Reivers, The - William Faulkner [81]
But in winter of course (as now), it was different, with the quail season and the Grand National Trials, with the rich money of oil and wheat barons from Wall Street and Chicago and Saskatchewan, and the fine dogs with pedigrees more jealous than princes, and the fine breeding and training kennels only minutes away now by automobile —Red Banks and Michigan City and La Grange and Ger-mantown, and the names—Colonel Linscomb, whose horse (we assumed) we were going to race against tomorrow, and Horace Lytle and George Peyton as magical among bird-dog people as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb among baseball aficionados, and Mr Jim Avant from Hickory Flat and Mr Paul Rainey just a few miles down Colonel Sartoris's railroad toward Jefferson—hound men both, who (I suppose) among these mere pedigreed pointers and setters, called themselves slumming; the vast rambling hotel booming then, staffed and elegant, the very air itself suave and murmurous with money, littered with colored ribbons and cluttered with silver cups.
But there was nobody there now, the quiet street empty with May dust (it was after six now; Parsham would be at home eating—or preparing to eat—supper), vacant even of Otis, though he could be, probably was, inside. And what was even more surprising, to me anyway, vacant also of Butch. He simply drove us up to the door and put us out and drove away, pausing only long enough to give Ev-erbe one hard jeering leer and Boon one hard leering jeer, if anything a little harder than Everbe's, saying, "Dont worry, boy, I'll be back. If you got any business still hanging, better get it unhung before I get back or something might get tore," and drove away. So apparently he also had somewhere he had to be occasionally: a home; I was still ignorant and innocent (not as much as I was twenty-four hours ago, but still tainted) but I was on Boon's side, my loyalty was to him, not to mention to Everbe, and I had assimilated enough (whether I had digested all of it yet or not) since yesterday, to know exactly what I meant when I hoped that maybe he had a wife in it—some innocent ravished out of a convent whose friendless avengeless betrayal would add another charge to the final accounting of his natural ruthless baseness; or better: an ambidextrous harridan who could cope with him by at least recording into his face each one of his countermarital victories. Because probably half the pleasure he got out of fornication was having it known who the victim was. But I wronged him. He was a bachelor.
But Otis was not inside either: only the single temporary clerk in the half-shrouded lobby and the single temporary waiter flapping his napkin in the door of the completely shrouded dining room save for a single table set out for such anonymous passers-by as we were—so far were, that is. But Otis had not been seen. "I aint wondering so much where he's at," Boon said, "as I am about what the hell he has done this time that we aint found out about yet."
"Nothing!" Everbe said. "He's just a child!"
"Sure," Boon said. "Just a little armed child. When he gets big enough to steal—"
"Stop!" Everbe said. "I wont—"
"All right, all right," Boon said. "Find, then. Find enough money to buy a knife with a six-inch blade in place of that two-inch pocketknife, anybody that turns his back on him had sho enough better be wearing one of them old-time iron union suits like you see in museums. I got to talk to you," he told her. "Supper'll be soon, and then we got to meet the train. And that tin-badge stallion will be neighing and prancing back here any time now." He took her arm. "Come on."
That was when I had to begin to listen to Boon. I mean, I had to. Everbe compelled it. She wouldn't even go with him unless I came too. We—they—went to the ladies' parlor; there wasn't much time now; we would have to eat supper and then go to the depot to meet Miss Reba. In those days females didn't run in and out of gentlemen's rooms in hotels as,