like looking out over a mesa, yet withal some indefinable quality of delicate paradox, as though the Creator had completed his joke by lighting the munificent expenditure of putty with something originally intended for some weak, acquisitive creature like a squirrel or a rat.
“Dont I address Judge Benbow?” he said, offering his hand.
“I’m Senator Snopes, Cla’ence Snopes.”
“Oh,” Horace said, “yes.
Thanks,” he said, “but I’m afraid you anticipate a little.
Hope, rather.”
The other waved the cigar, the other hand, palm-up, the third finger discolored faintly at the base of a huge ring, in Horace’s face.
Horace shook it and freed his hand.
“I thought I recognised you when you got on at Oxford,” Snopes said, “but I—May I set down?” he said, already shoving at Horace’s knee with his leg.
He flung the overcoat—a shoddy blue garment with a greasy velvet collar—on the seat and sat down as the train stopped.
“Yes, sir, I’m always glad to see any of the boys, any time.……” He leaned across Horace and peered out the window at a small dingy station with its cryptic bulletin board chalked over, an express truck bearing a wire chicken coop containing two forlorn fowls, at three or four men in overalls gone restfully against the wall, chewing. “ ’Course you aint in my county no longer, but what I say a man’s friends is his friends, whichever way they vote.
Because a friend is a friend, and whether he can do anything for me or not.……” He leaned back, the unlighted cigar in his fingers.
“You aint come all the way up from the big town, then.”
“No,” Horace said.
“Anytime you’re in Jackson, I’ll be glad to accommodate you as if you was still in my county.
Dont no man stay so busy he aint got time for his old friends, what I say.
Let’s see, you’re in Kinston, now, aint you?
I know your senators.
Fine men, both of them, but I just caint call their names.”
“I really couldn’t say, myself,” Horace said. The train started.
Snopes leaned into the aisle, looking back.