"She’ll want to go in ourn," and him knowing how much I believed that was the reason.
After supper Jewel rode over to the Bend to get Peabody.
I heard he was to be there today at Varner's.
Jewel come back about midnight.
Peabody had gone down below Inverness somewhere, but Uncle Billy come back with him, with his satchel of horse physic.
Like he says, a man aint so different from a horse or a mule, come long come short, except a mule or a horse has got a little more sense.
"What you been Into now, boy?" he says, looking at Cash.
"Get me a mattress and a chair and a glass of whisky," he says.
He made Cash drink the whisky, then he run Anse out of the room.
"Lucky it was the same leg he broke last summer," Anse says, mournful, mumbling and blinking.
"That's something."
We folded the mattress across Cash's legs and set the chair on the mattress and me and Jewel set on the chair and the gal held the lamp and Uncle Billy taken a chew of tobacco and went to work.
Cash fought pretty hard for a while, until he fainted.
Then he laid still, with big balls of sweat standing on his face like they had started to roll down and then stopped to wait for him.
When he waked up, Uncle Billy had done packed up and left.
He kept on trying to say something until the gal leaned down and wiped his mouth.
"It's his tools," she said.
"I brought them in," Darl said.
"I got them."
He tried to talk again; she leaned down.
"He wants to see them," she said.
So Darl brought them in where he could see them.
They shoved them under the side of the bed, where he could reach his hand and touch them when he felt better.
Next morning Anse taken that horse and rode over to the Bend to see Snopes.
Him and Jewel stood in the lot talking a while, then Anse got on the horse and rode off.
I reckon that was the first time Jewel ever let anybody ride that horse, and until Anse come back he hung around in that swole-up way, watching the road like he was half a mind to take out after Anse and get the horse back.
Along toward nine oclock it begun to get hot.
That was when I see the first buzzard.
Because of the wetting, I reckon.
Anyway it wasn't until well into the day that I see them.
Lucky the breeze was -setting away from the house, so it wasn't until well into the morning.
But soon as I see them it was like I could smell it in the field a mile away from just watching them, and them circling and circling for everybody in the county to see what was in my barn.
I was still a good half a mile from the house when I heard that boy yelling.
I thought maybe he might have fell into the well or something, so I whipped up and come into the lot on the lope.
There must have been a dozen of them setting along the ridge-pole of the bam, and that boy was chasing another one around the lot like it was a turkey and it just lifting enough to dodge him and go flopping bade to the roof of the shed again where he had found it setting on the coffin.
It had got hot then, right, and the breeze had dropped or changed or something, so I went and found Jewel, but Lula come out.
"You got to do something,"' she said.
"It's a outrage."
"That's what I aim to do," I said.
"It's a outrage," she said.
"He should be lawed for treating her so."
"He's getting her into the ground the best he can," I said.
So I found Jewel and asked him if he didn't want to take one of the mules and go over to the Bend and see about Anse.
He didn't say nothing.
He just looked at me with his jaws going bone-white and them bone-white eyes of hisn, then he went and begun to call Darl.
"What you fixing to do?" I said.
He didn't answer.
Darl come out.
"Come on," Jewel said.
"What you aim to do?"