Free Knight's Gambit by William Faulkner

spool near by, and a rusted can half full of heavy fishhooks, some of which had already been bent onto the cords. But there was nobody there.
    ‘The boat’s gone,’ the man with the sack said. ‘So he ain’t gone to the store.’ Then he discovered that the youth had gone on, and he drew in his breath and was just about to shout when suddenly a man rushed out of the undergrowth and stopped, facing him and making an urgent whimpering sound—a man not large, but with tremendous arms and shoulders; an adult, yet with something childlike about him, about the way he moved, barefoot, in battered overalls and with the urgent eyes of the deaf and dumb.
    ‘Hi, Joe,’ the man with the sack said, raising his voice as people will with those who they know cannot understand them. ‘Where’s Lonnie?’ He held up the sack. ‘Got some fish?’
    But the other only stared at him, making that rapid whimpering. Then he turned and scuttled on up the path where the youth had disappeared, who, at that moment, shouted: ‘Just look at this line!’
    The older one followed. The youth was leaning eagerly out over the water beside a tree from which a light cotton rope slanted tautly downward into the water. The deaf-and-dumb man stood just behind him, still whimpering and lifting his feet rapidly in turn, though before the older man reached him he turned and scuttled back past him, toward the hut. At this stage of the river the line should have been clear of the water, stretching from bank to bank, between the two trees, with only the hooks on the dependent cords submerged. But now it slanted into the water from either end, with a heavy downstream sag, and even the older man could feel movement on it. ‘It’s big as a man!’ the youth cried.
    ‘Yonder’s his boat,’ the older man said. The youth saw it, too—across the stream and below them, floated into a willow clump inside a point. ‘Cross and get it, and we’ll see how big this fish is.’
    The youth stepped out of his shoes and overalls and removed his shirt and waded out and began to swim, holding straight across to let the current carry him down to the skiff, and got the skiff and paddled back, standing erect in it and staring eagerly upstream toward the heavy sag of the line, near the center of which the water, from time to time, roiled heavily with submerged movement. He brought the skiff in below the older man, who, at that moment, discovered the deaf-and-dumb man just behind him again, still making the rapid and urgent sound and trying to enter the skiff.
    ‘Get back!’ the older man said, pushing the other back with his arm. ‘Get back, Joe!’
    ‘Hurry up!’ the youth said, staring eagerly toward the submerged line, where, as he watched, something rolled sluggishly to the surface, then sank again. ‘There’s something on there, or there ain’t a hog in Georgia. It’s big as a man too!’
    The older one stepped into the skiff. He still held the rope, and he drew the skiff, hand over hand, along the line itself.
    Suddenly, from the bank of the river behind them, the deaf-and-dumb man began to make an actual sound. It was quite loud.

2
     
    ‘Inquest?’ Stevens said.
    ‘Lonnie Grinnup.’ The coroner was an old country doctor. ‘Two fellows found him drowned on his own trotline this morning.’
    ‘No!’ Stevens said. ‘Poor damned feeb. I’ll come out.’ As county attorney he had no business there, even if it had not been an accident. He knew it. He was going to look at the dead man’s face for a sentimental reason. What was now Yoknapatawpha County had been founded not by one pioneer but by three simultaneous ones. They came together on horseback, through the Cumberland Gap from the Carolinas, when Jefferson was still a Chickasaw Agency post, and bought land in the Indian patent and established families and flourished and vanished, so that now, a hundred years afterward, there was in all the county they helped to found but one representative of the