And it might not have been the third day either. In fact, he couldn't remember how many days it had been, when at last he heard the sudden thunder of the hooves on the bridge and then saw them: the stallion boring, frothing a little, wrenching its arrogant vicious head at the snaffle and curb both with which Houston rode it, the big lean hound bounding along beside it. He cocked the two hammers and pushed the gun through the port-hole, and even as he laid the sight on Houston's chest, leading him just a little, his finger already taking up the slack in the front trigger, he thought 'And even now; They still aint satisfied yet', thinking how if there had only been time, space, between the roar of the gun and the impact of the shot, for him to say to Houston and for Houston to have to hear it: "I aint shooting you because of them thirty-seven and a half four-bit days. That's all right; I done long ago forgot and forgive that. Likely Will Varner couldn't do nothing else, being a rich man too and all you rich folks has got to stick together or else maybe some day the ones that aint rich might take a notion to raise up and take hit away from you. That aint why I shot you. I killed you because of that-ere extry one-dollar pound fee."

When he had nothing, he could afford to chew tobacco; when he had a little, he could afford to chew gum; when he found out he could be rich provided he just didn't die before hand, he couldn't afford to chew anything.

Flem never even went into (any of the rooms of the house) except to eat in the diningroom, except that one room at the back where when he wasn't in the bed sleeping he was setting in another swivel chair like the one in the bank, with his feet propped against the side of the firplace: not reading, not doing nothing; jest sitting with his hat on, chewing that same little mouth-sized chunk of air he had been chewing ever since he quit tobacco when he finally got to Jefferson and heard about chewing gum and then quit chewing gum too when he found out folks considered the vice president of a bank rich enough not to have to chew anything. And how Wat Snopes had found a picture in a magazine how to do over all the fireplaces with colonial molding and colyums and cornices too and at first Flem would jest set with his feet propped on the white paint, scratching it a little deeper ever day with the pegs in his heels. Until one day about a year after the house was finished, Wat Snopes was there to eat dinner and after Wat finally left the yard man said how he went into the room and seen it: not a defiance, not a simple reminder of where he had come from but rather as the feller says a reaffirmation of his-self and maybe a warning to his-self too: a little wood ledge, not even painted, nailed to the front of that hand-carved hand-painted Mount Vernon mantelpiece at the exact height for Flem to prop his feet on it.

And two days later we was back home, covering in two days the distance it taken that first V.K. four generations to do.

So all that remained for her and Gavin was continence. To put it crudely, morality. Because where could they go. Not to her house because between her and her father, the wrong one was deaf. And not to his because the house he lived in wasn't his but Mother's and one of the earliest (when the time came of course) principles he taught me was that a gentleman does not bring his paramour into the home of: in this order: His wife. His mother. His sister. His mistress. And they couldn't make the coincidental trips to the available places in Memphis or New Orleans or maybe as far away as St. Louis and Chicago that (we assumed) her mother and Manfred de Spain used to make, since even police morality, not to mention that of that semi-underwold milieu to which they would have had to resort, whould have revolted at the idea of seducing a stone deaf woman from the safety and innocence of her country home town, to such a purpose. So that left only his automobile, concealed desperately and frantically behind a bush--Gavin Stevens, aged fifty, M.A. Harvard, Ph.D. Heidelberg, LI.B. Mississippi, American Field Service and Y.M.C.A., France 1915-1918, County Attorney; and Linda Kohl, thirty, widow, wounded in action with the Communist forces in Spain, fumbling and panting in a parked automobile like they were seventeen years old.

Old Snopes neither smoked nor drank nor even chewed tobacco; what his jaws worked steadily on was, as Ratliff put it, the same little chunk of Frenchman's Bend air he had brought in his mouth when he moved to Jefferson thirty years ago.

"Two years of life are not important," she said. "'Two years of jail are."