His light gray suit had been pressed but not cleaned.
“Well,” he said. He rose and took up the overcoat.
“Any time you’re in the city.……You going to Jefferson, I reckon?”
“Yes,” Horace said.
“I’ll see you again, then.”
“Why not ride back here?” Horace said.
“You’ll find it more comfortable.”
“I’m going up and have a smoke,” Snopes said, waving the cigar.
“I’ll see you again.”
“You can smoke here.
There aren’t any ladies.”
“Sure,” Snopes said.
“I’ll see you at Holly Springs.”
He went on back toward the day coach and passed out of sight with the cigar in his mouth.
Horace remembered him ten years ago as a hulking, dull youth, son of a restaurant-owner, member of a family which had been moving from the Frenchman’s Bend neighborhood into Jefferson for the past twenty years, in sections; a family of enough ramifications to have elected him to the legislature without recourse to a public polling.
He sat quite still, the cold pipe in his hand.
He rose and went forward through the day coach, then into the smoker.
Snopes was in the aisle, his thigh draped over the arm of a seat where four men sat, using the unlighted cigar to gesture with.
Horace caught his eye and beckoned from the vestibule.
A moment later Snopes joined him, the overcoat on his arm.
“How are things going at the capital?” Horace said.
Snopes began to speak in his harsh, assertive voice.
There emerged gradually a picture of stupid chicanery and petty corruption for stupid and petty ends, conducted principally in hotel rooms into which bellboys whisked with bulging jackets upon discreet flicks of skirts in swift closet doors.
“Anytime you’re in town,” he said.
“I always like to show the boys around.
Ask anybody in town; they’ll tell you if it’s there, Cla’ence Snopes’ll know where it is.
You got a pretty tough case up home there, what I hear.”
“Cant tell yet,” Horace said.
He said: “I stopped off at Oxford today, at the university, speaking to some of my step-daughter’s friends.
One of her best friends is no longer in school there.
A young lady from Jackson named Temple Drake.”
Snopes was watching him with thick, small, opaque eyes.
“Oh, yes; Judge Drake’s gal,” he said.
“The one that ran away.”
“Ran away?” Horace said.
“Ran back home, did she?
What was the trouble?
Fail in her work?”
“I dont know.
When it come out in the paper folks thought she’d run off with some fellow.
One of them companionate marriages.”
“But when she turned up at home, they knew it wasn’t that, I reckon.
Well, well, Belle’ll be surprised.
What’s she doing now?
Running around Jackson, I suppose?”
“She aint there.”
“Not?” Horace said.
He could feel the other watching him.
“Where is she?”
“Her paw sent her up north somewhere, with an aunt.