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By Root 4352 0

someone had to go by foot or horse or bicycle out to Mr Buffaloe's home on the edge of town, whereupon Mr Buffaloe would appear, vague and dreaming and without haste and still wiping his hands, around the corner of his house from his back yard; and by the third day Father finally found out where Boon would be (had been) during the time when he—Boon— should have been in the livery stable. Because on that day Boon himself revealed the secret, spilled the beans, with frantic and raging urgency. He and Mr Buffaloe had come to what would have been physical battle, had not Mr Buffaloe—that apparently inexhaustible reservoir of surprases and capabilities—drawn a greasy and soot-grimed but perfectly efficient pistol on Boon.

That was how Boon told it. He and Mr Buffaloe had been not merely in complete, but instantaneous, accord and understanding in the whole process of getting the automobile into Mr Buftaloe's hands and the owner of it out of town; so that, Boon naturally thought, Mr Buftaloe would quickly solve the mystery of how to operate it and they would slip it out after dark and ride in it. But to Boon's shocked and outraged amazement, all Mr Buffaloe wanted was to find out why it ran. "He's ruined it!" Boon said. "He's done took it all to pieces just to see what was inside! He wont never get it all back together again!"

But Buftaloe did. He stood, mild and grease-stained and gently dreaming, when two weeks later the owner returned and cranked it up and drove away; and a year later Buffaloe had made one of his own, engine, gears and all, into a rubber-tired buggy; that afternoon, stinking noisily and sedately and not at all fast across the Square, he frightened Colonel Sartoris's matched carriage horses into bolting with the luckily empty surrey and more or less destroying it; by the next night there was formally recorded into the archives of Jefferson a city ordinance against the operation of any mechanically propelled vehicle inside the corporate limits. So, as president of the older, the senior bank in Yoknapatawpha County, my grandfather was forced to buy one or else be dictated to by the president of the junior one. You see what I mean? not senior and junior in the social hierarchy of the town, least of all rivals in it, but bankers, dedicated priests in the impenetrable and ineluctable mysteries of Finance; it was as though, despite his life-long ramrod-stiff and unyielding opposition to, refusal even to acknowledge, the machine age, Grandfather had been vouchsafed somewhere in the beginning a sort of—to him—nightmare vision of our nation's vast and boundless future in which the basic unit of its economy and prosperity would be a small mass-produced cubicle containing four wheels and an engine.

So he bought the automobile, and Boon found his soul's lily maid, the virgin's love of his rough and innocent heart. It was a Winton Flyer. (This was the first one he—we— owned, before the White Steamer which Grandfather traded it for when Grandmother finally decided two years later that she couldn't bear the smell of gasoline at all.) You cranked it by hand while standing in front of it, with no more risk (provided you had remembered to take it out of gear) than a bone or two in your forearm; it had kerosene lamps for night driving and when rain threatened five or six people could readily put up the top and curtains in ten or fifteen minutes, and Grandfather himself equipped it with a kerosene lantern, a new axe and a small coil of barbed wire attached to a light block and tackle for driving beyond the town limits. With which equipment it could—and did once, of which I shall speak presently—go as far as Memphis. Also, all of us, grandparents, parents, aunts, cousins and children, had special costumes for riding in it, consisting of veils, caps, goggles, gauntlet gloves and long shapeless throat-close neutral-colored garments called dusters, of which I shall also speak later.

By this time Mr Buffaloe had long since taught Boon to operate his homemade one. They couldn't use the streets of Jefferson of course—in fact never