You'll want a early start tomorrow, long as you'll have to go by Mottson."
Then he quit looking like he had been for a while.
He got that badgered look like he used to have, mumbling his mouth.
"I do the best I can," he said.
"Fore God, if there were ere a man in the living world suffered the trials and floutings I have suffered."
"A fellow that just beat Snopes in a trade ought to feel pretty good," I said.
"What did you give him, Anse?"
He didn't look at me.
"I give a chattel mortgage on my cultivator and seeder," he said.
"But they aint worth forty dollars.
How far do you aim to get with a forty dollar team?"
They were all watching him now, quiet and steady.
Jewel was stopped, halfway back, waiting to go on to the horse.
"I give other things," Anse said.
He begun to mumble his mouth again, standing there like he was waiting for somebody to hit him and him with his mind already made up not to do nothing about it.
"What other things?"
Darl said.
"Hell," I said.
"You take my team.
You can bring them back.
Ill get along someway."
"So thats what you were doing in Cash's clothes last night," Darl said.
He said it just like he was reading it outen the paper.
Like he never give a durn himself one way or the other.
Jewel had come back now, standing there, looking at Anse with them marble eyes of hisn.
"Cash aimed to buy that talking machine from Suratt with that money," Darl said.
Anse stood there, mumbling his mouth.
Jewel watched him.
He aint never blinked yet.
"But that's just eight dollars more," Darl said, in that voice like he was just listening and never give a durn himself.
"That still wont buy a team."
Anse looked at Jewel, quick, kind of sliding his eyes that way, then he looked down again.
"God knows, if there were ere a man," he says.
Still they didn't say nothing.
They just watched him, waiting, and hire sliding his eyes toward their feet and up their legs but no higher.
"And the horse," he says.
"What horse?" Jewel said.
Anse just stood there.
I be durn, if a man cant keep the upper hand of his sons, he ought to run them away from home, no matter how big they are.
And if he cant do that, I be durn if he oughtn't to leave himself.
I be durn if I wouldn't.
"You mean, you tried to swap my horse?" Jewel says.
Anse stands there, dangle-armed.
"For fifteen years I aint had a tooth in my head," he says.
"God knows it.
He knows in fifteen years I aint et the victuals He aimed for man to eat to keep his strength up, and me saving a nickel here and a nickel there so my family wouldn't suffer it to buy them teeth so I could eat God's appointed food.
I give that money.
I thought that if I could do without eating, my sons could do without riding.
God knows I did."
Jewel stands with his hands on his hips, looking at Anse.