Reivers, The - William Faulkner [30]
Anyway, that's what Wyott did. And then his little wilderness-cradled hermitage became a roaring place indeed: it became dormitory, grubbing station and saloon for the transient freighters and the fixed crews of hard-mouthed hard-souled mule skinners who met the wagons at both edges of the bottom, with two and three and (when necessary) four span of already geared-up mules, to curse the heavy wagons in to the ferry on one side of the river, and from the ferry to high ground once more on the other. A roaring place; who faced it were anyway men. But just tough men then, no more, until Colonel Sartoris (I don't mean the banker with his courtesy title acquired partly by inheritance and partly by propinquity, who was responsible for Boon and me being where we at this moment were; I mean his father, the actual colonel, C.S.A.—soldier, statesman, politician, duelist; the collateral descending nephews and cousins of one twenty-year-old Yoknapatawpha County youth say, murderer) built his railroad in the mid-seventies and destroyed it
But not Ballenbaugh's, let alone Ballenbaugh. The wagon trains came and drove the boats from the river and changed the name of Wyott's Crossing to Ballenbaugh's Ferry; the railroads came and removed the cotton bales from the wagons and therefore the ferry from Ballenbaugh's, but that was all; forty years before, in the modest case of the trader, Wyott, Ballenbaugh snowed himself perfectly capable of anticipating the wave of the future and riding it; now, in the person of his son, mother giant who in 1865, returned with (it was said) his coat lined with uncut United States bank notes, from (he said) Arkansas, where (he said) he had served and been honorably discharged from a troop of partisan rangers, the name of whose commander he was never subsequently able to recall, he showed that he had lost none of his old deftness and skill and omniscience. Formerly, people passed through Ballenbaugh's, pausing for the night; now they travelled to Ballenbaugh's, always at night and often rapidly, to give Ballenbaugh as much time as possible to get the horse or cow concealed in the swamp before the law or the owner arrived. Because, in addition to gangs of angry farmers following the nonreturning prints of horses and cattle, and sheriffs following those of actual murderers into Ballenbaugh's, at least one federal revenue agent left a set of nonreturning footprints. Because where Ballenbaugh senior merely sold whiskey, this one made it too; he was now the patron of what is covered by the euphemistic blanket-term of dance hall, and by the mid-eighties Ballenbaugh's was a byword miles around for horror and indignation; ministers and old ladies tried to nominate sheriffs whose entire platform would be running Ballenbaugh and his drunks and fiddlers and gamblers and girls out of Yoknapatawpha County and Mississippi too if possible. But Ballenbaugh and his entourage—stable, pleasuredome, whatever you want to call it—never bothered us outsiders: they never came out of their fastness and there was no law compelling anyone to go there; also, seemingly his new avocation (avatar) was so rewarding that word went round that anyone with sights and ambition no higher than one spavined horse or dry heifer was no longer welcome there. So sensible people simply let Ballen-baugh's alone. Which certainly included sheriffs, who were not only sensible but family men too, and who had the example of the federal revenuer who had vanished in that direction not so long ago>.
That is, until the summer of 1886, when a Baptist minister named Hiram Hightower—also a giant of a man, as tall and almost as big as Ballenbaugh himself, who on Sunday from 1861 to 1865 had been one of Forrest's company chaplains and on the other six days one of his hardest and most courageous troopers—rode into Ballen-baugh's armed with a Bible and his bare hands and