The Unvanquished by William Faulkner Page A

on the whiffletrees and his mouth hanging open and his eyes like two eggs, and I had forgotten what the blue coats looked like. It was fast, like that: all sweating horses with wild eyes and men with wild faces full of yelling and then Granny standing up in the wagon and beating the five men about their heads and shoulders with the umbrella while they unfastened the traces and cut the harness off the mules with pocket knives. They didn’t say a word, they didn’t even look at Granny while she was hitting them, they just took the mules out of the wagon and then the two mules and the five men disappeared together in another cloud of dust and the mules came out of the dust soaring like hawks with two men on them and two more just falling backward over the mules’ tails and the fifth man already running too and the two that were on their backs in the road getting up with little scraps of cut leather sticking to them like a kind of black shavings in a sawmill; the three of them went off across the field after the mules and then we heard the pistols away off like striking a handful ofmatches at one time and Joby still sitting on the seat with his mouth still open and the ends of the cut reins in his hands and Granny still standing in the wagon with the bent umbrella lifted and hollering at Ringo and me while we jumped out of the wagon and ran across the road.
    “The stable,” I said. “The stable!” While we were running up the hill toward the house we could see our mules still galloping in the field and we could see the three men running too. When we ran around the house we could see the wagon too in the road, with Joby on the seat above the wagon tongue sticking straight out ahead and Granny standing up and shaking the umbrella toward us and even though I couldn’t hear her I knew she was still shouting. Our mules had run into the woods but the three men were still in the field and the old white horse was watching them too in the barn door; he never saw us until he snorted and jerked back and kicked over something behind him. It was a homemade shoeing box and he was tied by a rope halter to the ladder to the loft and there was even a pipe still burning on the ground.
    We climbed onto the ladder and got on him and when we came out of the barn we could still see the three men but we had to stop while Ringo got down and opened the lot gate and got back on again and so they were gone too by then. When we reached the woods there was no sign of them and we couldn’t hear anything either but the old horse’s insides. We went on slower then because the old horse wouldn’t go fast againanyway and so we tried to listen and so it was almost sunset when we came out into a road. “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 aint followed them mules all my life and cant 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 time it was, we didn’t care; we only 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 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