Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sartoris will skin you alive. And if he don’t, I will!” When the wagon straightened out, he began to hobble along beside it. “And when you see him, tell him I said to leave the horses go for a while and kill the bluebellied sons. Kill them!”
    “Yes, sir,” I said. We went on.
    “Good thing for his mouth Granny ain’t here,” Ringo said. Sheand Joby were waiting for us at the Compsons’ gate. Joby had another basket with a napkin over it and a bottle neck sticking out and some rose cuttings. Then Ringo and I sat behind again, and Ringo turning to look back every few feet and saying, “Good-by, Jefferson. Memphis, how-de-do!” And then we came to the top of the first hill and he looked back, quiet this time, and said, “Suppose they don’t never get done fighting.”
    “All right,” I said. “Suppose it.” I didn’t look back.
    At noon we stopped by a spring and Granny opened the basket, and she took out the rose cuttings and handed them to Ringo.
    “Dip the roots into the spring after you drink,” she said. They had earth still on the roots, in a cloth; when Ringo stooped down to the water, I watched him pinch off a little of the dirt and start to put it into his pocket. Then he looked up and saw me watching him, and he made like he was going to throw it away. But he didn’t.
    “I reckon I can save dirt if I want to,” he said.
    “It’s not Sartoris dirt though,” I said.
    “I know hit,” he said. “Hit’s closer than Memphis dirt though. Closer than what you got.”
    “What’ll you bet?” I said. He looked at me. “What’ll you swap?” I said. He looked at me.
    “What you swap?” he said.
    “You know,” I said. He reached in his pocket and brought out the buckle we shot off the Yankee saddle when we shot the horse last summer. “Gimmit here,” he said.
    I took out the box and gave him half of the dirt. “I know hit,” he said. “Hit come from ’hind the smokehouse. You brung a lot of hit.”
    “Yes,” I said. “I brought enough to last.”
    We soaked the cuttings every time we opened the basket, and there was some of the food left on the fourth day, because at least once a day we stopped at houses on the road and ate with them, and on the second night we had supper and breakfast both at the same house. But even then Granny would not come inside to sleep. She made her bed down in the wagon by the chest, and Joby slept under the wagon with the gun by him like when we camped on the road. Only it would not be exactly on the road, but back in the woods a way; on the third night Granny was in the wagon and Joby and Ringo and me were under the wagon, and some cavalry rodeup, and Granny said, “Joby! Get the gun!” and somebody got down and took the gun away from Joby, and they lit a pine knot and we saw the gray.
    “Memphis?” the officer said. “You can’t get to Memphis. There was a fight at Cockrum yesterday and the roads ahead are full of Yankee patrols. How in hell—Excuse me, ma’am [Behind me, Ringo said, “Git the soap.”]—you ever got this far I don’t see. If I were you, I wouldn’t even try to go back, I’d stop at the first house I came to and stay there.”
    “I reckon we’ll go on,” Granny said, “like John—Colonel Sartoris told us to. My sister lives in Memphis; we are going there.”
    “Colonel Sartoris?” the officer said. “Colonel Sartoris told you?”
    “I’m his mother-in-law,” Granny said. “This is his son.”
    “Good Lord, ma’am! You can’t go a step farther. Don’t you know that if they captured you and this boy, they could almost force him to come in and surrender?”
    Granny looked at him; she was sitting up in the wagon and her hat was on. “My experience with Yankees has evidently been different from yours. I have no reason to believe that their officers—I suppose they still have officers among them—will bother a woman and two children. I thank you, but my son has directed us to go to Memphis. If there is any