Free Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner Page A

there and ride with his troop. Tell him I can ride, and maybe I can learn to shoot. Will you?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I’ll tell him you are not afraid too.”
    “Aren’t I?” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it. It doesn’t matter anyway. Just tell him I can ride and that I don’t get tired.” Her hand was on my shoulder; it felt thin and hard. “Will you do that for me? Ask him to let me come, Bayard.”
    “All right,” I said. Then I said, “I hope he will let you.”
    “So do I,” she said. “Now you go back to bed. Good night.”
    I went back to bed. After a while I was asleep.
    And by sunup we were on the road again, with Cousin Drusilla on Bobolink beside the wagon.
    It took us all that day to get through them, like Cousin Drusilla said. We began to see the dust almost at once, and then I began to smell them, and then we were in the middle of them—men carrying babies, and women dragging children by the hand, and women carrying babies, and old ones kind of pulling themselves along with sticks or sitting beside the road and holding up their hands and even calling to us when we passed, and one old woman even running along holding to the wagon and hollering at Granny to at least let her see the water before she died.
    But mostly they didn’t even look at us. We didn’t try to ask them to let us through; it was like we could look at their faces and know that they couldn’t have heard us. They were not singing yet; they were just hurrying, with our horses pushing slow through them, and their blank eyes not looking at anything out of faces caked with dust and sweat, and our horses and Bobolink shoving slow through them like trying to ride up a creek full of floating logs, and the dust everywhere, and Ringo holding the parasol over Granny and his eyes getting whiter and whiter, and Granny with Mrs. Compson’s hat on, and the smell of them, and Granny looking sicker and sicker. Then it was afternoon. I had forgot about time. All of a sudden we began to hear them where the cavalry was holding them back from the bridge.
    It was just a sound at first, like wind, like it might be in the dust itself, and Cousin Drusilla hollering, “Look out, Aunt Rosa! Oh, look out!”
    It was like we all heard it at the same time—us in the wagon and on the horse—and the faces all around us under the sweat-caked dust. They made a kind of long wailing sound, and then I could feel the whole wagon rise up and begin to run forward. I saw our old rib-gaunted horses standing on their hind feet one minute andthen turned sideways in the traces the next, and Cousin Drusilla leaning forward a little and holding Bobolink, and I saw men and women and children going down under the horses, and we could feel the wagon going over them and we could hear them screaming. And we couldn’t stop any more than if the earth had tilted up and was sliding us all down toward the river.
    It went fast, like that, like it did every time; it was like the Yankees were a kind of gully, and every time Granny and Ringo and I got close to them, we would go rushing down into the gully like three rocks. Because all of a sudden it was sunset; there was a high, bright, rosy glow quiet behind the trees and shining on the river, and we saw the bridge full of Yankee soldiers running across to the other bank. I remember watching horses’ and mules’ heads mixed up with the bayonets, and then the barrels of cannon tilted up and kind of rushing slow across the high air, like split-cane clothespins being jerked along the clothesline, and the singing everywhere up and down the river bank, with the voices of the women coming out of it high, and then hollering “Glory!” and “Jesus!”
    They were fighting now. There was a cleared space between the end of the bridge and the backs of the cavalry. I was watching the horses rearing and shoving against them, and the men beating at them with their scabbards, and the last of the infantry running onto the bridge, and