11
the vine-massed fence might be and he dared not risk it. So he ran on down the drive, blood and breath
roaring; presently he was in the road again though he could not see it. He could not hear either: the
galloping mare was almost upon him before he heard her, and even then he held his course, as if the
urgency of his wild grief and need must in a moment more find him wings, waiting until the ultimate instant
to hurl himself aside and into the weed-choked roadside ditch as the horse thundered past and on, for an
instant in furious silhouette against the stars, the tranquil early summer night sky which, even before the
shape of the horse and rider vanished, strained abruptly and violently upward: a long, swirling roar
incredible and soundless, blotting the stars, and he springing up and into the road again, running again,
knowing it was too late yet still running even after he heard the shot and, an instant later, two shots,
pausing now without knowing he had ceased to run, crying "Pap! Pap!," running again before he knew he
had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run,
looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees,
panting, sobbing, "Father! Father!"
At midnight he was sitting on the crest of a hill. He did not know it was midnight and he did not know how
far he had come. But there was no glare behind him now and he sat now, his back toward what he had
called home for four days anyhow, his face toward the dark woods which he would enter when breath
was strong again, small, shaking steadily in the chill darkness, hugging himself into the remainder of his
thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair. Father. My
father, he thought. "He was brave!" he cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: "He
was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris' cav'ry!" not knowing that his father had gone to that
war a private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving
fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war as Malbrouck himself did: for booty - it meant nothing and
less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own.
The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be
hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His
breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been
asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the
whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned
and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was
no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would
the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which
the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing - the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and
quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back.