Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses Old Man The Bear (Vintage) by William Faulkner Page B

the little boy were eating. When they mounted the steps, Eck had gone on into the store and emerged with a paper sack, from which he took a segment of cheese and with his pocket knife divided it carefully into two exact halves and gave one to the boy and took a handful of crackers from the sack and gave them to the boy, and now they squatted against the wall, side by side and, save for the difference in size, identical, eating.
    “I wonder what that horse thought Ratliff was,” one said. He held a spray of peach bloom between his teeth. It bore four blossoms like miniature ballet skirts of pink tulle. “Jumping out windows and running in doors in his shirttail? I wonder how many Ratliffs that horse thought he saw.”
    “I dont know,” Ratliff said. “But if he saw just half as many of me as I saw of him, he was sholy surrounded. Every time I turned my head, that thing was just running over me or just swirling to run back over that boy again. And that boy there, he stayed right under it one time to my certain knowledge for a full one-and-one-half minutes without ducking his head or even batting his eyes. Yes sir, when I looked around and seen that varmint in the door behind me blaring its eyes at me, I’d a made sho Flem Snopes had brought a tiger back from Texas except I knowed that couldn’t no just one tiger completely fill a entire room.” They laughed again, quietly. Lump Snopes, the clerk, sitting in the only chair tilted back against the door-facing and partly blocking the entrance, cackled suddenly.
    “If Flem had knowed how quick you fellows was going to snap them horses up, he’d a probably brought some tigers,” he said. “Monkeys too.”
    “So they was Flem’s horses,” Ratliff said. The laughter stopped. The other three had open knives in their hands, with which they had been trimming idly at chips and slivers of wood. Now they sat apparently absorbed in the delicate and almost tedious movements of the knife-blades. The clerk had looked quickly up and found Ratliff watching him. His constant expression of incorrigible and mirthful disbelief had left him now; only the empty wrinkles of it remained about his mouth and eyes.
    “Has Flem ever said they was?” he said. “But you town fellows are smarter than us country folks. Likely you done already read Flem’s mind.” But Ratliff was not looking at him now.
    “And I reckon we’d a bought them,” he said. He stood above them again, easy, intelligent, perhaps a little sombre but still perfectly impenetrable. “Eck here, for instance. With a wife and family to support. He owns two of them, though to be sho he never had to pay money for but one. I heard folks chasing them things up until midnight last night, but Eck and that boy aint been home a-tall in two days.” They laughed again, except Eck. He pared off a bite of cheese and speared it on the knife-point and put it into his mouth.
    “Eck caught one of hisn,” the second man said.
    “That so?” Ratliff said. “Which one was it, Eck? The one he give you or the one you bought?”
    “The one he give me,” Eck said, chewing.
    “Well, well,” Ratliff said. “I hadn’t heard about that. But Eck’s still one horse short. And the one he had to pay money for. Which is pure proof enough that them horses wasn’t Flem’s because wouldn’t no man ever give his own blood kin something he couldn’t even catch.” They laughed again, but they stopped when the clerk spoke. There was no mirth in his voice at all.
    “Listen,” he said. “All right. We done all admitted you are too smart for anybody to get ahead of. You never bought no horse from Flem or nobody else, so maybe it aint none of your business and maybe you better just leave it at that.”
    “Sholy,” Ratliff said. “It’s done already been left at that two nights ago. The fellow that forgot to shut that lot gate done that. With the exception of Eck’s horse. And we know that wasn’t Flem’s, because that horse was give to