He didn’t look at me. “I give a chattel mortgage on my cultivator and seeder,” he said.
“But they ain’t worth forty dollars. How far do you aim to get with a forty-dollar team?”
They were all watching him now, quiet and steady. Jewel was stopped, halfway back, waiting to go on to the horse. “I give other things,” Anse said. He begun to mumble his mouth again, standing there like he was waiting for somebody to hit him and him with his mind already made up not to do nothing about it.
“What other things?” Darl said.
“Hell,” I said. “You take my team. You can bring them back. I’ll get along some way.”
“So that’s what you were doing in Cash’s clothes last night,” Darl said. He said it just like he was reading it outen the paper. Like he never give a durn himself one way or the other. Jewel had come back now, standing there, looking at Anse with them marble eyes of hisn. “Cash aimed to buy that talking machine from Suratt with that money,” Darl said.
Anse stood there, mumbling his mouth. Jewel watched him. He ain’t never blinked yet.
“But that’s just eight dollars more,” Darl said, in that voice like he was just listening and never give a durn himself. “That still won’t buy a team.”
Anse looked at Jewel quick, kind of sliding his eyes that way, then he looked down again. “God knows, if there were ere a man,” he says. Still they didn’t say nothing. They just watched him, waiting, and him sliding his eyes toward their feet and up their legs but no higher. “And the horse,” he says.