The Unvanquished Read Online Free Page B

But her voice was strong as ever:
    “What’s this? You, Marengo! What have you done?”
    “We shot the bastud, Granny!” Ringo said. “We kilt him!” Then Louvinia was there too, with her mouth still open too and her face like somebody had thrown ashes at her. Only it didn’t need her face; we heard the hooves jerking and sliding in the dirt and one of them hollering, “Get around to the back there, some of you!” and we looked up and saw them ride past the window—the blue coats and the guns. Then we heard the boots and spurs on the porch.
    “Granny!” I said. “Granny!” But it seemed like none of us could move at all, we just had to stand therelooking at Granny with her hand at her breast and her face looking like she had died and her voice like she had died too:
    “Louvinia! What is this? What are they trying to tell me?” That’s how it happened, like when once the musket decided to go off, all that was to occur afterward tried to rush into the sound of it all at once. I could still hear it, my ears were still ringing, so that Granny and Ringo and I all seemed to be talking far away. Then she said, “Quick! Here!” and then Ringo and I were squatting with our chins under our knees, on either side of her against her legs, with the hard points of the chair rockers jammed into our backs and her skirts spread over us like a tent, and the heavy feet coming in and (Louvinia told us afterward) the Yankee sergeant shaking the musket at Granny and saying,
    “Come on, grandma. Where are they? We saw them run in here.”
    We couldn’t see, we just squatted in a kind of faint gray light and that smell of Granny that her clothes and bed and room all had and Ringo’s eyes looking like two plates of chocolate pudding and maybe both of us thinking how Granny had never whipped us for anything in our lives except lying, and that even when it wasn’t even a told lie but just keeping quiet, how she would whip us first and then make us kneel down and kneel down with us herself to ask the Lord to forgive us.
    “You are mistaken,” she said. “There are no children in this house nor on this place. There is no one hereat all except my servant and myself and the people in the quarters.”
    “You mean you deny ever having seen this gun before?”
    “I do.” It was that quiet; she didn’t move at all, sitting bolt upright and right on the edge of the chair to keep her skirts spread over us. “If you doubt me, you may search the house.”
    “Dont you worry about that, I’m going to. Send some of the boys upstairs,” he said. “If you find any locked doors, you know what to do. And tell them fellows out back to comb and curry the barn and the cabins too.”
    “You wont find any locked doors,” Granny said. “At least let me ask you——”
    “Dont you ask anything, grandma. You set still. Better for you if you had done a little asking before you sent them little devils out with this gun.”
    “Was there.……” We could hear her voice die away and then speak again, like she was behind it with a switch, making it talk. “Is he.…… it.…… the one who——”
    “Dead? Hell, yes. Broke his back and we had to shoot him.”
    “Had to——you had——shoot.……” I didn’t know horrified astonishment either, but Ringo and Granny and I were all three it.
    “Yes, by God. Had to shoot him. The best damn horse in the whole army. The whole damn regiment betting on him for next Sunday——” He said somemore, but we were not listening. We were not breathing either, glaring at one another in the gray gloom and I was almost shouting too, until Granny said it:
    “Didn’t——they didn’t——Oh, thank God! Thank God!”
    “We didn’t——” Ringo said.
    “Hsh!” I said. Because we didn’t have to say it, it was like we had had to hold our breaths for a long time without knowing it, and that now we could let go and breathe again. Maybe that was why we never heard the other man when he came in