Free Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter Page B

to the governor of Mississippi and—”
    “Haw!” laughed one of the deputies, “ain’t that a good one. He’s gonna go to Jackson and tell old Bilbo ’bout a drownded nigger!”
    The others hooted.
    “Sir,” the sheriff said, “tell who you wish whatever you want. In Jackson they consider that we do our job well down here. We handle the uppity niggers, or rather the prison does. We make the state run, and we do our part to keep order, and I’m a proud man because of it. Now I warned you to leave this town.”
    “Mr. Leon,” Lazear suddenly proclaimed, “don’t make us leave now. I don’t know de river in de dark; we end up dead as them nigs.”
    About three different conversations seemed to explode simultaneously: the deputies continued to enjoy the humorous idea of Sam’s audience at the state capital; Lazear enjoined the sheriff to let them stay the night so that he did not have to face the river in the dark; and Sam continued to demand action on the missing family.
    The sheriff finally reached to his holster, pulled out a big revolver, and fired a single shot to quiet them all. Its boom clapped and whanged, rolled and reverberated. Total silence followed as all looked at the large man with the revolver in hand.
    “Y’all, you git back on patrol,” he told his deputies. “Old man, you stay here, moored to that dock. At first light, you be gone, or by God, I’ll make you wish you had. And you, Mr. Lawyer, you git back on that boat, and don’t you come off to step on the dirt of my county ever agin. If you do, I will personally have a knot beaten into your head that will last forever, and you can tell all your fancy Arkansas people, I got this knot in Thebes, Mississip, on account of some drownded niggers. And I don’t care to speak again on this subject, no more, never.”
    “Sheriff, you are making a big mistake.”
    “Jed, you stay down here, make sure these two don’t roam. And make sure they put off with the light. They give you any trouble, you can whip up on them any old way you want. Now I’m going home to get my supper.”
    Jed detached himself from his chums and swaggered down. He was a big ol’ boy, with three guns, and cords and leathers and belts everywhere. He looked just dumb enough to take all this seriously, and wouldn’t be convincible elsewise. He’d as soon hit you with the club he carried as listen.
    He spat a wad into the water, where it popped wetly as it hit.
    “Don’t you worry, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll take care of these boys, you can bet on it.”
     
     
    S AM awakened in the dark.
    He had reached his conclusion at last.
    He’d been building toward it for a long piece, fighting its implications, aware that he was troubling with the very stuff of his life, his destiny, his fate.
    But now he knew he could not spend his time in Blue Eye, Arkansas, pretending to represent law and order, while three hundred miles away this chancre perpetuated itself, unseen, unmolested, uncontested.
    He knew: Thebes must fall.
    Somehow, some way, it must fall. In his mind, he sketched out a plan. It was orderly and well founded, almost certain to succeed. He would have to form a committee of well regarded, unassailably moral Southern prosecutors—he knew many of them—and very carefully review and accumulate the evidence. An unassailable report had to be created. Then, carefully, copies of this document must be given to selected press, which would reveal the findings on the day that his committee presented the report to the governor of the state of Mississippi, the speaker of the house in the Mississippi state assembly, Mississippi’s two senators and five congressmen, hell, maybe even, for the publicity value alone, Harry S. Damn Truman himself, or, since all this was some years off, whomsoever bigwigged war general was in the White House.
    It had to be done square and legal, one step at a time, with an eye toward reality, so that the final product had a rightness to it that