“It doesn’t matter what I believe.
Go on away, Horace.
I ask it.”
“And leave her—them, flat?”
“Hire a lawyer, if he still insists he’s innocent.
I’ll pay for it.
You can get a better criminal lawyer than you are.
She wont know it.
She wont even care.
Cant you see that she is just leading you on to get him out of jail for nothing?
Dont you know that woman has got money hidden away somewhere? You’re going back into town tomorrow, are you?”
She turned, began to dissolve into the blackness.
“You wont leave before breakfast.”
The next morning at breakfast, his sister said:
“Who will be the lawyer on the other side of the case?”
“District Attorney.
Why?”
She rang the bell and sent for fresh bread.
Horace watched her.
“Why do you ask that?”
Then he said: “Damn little squirt.”
He was talking about the district attorney, who had also been raised in Jefferson and who had gone to the town school with them.
“I believe he was at the bottom of that business night before last.
The hotel.
Getting her turned out of the hotel for public effect, political capital.
By God, if I knew that, believed that he had done that just to get elected to Congress.……”
After Horace left, Narcissa went up to Miss Jenny’s room.
“Who is the District Attorney?” she said.
“You’ve known him all your life,” Miss Jenny said.
“You even elected him.
Eustace Graham.
What do you want to know for?
Are you looking around for a substitute for Gowan Stevens?”
“I just wondered,” Narcissa said.
“Fiddlesticks,” Miss Jenny said.
“You dont wonder.
You just do things and then stop until the next time to do something comes around.”
Horace met Snopes emerging from the barbershop, his jowls gray with powder, moving in an effluvium of pomade.
In the bosom of his shirt, beneath his bow tie, he wore an imitation ruby stud which matched his ring.
The tie was of blue polka-dots; the very white spots on it appeared dirty when seen close; the whole man with his shaved neck and pressed clothes and gleaming shoes emanated somehow the idea that he had been dry-cleaned rather than washed.
“Well, Judge,” he said,
“I hear you’re having some trouble gittin a boarding-place for that client of yourn.
Like I always say—” he leaned, his voice lowered, his mud-colored eyes roving aside “—the church aint got no place in politics, and women aint got no place in neither one, let alone the law.
Let them stay at home and they’ll find plenty to do without upsetting a man’s law-suit.
And besides, a man aint no more than human, and what he does aint nobody’s business but his.
What you done with her?”
“She’s at the jail,” Horace said.
He spoke shortly, making to pass on.
The other blocked his way with an effect of clumsy accident.
“You got them all stirred up, anyhow.