Outer Dark

You married?

No. I ain’t married. He looked up at the squire. Their shadows canted upon the whitewashed brick of the kitchen shed in a pantomime of static violence in which the squire reeled backward and he leaned upon him in headlong assault. It ain’t no crime to be poor, he said.

No, it ain’t. It ain’t a crime. I hope you’ve not got a family. It’s a sacred thing, a family. A sacred obligation. Afore God. The squire had been looking away and now he turned to Holme again. It ain’t no crime to be poor, he said. That’s right. But shiftlessness is a sin, I would judge. Wouldn’t you?

I reckon, he said.

They got the awfullest jail in the state.

I ain’t never been in jail, Holme said.

You ain’t never been in Cheatham.

Holme put his hands in the bib of his overalls.

What trade do ye follow? The man said.

I ain’t got nary.

The man nodded.

I can work, Holme said. I ain’t no slack hand.

You aim to hunt work in Cheatham?

I’d studied it.

He nodded again. They went on.

He wore a shapeless and dusty suit of black linen that was small on him and his beard and hair were long and black and tangled. […] He said nothing. They gave before him until he reached the wagon and stood looking down at the man in the bed of it. They waited, a mass of grave faces. He turned slowly and looked about him. It’s old man Salter, one said. Dead. Stobbed and murdered. He nodded. All right, he said, Let’s be for findin the man that done it. And in the glare of the torches nothing of his face visible but the eyes like black agates, nothing of his beard or the suit he wore gloss enough to catch the light and nothing about his hulking dusty figure other than its size to offer why these townsmen should follow him along the road this night.