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By Root 4402 0

the horse and talking to it. "There you is," he said. "Right straight up this here chicken walk to glory and Possum, Tennessee, by sunup tomorrow." He came back down, already turning the horse, moving fairly rapidly, speaking to me now: "He done seen the switch. Fall right in behind him. Dont touch him or pop till I tell you to." I did that, the three of us—Ned, the horse, then me—moving directly away from the ramp for perhaps twenty yards, when without stopping Ned turned and wheeled the horse, I still following, until it faced the rise of the ramp between Boon and Sam twenty yards away. When it saw the ramp, it checked. "Pop," Ned said. I made the sound, a good one; the horse sprang a little, Ned already moving on, a little faster now, back toward the ramp. "When I tells you to pop this time, touch him with the switch. Dont bit: just tap him at the root of his tail a second after you pops." He had already passed between Boon and Sam and was on the ramp. The horse was now trying to decide which to do: refuse, or run out (with the additional confusion of having to decide which of Boon and Sam would run over the easiest) or simply bolt over and through us all. You could almost see it happening: which was maybe what Ned was counting on: an intelligence panicky and timorous and capable of only one idea at a time, in which the intrusion of a second one reduces all to chaos. "Pop," Ned said. This time I tapped the horse too, as Ned had told me. It surged, leaped, its forefeet halfway up the ramp, the near hind foot (Boon's side) striking the edge of the ramp and sliding off until Boon, before Ned could speak, grasped the leg in both hands and set it back on the ramp, leaning his weight against the flank, the horse motionless now, trembling, all four feet on the ramp now. "Now," Ned said, "lay your switch right across his hocks so he'll know he got something behind him to not let him fall."

"To not let him back off the ramp, you mean," Sam said. "We need one of the crowbars. Go get it, Charley."

"That's right," Ned said. "We gonter need that crowbar in a minute. But all we needs right now is that switch. You's too little;" he told me. "Let Mr Boon and Mr Boxcar have it. Loop it behind his hocks like britching." They did so, one at each end of the Umber switch. "Now, walk him right on up. When I say pop this time, pop loud, so he will think the lick gonter be loud too." But I didn't need to pop at all again. Ned said to the horse: "Come on, son. Let's go to Possum," and the horse moved, Boon and Sam moving with it, the switch like a loop of string pressing it on, its forefeet on the solid platform now, then one final scuffling scrabbling surge, the platform resounding once as if it had leaped onto a wooden bridge.

"It's going to take more than this switch or that boy popping his tongue either, to get him into that car," Sam said.

"What gonter get him into that boxcar is that crowbar," Ned said. "Aint it come yet?" It was here now. "Prize that-ere chicken walk loose," Ned said.

"Wait," Sam said. "What for?"

"So he can walk on it into that boxcar," Ned said. "He's used to it now. He's done already found out aint nothing at the other end gonter hurt or skeer him."

"He aint smelled the inside of an empty boxcar yet though," Sam said. "That's what I'm thinking about." But Ned's idea did make sense. Besides, we had gone much too far now to boggle even if Ned had commanded us to throw down both walls of the warehouse so the horse wouldn't have to turn corners. So Boon and the railroad man prized the ramp away from the platform.

"God damn it," Sam said. "Do it quiet, cant you?"

"Aint you right here with us?" Ned said. "Sholy you can get a little more benefit outen them brass buttons than just walking around in them." Though it took all of us, including Miss Corrie, to lift the ramp onto the platform and carry it across and lay it like a bridge from the platform into the black yawn of the open car door. Then Ned led the horse up and at once I understood what Sam had meant. The horse had not only never smelled an empty boxcar before,