Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Read Online Free PDF

out of his own pocket, and took ’em to Ferginny and whipped Yankees right and left with ’em before he found out that what he had bought and paid for wasn’t a regiment of soldiers but a congress of politicians and fools. Fools, I say!” he hollered, still shaking the stick at me and glaring at everybody, and the captain looking at him funny, because he hadn’t listened to Uncle Buck before yet, and I kept on thinking about Louvinia standing there on the porch with father’s old hat on, and wishing that Uncle Buck would get through or hush, so we could go on.
    “Fools, I say!” he hollered. “I don’t care if some of you folks here do still claim kin with men that elected him colonel and followed him and Stonewall Jackson right up in spitting distance of Washington without hardly losing a man, and then next year turned around and voted him down to major and elected in his stead a damn whippersnapper that never even knowed which end of a gun done the shooting until John Sartoris showed him.” He quit hollering just as easy as he started, but the hollering was right there, waiting to start again as soon as he found something else to holler about. “I won’t say God take care of you and your grandma on the road, boy, because, by Godfrey, you don’t need God’s nor nobody else’s help; all you got to say is ‘I’m John Sartoris’ boy; rabbits, hunt the canebrake,’ and then watch the blue-bellied sons fly.”
    “Are they leaving, going away?” the captain said.
    Then Uncle Buck began to holler again: “Leaving? Hell’s skillet, who’s going to take care of them around here? John Sartoris is a damn fool; they voted him out of his own regiment in kindness, so he could come home and take care of his family, knowing that if he didn’t, wouldn’t nobody around here be likely to. But that don’t suit John Sartoris, because John Sartoris is a damned, confounded, selfish coward, askeered to stay at home where the Yankees mightget him. Yes, sir. So skeered that he has to raise him up another batch of men to protect him every time he gets up within a hundred feet of a Yankee regiment. Scouring all up and down the country, finding Yankee brigades to dodge; only, if it had been me, I would have took back to Ferginny and I’d have showed that new colonel what fighting looked like. But not John Sartoris. He’s a coward and a fool. The best he can do is dodge and run away from Yankees until they have to put a price on his head, and now he’s got to send his family out of the country; to Memphis, where maybe the Union Army will take care of them, since it don’t look like his own government and fellow citizens are going to.” He ran out of breath then, or out of words, anyway, standing there with his beard trembling and the tobacco running onto it out of his mouth, and shaking his stick at me. So I lifted the reins; only the captain spoke; he was still watching me.
    “How many men has your father got in his regiment?” he said.
    “It’s not a regiment, sir,” I said. “He’s got about fifty, I reckon.”
    “Fifty?” the captain said. “Fifty? We had a prisoner last week who said he had more than a thousand. He said that Colonel Sartoris didn’t fight; he just stole horses.”
    Uncle Buck had enough wind to laugh though. He sounded just like a hen, slapping his leg and holding to the wagon wheel like he was about to fall.
    “That’s it! That’s John Sartoris! He gets the horses; any fool can step out and get a Yankee. These two damn boys here did that last summer—stepped down to the gate and brought back a whole regiment, and them just—How old are you, boy?”
    “Fourteen,” I said.
    “We ain’t fourteen yit,” Ringo said. “But we will be in September, if we live and nothing happens.… I reckon Granny waiting on us, Bayard.”
    Uncle Buck quit laughing. He stepped back. “Git on,” he said. “You got a long road.” I turned the wagon. “You take care of your grandma, boy, or John