“They’re in front of him now though.”
“You think so?”
“Where is he, then?”
“I don’t know. But I know that he ain’t no closer to them fool dogs right now than that fox is. Wherever that fox is squatting right now, laughing at them dogs, that’s where he is heading for.”
“You mean to tell me that ere a man in the world can smell out a fox where even a city dog can’t untangle it?”
“Them dogs yonder can’t smell out a straight track because they don’t hate that fox. A good fox- or coon- or possum-dog is a good dog because he hates a fox or a coon or a possum, not because he’s got a extra good nose. It ain’t his nose that leads him; it’s his hating. And that’s why when I see which-a-way that fellow’s riding, I’ll tell you which-a-way that fox has run.”
The youth made a sound in his throat and nostrils. “A growed-up man. Hating a durn little old mangy fox. I be durn if it don’t take a lot of trouble to be rich. I be durn if it don’t.”
They looked down into the field. From farther on down the ridge the eager, baffled yapping of the dogs came. The last rider in boots and pink had ridden up and passed them and gone on, and the two men sat their mules in the profound and winy and sunny silence, listening, with expressions identical and bleak and sardonic on their gaunt, yellow faces. Then the youth turned on his mule and looked back up the ridge in the direction from which the race had come. At that moment the older man turned also and, motionless, making no sound, they watched two more riders come up and pass. They were the woman on the chestnut mare and the man on the bay horse. They passed like one beast, like a double or hermaphroditic centaur with two heads and eight legs. The woman carried her hat in her hand; in the slanting sun the fine, soft cloud of her unbobbed hair gleamed like the chestnut’s flank, like soft fire, the mass of it appearing to be too heavy for her slender neck. She was sitting the mare with a kind of delicate awkwardness, leaning forward as though she were trying to outpace it, with a quality about her of flight within flight, separate and distinct from the speed of the mare.
The man was holding the bay horse against the mare’s flank at full gallop. His hand lay on the woman’s hand which held the reins, and he was slowly but steadily drawing both horses back, slowing them. He was leaning toward the woman; the two men on the mules could see his profile stoop past with a cold and ruthless quality like that of a stooping hawk; they could see that he was talking to the woman. They passed so, with that semblance of a thrush and a hawk in terrific immobility in mid-air, with an apparitionlike suddenness: a soft rush of hooves in the sere needles, and were gone, the man stooping, the woman leaning forward like a tableau of flight and pursuit on a lightning bolt.
Then they were gone. After a while the youth said, “That one don’t seem to need no dogs neither.” His head was still turned after the vanished riders. The other man said nothing. “Yes, sir,” the youth said. “Just like a fox. I be durn if I see how that skinny neck of hern … Like you look at a fox and you wonder how a durn little critter like it can tote all that brush. And once I heard him say”—he in turn indicated, with less means than even spitting, that it was the rider of the black horse and not the bay, of whom he spoke—“something to her that a man don’t say to a woman in comp’ny, and her eyes turned red like a fox’s and then brown again like a fox.” The other did not answer. The youth looked at him.
The older man was leaning a little forward on his mule, looking down into the field. “What’s that down there?” he said. The youth looked also. From the edge of the woods beneath them came a mold-muffled rush of hooves and then a crash of undergrowth; then they saw, emerging from the woods at full gallop, Blair on the black horse. He entered the rice field at a dead run and began to cross it with the unfaltering and undeviating speed of a crow’s flight, following a course as straight as a surveyor’s line toward the dyke which bounded the field at its other side. “What did I tell you?” the older man said. “That fox is hid yonder on that ditch-bank. Well, it ain’t the first time they ever seen one another eye to eye. He got close enough to it once two years ago to throw that ere leather riding-switch at it.”
“Sho,” the youth said. “These folks don’t need no dogs.”
In the faint, sandy road which followed the crest of the ridge, and opposite another gap in the trees through which could be seen a pie-shaped segment of the rice field, and some distance in the rear of the hunt, stood a Ford car with a light truck body. Beneath the wheel sat a uniformed chauffeur; beside him, hunched into a black overcoat, was a man in a derby hat. He had a smooth, flaccid, indoors face and he was smoking a cigarette: a face sardonic and composed, yet at the moment a little wearily savage, like that of an indoors-bred and -inclined man subject to and helpless before some natural inclemency like cold or wet. He was talking.
“Sure. This all belongs to her, house and all. His old man owned it before they moved to New York and got rich, and Blair was born here. He bought it back and gave it to her for a wedding present. All he kept was this what-ever-it-is he’s trying to catch.”
“And he can’t catch that,” the chauffeur said.
“Sure. Coming down here every year and staying two months, without nothing to see and nowheres to go except these clay-eaters and Nigras. If he wants to live in a herd of nigras for two months every year, why don’t he go and spend a while on Lenox Avenue? You don’t have to drink the gin. But he’s got to buy this place and give it to her for a present because she is one of these Southerns and she might get homesick or something. Well, that’s all right, I guess. But Fourteenth Street is far enough south for me. But still, if it ain’t this, it might be Europe or somewheres. I don’t know which is worse.”
“Why did he marry her, anyways?” the chauffeur said.
“You want to know why he married her? It wasn’t the jack, even if they did have a pot full of it, of this Oklahoma Indian oil.…”
“Indian oil?”
“Sure. The government give this Oklahoma to the Indians because nobody else would have it, and when the first Indian got there and seen it and dropped dead and they tried to bury him, when they stuck the shovel into the ground the oil blowed the shovel out of the fellow’s hand, and so the white folks come. They would come up with a new Ford with a man from the garage driving it and they would go to an Indian and say, ‘Well, John, how much rotten-water you catchum your front yard?’ and the Indian would say three wells or thirteen wells or whatever it is and the white man would say, ‘That’s too bad. The way the White Father put the bee on you boys, it’s too bad. Well, never mind. You see this fine new car here? Well, I’m going to give it to you so you can load up your folks and go on to where the water don’t come out of the ground rotten and where the White Father can’t put the bee on you no more.’ So the Indian would load his family into the car, and the garage man would head the car west, I guess, and show the Indian where the gasoline lever was and hop off and snag the first car back to town. See?”
“Oh,” the chauffeur said.
“Sure. So here we was in England one time, minding our own business, when here this old dame and her red-headed gal come piling over from Europe or somewheres where the gal was going to the high school, and here it ain’t a week before Blair says, ‘Well, Ernie, we’re going to get married. What the hell do you think of that?’ And him a fellow that hadn’t done nothing all his life but dodge skirts so he could drink all night and try to ride a horse to death all day, getting married in less than a week. But soon as I see this old dame, I know which one of her and her husband it was that had took them oil wells off the Indians.”
“She must have been good, to put it on Blair at all, let alone that quick,” the chauffeur said. “Tough on her, though. I’d hate for my daughter to belong to him. Not saying nothing against him, of course.”
“I’d hate for my dog to belong to him. I see him kill a dog once because it wouldn’t mind him. Killed it with a walking stick, with one lick. He says, ‘Here. Send And
rews here to haul this away.’ ”
“I don’t see how you put up with him,” the chauffeur said. “Driving his cars, that’s one thing. But you, in the house with him day and night.…”
“We settled that. He used to ride me when he was drinking. One day he put his hand on me and I told him I would kill him. ‘When?’ he says. ‘When you get back from the hospital?’ ‘Maybe before I go there,’ I says. I had my hand in my pocket. ‘I believe you would,’ he says. So we get along now. I put the rod away and he don’t ride me any more and we get along.”
“Why didn’t you quit?”
“I don’t know. It’s a good job, even if we do stay all over the place all the time. Jees! half the time I don’t know if the next train goes to Ty Juana or Italy; I don’t know half the time where I’m at or if I can read the newspaper next morning even. And I like him and he likes me.”
“Maybe he quit riding you because he had something else to ride,” the chauffeur said.
“Maybe so. Anyways, when they married, she hadn’t never been on a horse before in all her life until he bought this chestnut horse for her to match her hair. We went all the way to Kentucky for it, and he come back in the same car with it. I wouldn’t do it; I says I would do anything in reason for him but I wasn’t going to ride in no horse Pullman with it empty, let alone with a horse already in it. So I come back in a lower.
“He didn’t tell her about the horse until it was in the stable. ‘But I don’t want to ride,’ she says.
“ ‘My wife will be expected to ride,’ he says. ‘You are not in Oklahoma now.’
“ ‘But I can’t ride,’ she says.
“ ‘You can at least sit on top of the horse so they will think you can ride on it,’ he says.
“So she goes to Callaghan, riding them practice plugs of his with the children and the chorines that have took up horse riding to get ready to get drafted from the bushes out in Brooklyn or New Jersey to the Drive or Central Park. And her hating a horse like it was a snake ever since one day when she was a kid and gets sick on a merry-go-round.”
“How did you know all this?” the chauffeur said.
“I was there. We used to stop there now and then in the afternoon to see how she was coming on the horse. Sometimes she wouldn’t even know we was there, or maybe she did. Anyways, here she would go, round and round among the children and one or two head of Zigfield’s prize stock, passing us and not looking at us, and Blair standing there with that black face of his like a subway tunnel, like he knew all the time she couldn’t ride no horse even on a merry-go-round and like he didn’t care if she learned or not, just so he could watch her trying and not doing it. So at last even Callaghan come to him and told him it wasn’t no use. ‘Very well,’ Blair says. ‘Callaghan says you may be able to sit on the top of a painted horse, so I will buy you a horse out of a dump cart and nail him to the front porch, and you can at least be sitting on top of it when we come up.’
“ ‘I’ll go back to momma’s,’ she says.
“ ‘I wish you would,’ Blair says. ‘My old man tried all his life to make a banker out of me, but your old woman done it in two months.’ ”
“I thought you said they had jack of their own,” the chauffeur said. “Why didn’t she spend some of that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t no exchange for Indian money in New York. Anyways, you would have thought she was a conductor on a Broadway surface car. Sometimes she wouldn’t even wait until I could get Blair under a shower and a jolt into him before breakfast, to make the touch. So the gal goes to the old dame (she lives on Park Avenue) and the gal …”
“Was you there too?” the chauffeur said.
“Cried … What? Oh. This was a maid, a little Irish kid named Burke; me and her used to go out now and then. She was the one told me about this fellow, this Yale college boy, this Indian sweetheart.”
“Indian sweetheart?”
“They went to the same ward school out at Oklahoma or something. Swapped Masonic rings or something before the gal’s old man found three oil wells in the henhouse and dropped dead and the old dame took the gal off to Europe to go to the school there. So this boy goes to Yale College and last year what does he do but marry a gal out of a tank show that happened to be in town. Well, when she finds that Callaghan has give her up, she goes to her old woman in Park Avenue. She cries. ‘I begin to think that maybe I won’t look funny to his friends, and then he comes there and watches me. He don’t say nothing,’ she says, ‘he just stands there and watches me.’
“ ‘After all I’ve done for you,’ the old dame says. ‘Got you a husband that any gal in New York would have snapped up. When all he asks is that you learn to sit on top of a horse and not shame him before his swell friends. After all I done for you,’ the old dame says.
“ ‘I didn’t,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to marry him.’
“ ‘Who did you want to marry?’ the old dame says.
“ ‘I didn’t want to marry nobody,’ the gal says.
“So now the old dame digs up about this boy, this Allen boy that the gal …”
“I thought you said his name was Yale,” the chauffeur said.
“No. Allen. Yale is where he went to this college.”
“You mean Columbia.”
“No. Yale. It’s another college.”
“I thought the other one was named Cornell or something,” the chauffeur said.
“No. It’s another one. Where these college boys all come from when these hotchachacha deadfalls get raided and they give them all a ride downtown in the wagon. Don’t you read no papers?”
“Not often,” the chauffeur said. “I don’t care nothing about politics.”
“All right. So this Yale boy’s poppa had found a oil well too and he was lousy with it too, and besides the old dame was mad because Blair wouldn’t leave her live in the house with them and wouldn’t take her nowheres when we went. So the old dame give them all three—her and Blair and this college boy—the devil until the gal jumps up and says she will ride on a horse or bust, and Blair told her to go on and bust if she aimed to ride on this chestnut horse we brought all the way back from Kentucky. ‘I don’t aim for you to ruin this good horse,’ Blair says. ‘You’ll ride on the horse I tell you to ride on.’
“So then she would slip out the back way and go off and try to ride this horse, this good one, this Kentucky plug, to learn how first and then surprise him. The first time didn’t hurt her, but the second time it broke her collar bone, and she was scared how Blair would find it out until she found out how he had knew it all the time that she was riding on it. So when we come down here for the first time that year and Blair started chasing this lyron or whatever it—”
“Fox,” the chauffeur said.
“All right. That’s what I said. So when—”
“You said lyron,” the chauffeur said.
“All right. Leave it be a lyron. Anyways, she would ride on this chestnut horse, trying to keep up, and Blair already outrun the dogs and all, like this time two years ago when he run off from the dogs and got close enough to this lyron to hit it with his riding whip—”
“You mean fox,” the chauffeur said. “A fox, not a lyron. Say …” The other man, the valet, secretary, whatever he might have been, was lighting another cigarette, crouched into his upturned collar, the derby slanted down upon his face.
“Say what?” he said.
“I was wondering,” the chauffeur said.
“Wondering what?”
“If it’s as hard for him to ride off and leave her as he thinks it is. To not see her ruining this good Kentucky horse. If he has to ride as fast to do it as he thinks he does.”
“What about that?”
“Maybe he don’t have to ride as fast this year as he did last year, to run off from her. What do you think about it?”
“Think about what?”
“I was wondering.”
“What wondering?”
“If he
knowed he don’t have to ride as fast this year or not.”
“Oh. You mean Gawtrey.”
“That his name? Gawtrey?”
“That’s it. Steve Gawtrey.”
“What about him?”
“He’s all right. He’ll eat your grub and drink your liquor and fool your women and let you say when.”
“Well, what about that?”
“Nothing. I said he was all right. He’s fine by me.”
“How by you?”
“Just fine, see? I done him a little favor once, and he done me a little favor, see?”
“Oh,” the chauffeur said. He did not look at the other. “How long has she known him?”
“Six months and maybe a week. We was up in Connecticut and he was there. He hates a horse about as much as she does, but me and Callaghan are all right too; I done Callaghan a little favor once too, so about a week after we come back from Connecticut, I have Callaghan come in and tell Blair about this other swell dog, without telling Blair who owned it. So that night I says to Blair, ‘I hear Mr. Van Dyming wants to buy this horse from Mr. Gawtrey too.’ ‘Buy what horse?’ Blair says. ‘I don’t know,’ I says. ‘One horse looks just like another to me as long as it stays out doors where it belongs,’ I says. ‘So do they to Gawtrey,’ Blair says. ‘What horse are you talking about?’ ‘This horse Callaghan was telling you about,’ I says. Then he begun to curse Callaghan. ‘He told me he would get that horse for me,’ he says. ‘It don’t belong to Callaghan,’ I says, ‘it’s Mr. Gawtrey’s horse.’ So here it’s two nights later when he brings Gawtrey home to dinner with him. That night I says, ‘I guess you bought that horse.’ He had been drinking and he cursed Gawtrey and Callaghan too. ‘He won’t sell it,’ he says. ‘You want to keep after him,’ I says. ‘A man will sell anything.’ ‘How keep after him, when he won’t listen to a price?’ he says. ‘Leave your wife do the talking,’ I says. ‘He’ll listen to her.’ That was when he hit me.…”
“I thought you said he just put his hand on you,” the chauffeur said.