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By Root 4589 0

the turnkey had somehow managed to marry-a man so quiet so mild and so ordinary that none remarked the manner in which he accepted and affirmed the oath when sworn into his office: merely somebody else's nameless and unknown cousin by blood or maybe just marriage, promising to be as brave and honest and loyal as anyone could or should expect for the pay he would receive during the next four years in a position he would lose the day the sheriff went out of office, turning to meet his one high moment as the male mayfly concentrates his whole one day of life in the one evening act of procreation and then relinquishes it. But the crowd was not running at him: only walking, and that only because he was between them and the courthouse, checking for an instant at sight of the drawn pistol, until a voice said: 'Take that thing away from him before he hurts somebody,' and they did: a hand, not ungently nor even unkindly, wrenching the pistol firmly from him, the crowd moving again, converging on him, the same voice, not impatient so much as irascible, speaking to him by name this time: 'Gwan, Irey. Get out of the sun': so that, turning again, the turnkey faced merely another gambit, he must choose all over again: cither to acquiesce forevermore to man or sever himself forevermore from the human race by the act-getting either himself or the prisoner free from one end or the other of the steel chain joining them-which would enable him to flee. Or not flee, not flight; who to dispute the moment's heroic image even in that last second: no puny fumbling with a blind mechanical insentient key, but instead one single lightning-stroke of sword or scimitar across the betraying wrist and then running, the scarlet-spurting stump inevictably aloft like an unbowed pennon's staff or the undefeated lance's headless shank, not even in adjuration but in abdication of all man and his corruption.

But there was not even time for that; his only choice was against Tuesday being trampled as, shoulder to shoulder now with his captive and, if anything, slightly behind him, they moved on in the center of the crowd, across the square and into the courthouse, a firm hand now grasping him above the elbow and thrusting him firmly on exactly as he had nightly dreamed ever since he assumed his office of himself in the act of doing, as soon as he found a felon either small enough or mild enough to permit him, through the corridor and up the stairs to the judge's chambers, where the New Orleans lawyer gave one start of outrage then of astonishment and then the infinitesimal flicker which never reached his face at all nor even his eyes, until the same calm merely irascible voice said, This aint big enough. We'll use the courtroom,' and he (the lawyer) was moving too, the three of them now-himself, the turnkey and the prisoner like three hencoops on a flood-filling the little room with a sibi-lant sound as though all the ghosts of Coke upon Littleton upon Blackstone upon Napoleon upon Julius Caesar had started up and back in one inextricable rustle, one aghast and dusty cry, and through the opposite door into the courtroom itself, where suddenly the lawyer was not only himself free of the crowd, he had managed (quite skilfully for all his bulk: a man not only tall but big, in rich dark broadcloth and an immaculate pique waistcoat and a black cravat bearing a single pearl like the egg of a celestial humming bird) to extricate the turnkey and the prisoner too, in the same motion kneeing the swing gate in the low railing enclosing Bench and witness stand and jury box and counsels' tables, and thrust the other two through it and followed and let the gate swing back while the crowd itself poured on into the auditorium.

People were entering now not only through the judge's chambers but through the main doors at the back too, not just men and boys now but women also-young girls who already at eight and nine in the morning had been drinking Coca-Cola in the drug-stores, and housewives testing meat and cabbages in the groceries and markets, or matching scraps of lace and