"Here where they went," Ringo said. They were mule tracks. "Tinney and Old Hundred's tracks bofe," Ringo said. "I know um anywhere. They done throwed them Yankees and heading back home."
"Are you sure?" I said.
"Is I sure? You reckon I ain't followed them mules all my life and I can't tell they tracks when I see um? .. . Git up there, horse!"
We went on, but the old horse could not go very fast. After a while the moon came up, but Ringo still said he could see the tracks of our mules. So we went on, only now the old horse went even slower than ever because presently I caught Ringo and held him as he slipped off and then a little later Ringo caught and held me from slipping before I even knew that I had been asleep. We didn't know what tune it was, we didn't care; we only
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heard after a time the slow hollow repercussion of wood beneath the horse's feet and we turned from the road and hitched the bridle to a sapling; we probably both crawled beneath the bridge already asleep; still sleeping, we doubtless continued to crawl. Because if we had not moved, they would not have have found us. I waked, still believing I dreamed of thunder. It was light; even beneath the close weed-choked bridge Ringo and I could sense the sun though not at once; for the time we just sat there beneath the loud drumming, while the loose planks of the bridge floor clattered and danced to the hooves; we sat there for a moment staring at one another in the pale jonquil-colored light almost before we were awake. Perhaps that was it, perhaps we were still asleep, were taken so suddenly in slumber that we had not time to think of Yankees or anything else; we were out from beneath the bridge and already running before we remembered having begun to move; I looked back one time and (the road, the bridge, was five or six feet higher than the earth beside it) it looked as if the whole rim of the world was full of horses running along the sky. Then everything ran together again as it had yesterday; even while our legs still continued to run Ringo and I had dived like two rabbits into a brier patch, feeling no thorn, and lay on our faces in it while men "shouted and horses crashed around us, then hard hands dragged us, clawing and kicking and quite blind, out of the thicket and onto our feet. Then sight returned—a vacuum, an interval, of amazing and dewy-breathed peace and quiet while Ringo and I stood in a circle of mounted and dismounted men and horses. Then I recognised Jupiter standing big and motionless and pale in the dawn as a mesmerised flame, then Father was shaking me and shouting, "Where's your grandmother? Where's Miss Rosa?" and then Ringo, in a tone of complete amazement: "We done fergot Granny!" "Forgot her?" Father shouted. "You mean you ran away and left her sitting there in that wagon hi the middle of the road?"
"Lord, Marse John," Ringo said. "You know hit ain't no Yankee gonter bother her if he know hit." Father swore. "How far back did you leave her?"
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"It was about three o'clock yesterday," I said. "We rode some last night."
Father turned to the others. "Two of you boys take them up behind you; we'll lead that horse." Then he stopped and turned back to us. "Have you-all had anything to eat?"
"Eat?" Ringo said. "My stomach think my throat been cut."
Father took a pone of bread from his saddle bag and broke it and gave it to us. "Where did you get that horse?" he said.
After a while I said, "We borrowed it."
"Who from?" Father said.
After a while Ringo said, "We ain't know. The man wasn't there." One of the men laughed. Father looked at him quick, and he hushed. But just for a minute, because all of a sudden they all began to whoop and holler, and Father looking around at them and his face getting redder and redder.
"Don't you say a word, Colonel," one of them said. "Hooraw for Sartoris!"
We galloped back; it was not far; we came to the field where the men had run, and the house with the barn, and in the road we could still see the scraps of harness where they had cut it. But the wagon was gone. Father led the old horse up to the house himself and knocked on the porch floor with his pistol, and the door of the house was still open, but nobody came. We put the old horse back into the barn; the pipe was still on the ground by the overturned shoeing box. We came back to the road and Father sat Jupiter in the middle of the litter of harness scraps.
"You damn boys," he said. "You damn boys."
When we went on now, we went slower; there were three men riding on ahead out of sight. In the afternoon, one of them came galloping back, and Father left Ringo and me three others, and he and the rest rode on; it was almost sunset when they came back with their horses sweated a little and leading two new horses with blue blankets under the saddles and U. S. burned on the horses' hips.
"I tole you they wasn't no Yankees gonter stop
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Granny," Ringo said. "I bet she in Memphis right now." "I hope for your sake she is," Father said. He jerked his hand at the new horses. "You and Bayard get on them." Ringo went to one of the new horses. "Wait," Father said; "the other one is yours."
"You mean hit belong to me?" Ringo said. "No," Father said. "You borrowed it." Then we all stopped and watched Ringo trying to get on his horse. The horse would stand perfectly still until he would feel Ringo's weight on the stirrup; then he would whirl completely around until his off side faced Ringo; the first time Ringo wound up lying on his back in the road.
"Get on him from that side," Father said laughing. Ringo looked at the horse and then at Father. "Git up from the wrong side?" Ringo said. "I knowed Yankees wasn't folks, but I never knowed before they horses ain't horses."
"Get on up," Father said. "He's blind in his near eye." It got dark while we were still riding, and after a while I waked up with somebody holding me in the saddle, and we were stopped in some trees and there was a fire, but Ringo and I didn't even stay awake to eat, and then it was morning again and all of them were gone but Father and eleven more, but we didn't start off even then; we stayed there in the trees all day. "What are we going to do now?" I said.
"I'm going to take you damn boys home, and then I've got to go to Memphis and find your grandmother," Father said.
Just before dark we started; we watched Ringo trying to get on his horse from the nigh side for a while and then we went on. We rode until dawn and stopped again. This time we didn't build a fire; we didn't even unsaddle right away; we lay hidden in the woods, and then Father was waking me with his hand. It was after sunup and we lay there and listened to a column of Yankee infantry pass in the road, and then I slept again. It was noon when I waked. There was a fire now and a shote cooking over it, and we ate. "We'll be home by midnight," Father said.
Jupiter was rested. He didn't want the bridle for a
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while and then he didn't want Father to get on him, and even after we were started he still wanted to go; Father had to hold him back between Ringo and me. Ringo was on his right. "You and Bayard better swap sides," Father told Ringo, "so your horse can see what's beside him."
"He going all right," Ringo said. "He like hit this way. Maybe because he can smell Jupiter another horse, and know Jupiter ain't fixing to get on him and ride."
"All right," Father said. "Watch him though." We went on. Mine and Ringo's horses could go pretty well, too; when I looked back, the others were a good piece behind, out of our dust. It wasn't far to sundown.
"I wish I knew your grandmother was all right," Father said.
"Lord, Marse John," Ringo said, "is you still worrying about Granny? I been knowed her all my life; I ain't worried about her."
Jupiter was fine to watch, with his head up and watching my horse and Ringo's, and boring a little and just beginning to drive a little. "I'm going to let him go a little," Father said. "You and Ringo watch yourselves." I thought Jupiter was gone then. He went out like a rocket, flattening a little. But I should have known that Father still held him, because I should have seen that he was still boring, but there was
a snake fence along the road, and all of a sudden it began to blur, and then I realised that Father and Jupiter had not moved up at all, that it was all three of us flattening out up toward the crest of the hill where the road dipped like three swallows, and I was thinking, 'We're holding Jupiter. We're holding Jupiter,' when Father looked back, and I saw his eyes and his teeth in his beard, and I knew he still had Jupiter on the bit.
He said, "Watch out, now," and then Jupiter shot out from between us; he went out exactly like I have seen a hawk come out of a sage field and rise over a fence.
When they reached the crest of the hill, I could see sky under them and the tops of the trees beyond the hill like they were flying, sailing out into the air to drop down beyond the hill like the hawk; only they didn't. It was like Father stopped Jupiter hi mid-air on
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top of the hill; I could see him standing in the stirrups and his arm up with his hat in it, and then Ringo and I were on them before we could even begin to think to pull, and Jupiter reined back onto his haunches, and when Father hit Ringo's horse across the blind eye with the hat I saw Ringo's horse swerve and jump clean over the snake fence, and I heard Ringo hollering as I went on over the crest of the hill, with Father just behind me shooting his pistol and shouting, "Surround them, boys! Don't let a man escape!"
There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything, given time, but to what it can accept, a limit hi time, in the very time which nourishes the believing of the incredible. And I was still a child at that moment when Father's and my horses came over the hill and seemed to cease galloping and to float, hang suspended rather in a dimension without time in it while Father held my horse reined back with one hand and I heard Ringo's half-blind beast crashing and blundering among the trees to our right and Ringo yelling, and looked quietly down at the scene beneath rather than before us—the dusk, the fire, the creek running quiet and peaceful beneath a bridge, the muskets all stacked carefully and neatly and nobody within fifty feet of them; and the men, the faces, the blue Yankee coats and pants and boots, squatting about the fire with cups in their hands and looking toward the crest of the hill with the same peaceful expression on all their faces like so many dolls. Father's hat was flung onto his head now, his teeth were showing and his eyes were bright as a cat's.
"Lieutenant," he said, loud, jerking my horse around, "ride back up the hill and close in with your troop on their right. Git!" he whispered, slapping my horse across the rump with his hand. "Make a fuss! Holler! See if
you can keep up with Ringo.------Boys," he said, while
they still looked up at him; they hadn't even put the cups down: "Boys, I'm John Sartoris, and I reckon I've got you."
Ringo was the only difficult one to capture. The rest of Father's men came piling over the hill, reining back, and I reckon that for a minute their faces looked about
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like the Yankees' faces did, and now and then I would quit thrashing the bushes and I could hear Ringo on his side hollering and moaning and hollering again, "Marse John! You, Marse John! You come here quick!" and hollering for me, calling Bayard and Colonel and Marse John and Granny until it did sound like a company at least, and then hollering at his horse again, and it running back and forth. I reckon he had forgotten again and was trying to get up on the nigh side again, until at last Father said, "All right, boys. You can come on in."
It was almost dark then. They had built up a fire, and the Yankees still sitting around it and Father and the others standing over them with then- pistols while two of them were taking the Yankees' pants and boots off. Ringo was still hollering off in the trees. "I reckon you better go and extricate Lieutenant Marengo," Father said. Only about that time Ringo's horse came bursting out with his blind eye looking big as a plate and still trotting in a circle with his knees up to his chin, and then Ringo came out. He looked wilder than the horse; he was already talking, he was saying, "I'm gonter tell Granny
on you, making my horse run------" when he saw the
Yankees. His mouth was already open, and he kind of squatted for a second, looking at them. Then he hollered, "Look out! Ketch um! Ketch urn, Marse John! They stole Old Hundred and Tinney!"
We all ate supper together—Father and us and the Yankees hi their underclothes.
The officer talked to Father. He said, "Colonel, I believe you have fooled us. I don't believe there's another man of you but what I see."
"You might try to depart, and prove your point," Father said.
"Depart? Like this? And have every darky and old woman between here and Memphis shooting at us for ghosts? ... I suppose we can have our blankets to sleep hi, can't we?"
"Certainly, Captain," Father said. "And with your permission, I shall now retire and leave you to set about that business."
We went back into the darkness. We could see them about the fire, spreading their blankets on the ground.
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"What in the tarnation do you want with sixty prisoners, John?" one of Father's men said.
"I don't," Father said. He looked at me and Ringo. "You boys captured them. What do you want to do with them?"
"Shoot 'em," Ringo said. "This ain't the first time me and Bayard ever shot Yankees."
"No," Father said. "I have a better plan than that. One that Joe Johnston will thank us for." He turned to the others behind him. "Have you got the muskets and ammunition?"
"Yes, Colonel," somebody said.
"Grub, boots, clothes?"
"Everything but the blankets, Colonel."
"We'll pick them up in the morning," Father said. "Now wait."
We sat there in the dark. The Yankees were going to bed. One of them went to the fire and picked up a stick. Then he stopped. He didn't turn his head and we didn't hear anything or see anybody move. Then he put the stick down again and came back to his blanket. "Wait," Father whispered. After a while the fire had died down. "Now listen," Father whispered. So we sat there in the dark and listened to the Yankees sneaking off into the bushes in their underclothes. Once we heard a "splash and somebody cursing, and then a sound like somebody had shut his hand over his mouth. Father didn't laugh out loud; he just sat there shaking.
"Look out for moccasins," one of the others whispered behind us.
It must have taken them two hours to get done sneaking off into the bushes. Then Father said, "Everybody get a blanket and let's go to bed."
The sun was high when he waked us. "Home for dinner," he said. And so, after a while, we came to the creek; we passed the hole where Ringo and I learned to swim and we began to pass the fields, too, and we came to where Ringo and I hid last summer and saw the first Yankee we ever saw, and then we could see the house, too, and Ringo said, "Sartoris, here we is; let them that want Memphis take hit and keep hit bofe." Because we were looking at the house, it was like that
day when we ran across the pasture and the house would not seem to get any nearer at all. We never saw the wagon at all; it was Father that saw it; it was com- -ing up the road from Jefferson, with Granny sitting thin and straight on the seat with Mrs. Compson's rose cuttings wrapped in a new piece of paper in her hand, and Joby yelling and lashing the strange horses, and Father stopping us at the gate with his hat raised while the wagon went hi first. Granny didn't say a word. She just looked at Ringo and me, and went on, with us coming behind, and she didn't stop at the house. The wagon went on into the orchard and stopped by the hole where we had dug the trunk up, and still Granny didn't say a word; it was Father that got down and got into the wagon and took up one end of the trunk and said over his shoulder,
"Jump up here, boys."
We buried the trunk again, and we walked behind the wagon to the house. We went into the back parlor, and Father put the musket back onto the pegs over the mantel, and Granny put down Mrs.
Compson's rose cuttings and took off her hat and looked at Ringo and me. "Get the soap," she said. "We haven't cussed any," I said. "Ask Father." "They behaved all right, Miss Rosa," Father said. Granny looked at us. Then she came and put her hand
on me and then on Ringo. "Go upstairs------" she said.
"How did you and Joby manage to get those horses?" Father said.
Granny was looking at us. "I borrowed them," she
said.------"upstairs and take off your------"
"Who from?" Father said.
Granny looked at Father for a second, then back at
us. "I don't know. There was nobody there.------take
off your Sunday clothes," she said.
It was hot the next day, so we only worked on the new pen until dinner and quit. It was even too hot for Ringo and me to ride our horses. Even at six o'clock it was still hot; the rosin was still cooking out of the front steps at six o'clock. Father was sitting hi his shirt sleeves and his stockings, with his feet on the porch railing, and Ringo and I were sitting on the steps wait-
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ing for it to get cool enough to ride, when we saw them coming into the gate—about fifty of them, coming "fast, and I remember how hot the blue coats looked. "Father," I said. "Father!"
"Don't run," Father said. "Ringo, you go around the house and catch Jupiter. Bayard, you go through the house and tell Louvinia to have my boots and pistols at the back door; then you go and help Ringo. Don't run, now; walk."
Louvinia was shelling peas in the kitchen. When she stood up, the bowl broke on the floor. "Oh Lord," she said. "Oh Lord. Again?"
I ran then. Ringo was just coming around the corner of the house; we both ran. Jupiter was in his stall, eating; he slashed out at us, his feet banged against the wall right by my head twice, like pistols, before Ringo jumped down from the hayrack onto his head. We got the bridle on him, but he wouldn't take the saddle. "Get your horse and shove his blind side up!" I was hollering at Ringo when Father came in, running, with his boots in his hand, and we looked up the hill toward the house and saw one of them riding around the corner with a short carbine, carrying it in one hand like a lamp.
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