Light in August - William Faulkner [177]
This lasted through Sunday night. The poker game ran. The caution, the surreptitiousness, which had clothed it was now gone. There was something about it too assured and serenely confident to the braggadocio; tonight when they heard the marshal’s feet on the stairs, one said, “Ware M.P.’s” and for an instant they glanced at one another with hard, bright, daredevil eyes; then one said, quite loud: “Throw the son of a bitch out,” and another through pursed lips made the immemorial sound. And so the next morning, Monday, when the first country cars and wagons began to gather, the platoon was again intact. And they now wore uniforms. It was their faces. Most of them were of an age, a generation, an experience. But it was more than that. They now had a profound and bleak gravity as they stood where crowds milled, grave, austere, detached, looking with. blank, bleak eyes at the slow throngs who, feeling, sensing without knowing, drifted before them, slowing, staring, so that they would be ringed with faces rapt and empty and immobile as the faces of cows, approaching and drifting on, to be replaced. And all morning the voices came and went, in quiet question and answer: “There he goes. That young fellow with the automatic pistol. He’s the captain of them. Special officer sent by the governor. He’s the head of the whole thing. Sheriff ain’t got no say in it today.”
Later, when it was too late, Grimm told the sheriff: “If you had just listened to me. Let me bring him out of that cell in a squad of men, instead of sending him across the square with one deputy and not even handcuffed to him, in all that crowd where that damned Buford didn’t dare shoot, even if he could hit a barn door.”
“How did I know he aimed to break, would think of trying it right then and there?” the sheriff said. “When Stevens had done told me he would plead guilty and take a life sentence.”
But it was too late then. It was all over then. It happened in the middle of the square, halfway between the sidewalk and the courthouse, in the midst of a throng of people thick as on Fair Day, though the first that Grimm knew of it was when he heard the deputy’s pistol twice, fired into the air. He knew at once what had happened, though he was at the time inside the courthouse. His reaction was definite and immediate. He was already running toward the shots when he shouted back over his shoulder at the man who had tagged him now for almost forty-eight hours as half aide and half orderly: “Turn in the fire alarm!”
“The fire alarm?” the aide said. “What—”
“Turn in the fire alarm!” Grimm shouted back. “It don’t. matter what folks think, just so they know that something ...” He did not finish; he was gone.
He ran among running people, overtaking and passing them, since he had an objective and they did not; they were just running, the black, blunt, huge automatic opening a way for him like a plow. They looked at his tense, hard, young face with faces blanched and gaped, with round, toothed orifices; they made one long sound like a murmuring sigh: “There ... went that way ...” But already Grimm had seen the deputy, running, his pistol aloft in his hand. Grimm glanced once about and sprang forward again; in the throng which had evidently been pacing the deputy and the prisoner across the square was the inevitable hulking youth in the uniform of the Western Union, leading his bicycle by the horns like a docile