The Unvanquished Read Online Free

even Louvinia calling us sounded faint and small. We looked up the road in the starlight, after the mule. “That’s where Corinth is,” I said.
    He didn’t get back until after dark the next day. We stayed close to the house and watched the road by turns, to get Louvinia calmed down in case it would be late before he got back. It was late; she had followed us up to bed and we had slipped out again; we were just passing Joby’s cabin when the door opened and Loosh kind of surged up out of the darkness right beside us. He was almost close enough for me to have touched him and he did not see us at all; all of a sudden he was just kind of hanging there against the lighted doorway like he had been cut out of tin in the act of running and was inside the cabin and the door shut black again almost before we knew what we had seen. And when we looked in the window he was standing in front of the fire, with his clothes torn and muddy where he had been hiding in swamps and bottoms from the Patrollers and with that look on his face again which resembled drunkenness but was not, as if he had not slept in a long time and did not want to sleep now, and Joby and Philadelphy leaning into the firelight and looking at him and Philadelphy’s mouth open too and the same look on her face. Then I saw Louvinia standing in the door. We had not heard her behind us yet there she was, with one hand on thedoor jamb, looking at Loosh, and again she didn’t have on Father’s old hat.
    “You mean they gwinter free us all?” Philadelphy said. “We gonter all be free?”
    “Yes,” Loosh said, loud, with his head flung back; he didn’t even look at Joby when Joby said, “Hush up, Loosh!”—“Yes!” Loosh said. “Ginral Sherman gonter sweep the earth and the Race gonter all be free!”
    Then Louvinia crossed the floor in two steps and hit Loosh across the head hard with her flat hand. “You black fool!” she said. “Do you think there’s enough Yankees in the whole world to whip the white folks?”
    We ran to the house, we didn’t wait for Louvinia; again we didn’t know that she was behind us. We ran into the room where Granny was sitting beside the lamp with the bible open on her lap and her neck arched to look at us across her spectacles. “They’re coming here!” I said. “They’re coming to set us free!”
    “What?” she said.
    “Loosh saw them! They’re just down the road. It’s General Sherman and he’s going to make us all free!” And we watching her, waiting to see who she would send for to take down the musket: whether it would be Joby because he was the oldest, or Loosh because he had seen them and would know what to shoot at. Then she shouted too, and her voice was strong and loud as Louvinia’s:
    “You, Bayard Sartoris! Aint you in bed yet? Louvinia!” she shouted. Louvinia came in. “Take these children up to bed and if you hear another sound out ofthem tonight you have my permission and my insistence too to whip them both.”
    It didn’t take us long to get to bed. But we couldn’t talk even then, because Louvinia was going to bed on the cot in the hall. And Ringo was afraid to come up in the bed with me, so I got down on the pallet with him. “We’ll have to watch the road,” I said. Ringo whimpered.
    “Look like hit haf to be us,” he said.
    “Are you scared?”
    “I aint very,” he said. “I just wish Marse John was here.”
    “Well he’s not,” I said. “It’ll have to be us.”
    We watched the road for two days, lying in the cedar copse. Now and then Louvinia hollered at us but we told her where we were and that we were making another map, and besides she could see the cedar copse from the kitchen. It was cool and shady there, and quiet, and Ringo slept most of the time and I slept some too. I was dreaming, it was like I was looking at our place and suddenly the house and stable and cabins and trees and all were gone and I was looking at a place flat and empty as the sideboard and it