See what you done now?"
The horse come up again.
It was headed for the hank now, throwing its head up, and then I saw one of them holding to the saddle on the downstream side, so I started running along the bank, trying to catch sight of Cash because, he couldn't swim, yelling at Jewel where Cash was like a durn fool, bad as that boy that was on down the bank still hollering at Darl.
So I went down into the water so I could still keep some kind of a grip in the mud, when I saw Jewel.
He was middle deep, so I knew he was on the ford, anyway, leaning hard upstream, and then I see the rope, and then I see the water building up where he was holding the wagon snubbed just below the ford.
So it was Cash holding to the horse when it come splashing and scrambling up the bank, moaning and groaning like a natural man.
When I come to it it was just kicking Cash loose from his holt on the saddle.
His face turned up a second when he was sliding back into the water.
It was gray, with his eyes closed and a long swipe of mud across his face.
Then he let go and turned over in the water.
He looked just like a old bundle of clothes kind of washing up and down against the bank.
He looked like he was laying there in the water on his face, rocking up and down a little, looking at something on the bottom.
We could watch the rope cutting down into the water, and we could feel the weight of the wagon kind of blump and lunge lazy like, like it just as soon as not, and that rope cutting down into the water hard as a iron bar.
We could hear the water hissing on it like it was red hot Like it was a straight iron bar stuck into the bottom and us holding the end of it, and the wagon lazing up and down, kind of pushing and prodding at us like it had come around and got behind us, lazy like, like it just as soon as not when it made up its mind.
There was a shoat come by, blowed up hike a balloon: one of them spotted shoats of Lon Quick's.
It bumped against the rope like it was a iron bar and bumped off and went on, and. us watching that rope slanting down into the water.
We watched it.
Darl.
Cash lies on his back on the earth, his head raised on a rolled garment.
His eyes are closed, his face is gray, his hair plastered in a smooth smear across his forehead as though done with, a paint brush.
His face appears sunken a little, "sagging from the bony ridges of eye sockets, nose, gums, as though the wetting had slacked the firmness which had held the skin full; his teeth, set in pale gums, are parted a little as if he had been laughing quietly.
He lies pole-thin in his wet clothes, a little pool of vomit at his head and a thread of it running from the corner of his mouth and down his cheek where he couldn't turn his head quick or far enough, until Dewey Dell stoops and wipes it away with the hem of her dress.
Jewel approaches.
He has the plane.
"Vernon just found the square," he says.
He looks down at Cash, dripping too.
"Aint he talked none yet?"
"He had his saw and hammer and chalk-line and rule," I say.
"I know that."
Jewel lays the square down.
Pa watches him.
"They cant be far away," pa says.
'It all went together.
Was there ere a such misfortunate man."
Jewel does not look at pa.
"You better call Vardaman back here," he says.
He looks at Cash.
Then he turns and goes away.
"Get him to talk soon as he can," he says, "so he can tell us what else there was."
We return to the river.
The wagon is hauled clear, the wheels chocked (carefully: we all helped; it is as though upon the shabby, familiar, inert shape of the wagon there lingered somehow, latent yet still immediate, that violence which had slain the mules that drew it not an hour since) above the edge of the flood.
In the wagon bed it lies profoundly, the long pale planks hushed a little with wetting yet still yellow, like gold seen through water, save for two long muddy smears.
We pass it and go on to the bank.
One end of the rope is made fast to a tree.
At the edge of the stream, knee-deep, Vardaman stands, bent forward a little, watching Vernon with rapt absorption.
He has stopped yelling and he is wet to the armpits.
Vernon is at the other end of the rope, shoulder-deep in the river, looking back at Vardaman,
"Further back than that," he says.
"You git back by the tree and hold the rope for me, so it cant slip."
Vardaman backs along the rope, to the tree, moving blindly, watching Vernon.