Read Online Knight's Gambit by William Faulkner - Free Book Online Page B

to walk in the free world and farm for God!” That’s all I told him. I never told him to do nothing. And now go tell them. Let them hang me too. Gambrell is rotted, and that batbrain is rotted, and I just as soon rot under ground as to rot in here. Go on and tell them.’
    ‘Yes,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘All right. You will go free.’
    For a minute he said Terrel did not move at all. Then he said, ‘Free?’
    ‘Yes,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Free. But remember this. A while ago you threatened me. Now I am going to threaten you. And the curious thing is, I can back mine up. I am going to keep track of you. And the next time anything happens, the next time anybody tries to frame you with a killing and you can’t get anybody to say you were not there nor any of your kinsfolks to take the blame for it—You understand?’ Terrel had looked up at him when he said Free, but now he looked down again. ‘Do you?’ Uncle Gavin said.
    ‘Yes,’ Terrel said. ‘I understand.’
    ‘All right,’ Uncle Gavin said. He turned; he called to the guard. ‘You can let us out this time,’ he said. He returned to the mess hall, where the Governor was calling the men up one by one and giving them their papers and where again the Governor paused, the smooth, inscrutable face looking up at Uncle Gavin. He did not wait for Uncle Gavin to speak.
    ‘You were successful, I see,’ he said.
    ‘Yes. Do you want to hear—’
    ‘My dear sir, no. I must decline. I will put it stronger than that: I must refuse.’ Again Uncle Gavin said he looked at him with that expression warm, quizzical, almost pitying, yet profoundly watchful and curious. ‘I really believe that you never have quite given up hope that you can change this business. Have you?’
    Now Uncle Gavin said he did not answer for a moment. Then he said, ‘No. I haven’t. So you are going to turn him loose? You really are?’ Now he said that the pity, the warmth vanished, that now the face was as he first saw it: smooth, completely inscrutable, completely false.
    ‘My dear Mr. Stevens,’ the Governor said. ‘You have already convinced me. But I am merely the moderator of this meeting; here are the votes. But do you think that you can convince these gentlemen?’ And Uncle Gavin said he looked around at them, the identical puppet faces of the seven or eight of the Governor’s battalions and battalions of factory-made colonels.
    ‘No,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘I can’t.’ So he left then. It was in the middle of the morning, and hot, but he started back to Jefferson at once, riding across the broad, heat-miraged land, between the cotton and the corn of God’s long-fecund, remorseless acres, which would outlast any corruption and injustice. He was glad of the heat, he said; glad to be sweating, sweating out of himself the smell and the taste of where he had been.

Hand Upon the Waters
     

1
     
    T he two men followed the path where it ran between the river and the dense wall of cypress and cane and gum and brier. One of them carried a gunny sack which had been washed and looked as if it had been ironed too. The other was a youth, less than twenty, by his face. The river was low, at mid-July level.
    ‘He ought to been catching fish in this water,’ the youth said.
    ‘If he happened to feel like fishing,’ the one with the sack said. ‘Him and Joe run that line when Lonnie feels like it, not when the fish are biting.’
    ‘They’ll be on the line, anyway,’ the youth said. ‘I don’t reckon Lonnie cares who takes them off for him.’
    Presently the ground rose to a cleared point almost like a headland. Upon it sat a conical hut with a pointed roof, built partly of mildewed canvas and odd-shaped boards and partly of oil tins hammered out flat. A rusted stovepipe projected crazily above it, there was a meager woodpile and an ax, and a bunch of cane poles leaned against it. Then they saw, on the earth before the open door, a dozen or so short lengths of cord just cut from a