Snopes creased himself across the wheel and peered out beneath the top, toward the house.
“We’ll talk here,” Horace said.
“Save you having to turn around.”
“It aint very private here,” Snopes said.
“But that’s for you to say.”
Huge and thick he loomed, hunched, his featureless face moonlike itself in the refraction of the moon.
Horace could feel Snopes watching him, with that sense of portent which had come over the wire; a quality calculating and cunning and pregnant.
It seemed to him that he watched his mind flicking this way and that, striking always that vast, soft, inert bulk, as though it were caught in an avalanche of cottonseed-hulls.
“Let’s go to the house,” Horace said.
Snopes opened the door.
“Go on,” Horace said.
“I’ll walk up.”
Snopes drove on.
He was getting out of the car when Horace overtook him.
“Well, what is it?” Horace said.
Again Snopes looked at the house.
“Keeping batch, are you?” he said.
Horace said nothing.
“Like I always say, ever married man ought to have a little place of his own, where he can git off to himself without it being nobody’s business what he does. ’Course a man owes something to his wife, but what they dont know caint hurt them, does it?
Long’s he does that, I caint see where she’s got ere kick coming.
Aint that what you say?”
“She’s not here,” Horace said, “if that’s what you’re hinting at.
What did you want to see me about?”
Again he felt Snopes watching him, the unabashed stare calculating and completely unbelieving.
“Well, I always say, caint nobody tend to a man’s private business but himself.
I aint blaming you.
But when you know me better, you’ll know I aint loose-mouthed.
I been around. I been there.… Have a cigar?”
His big hand flicked to his breast and offered two cigars.
“No, thanks.”
Snopes lit a cigar, his face coming out of the match like a pie set on edge.
“What did you want to see me about?” Horace said.
Snopes puffed the cigar.
“Couple days ago I come onto a piece of information which will be of value to you, if I aint mistook.” “Oh.
Of value.
What value?”
“I’ll leave that to you.
I got another party I could dicker with, but being as me and you was fellow-townsmen and all that.”
Here and there Horace’s mind flicked and darted.
Snopes’ family originated somewhere near Frenchman’s Bend and still lived there.
He knew of the devious means by which information passed from man to man of that illiterate race which populated that section of the county.
But surely it cant be something he’d try to sell to the State, he thought.
Even he is not that big a fool.
“You’d better tell me what it is, then,” he said.
He could feel Snopes watching him.
“You remember one day you got on the train at Oxford, where you’d been on some bus—”
“Yes,” Horace said.
Snopes puffed the cigar to an even coal, carefully, at some length.
He raised his hand and drew it across the back of his neck.
“You recall speaking to me about a girl.”