Reivers, The - William Faulkner [70]
"But how did you get word to him?" I said. "Let me tell you something," Ned said. "If you ever need to get something done, not just done but done quick and quiet and so you can depend on it and not no blabbing and gabbling around about it neither, you hunt around until you finds somebody like Mr. Sam Caldwell, and turn it over to him. You member that. Folks around Jefferson could use some of him. They could use a heap of Sam Caldwells."
Then we were there. The sun was well up now. It was a dog-trot house, paintless but quite sound and quite neat among locust and chinaberry trees, in a swept yard inside a fence which had all its palings too and a hinged gate that worked, with chickens in the dust and a cow and a pair of mules in the stable lot behind it, and two pretty good hounds which had already recognised the youth with us, and an old man at the top of the gallery steps above them—an old man very dark in a white shirt and galluses and a planter's hat, with perfectly white moustaches and an imperial, coming down the steps now and across the yard to look at the horse. Because he knew, remembered the horse, and so one at least of Ned's figment's vanished. "You all buy him?" he said. "We got him," Ned said. "Long enough to run him?"
"Once, anyway," Ned said. He said to me: "Make your manners to Uncle Possum Hood." I did so.
"Rest yourself," Uncle Parsham said. "You all about ready for breakfast, aint you?" I could already smell it— the ham.
"All I want is to go to sleep," I said. "He's been up all night," Ned said. "Both of us. Only he had to spend his in a house full of women hollering why and how much whilst all I had was just a quiet empty boxcar with a horse." But I was still going to help stable and feed Lightning. They wouldn't let me. "You go with Ly-curgus and get some sleep," Ned said. "I'm gonter need you soon, before it gets too hot. We got to find out about this horse, and the sooner we starts, the sooner it will be." I followed Lycurgus. It was a lean-to room, a bed with a bright perfectly clean harlequin-patched quilt; it seemed to me I was asleep before I even lay down, and that Ned was shaking me before I had ever slept. He had a clean heavy wool sock and a piece of string. I was hungry now. "You can eat your breakfast afterwards," Ned said. "You can learn a horse better on a empty stomach. Here—" holding the sock open. "Whistle-britches aint showed up yet. It might be better if he dont a-tall. He the sort that no matter how bad you think you need him, you find out afterward you was better off. Hold out your hand." He meant the bandaged one. He slipped the sock over it, bandage and all, and tied it around my wrist with the string. "You can still use your thumb, but this'll keep you from forgetting and trying to open your hand and bust them cuts again."
Uncle Parsham and Lycurgus were waiting with the horse. He was bridled now, under an old, used, but perfectly cared-for McClellan saddle. Ned looked at it. "We might run him bareback, unless they makes us. But leave it on. We can try him both ways and let him learn us which he likes best."
It was a small pasture beside the creek, flat and smooth, with good footing. Ned shortened the leathers, to suit not me so much as him, and threw me up. "You know what to do: the same as with them colts out at McCaslin. Let him worry about which hand he's on; likely all anybody ever tried to learn him is just to run as fast as the bit will let him, whichever way somebody points his head. Which is all we wants too. You dont need no switch yet. Besides, we dont want to learn a switch: we wants to learn him. Go on."
I moved him out, into the pasture, into a trot. He was nothing on the bit; a cobweb would have checked him. I said so. "I bet," Ned said. "I bet he got a heap more whip calluses on his behind than bit chafes in his jaw. Go on. Move him." but he wouldn't. I kicked, pounded my heels, but he just trotted, a little faster in the back stretch (I was riding a circular course like the one we had beaten