“Sho,” I said. “It’ll be fine here. Safe, too. Now let’s go back and eat supper.”
“I thank you,” Anse said. “We got a little something in the basket. We can make out.”
“Where’d you get it?” I said.
“We brought it from home.”
“But it’ll be stale now,” I said. “Come and get some hot victuals.”
But they wouldn’t come. “I reckon we can make out,” Anse said. So I went home and et and taken a basket back to them and tried again to make them come back to the house.
“I thank you,” he said. “I reckon we can make out.” So I left them there, squatting around a little fire, waiting; God knows what for.
I come on home. I kept thinking about them there, and about that fellow tearing away on that horse. And that would be the last they would see of him. And I be durn if I could blame him. Not for wanting to not give up his horse, but for getting shut of such a durn fool as Anse.
Or that’s what I thought then. Because be durn if there ain’t something about a durn fellow like Anse that seems to make a man have to help him, even when he knows he’ll be wanting to kick himself next minute. Because about a hour after breakfast next morning Eustace Grimm that works Snopes’ place come up with a span of mules, hunting Anse.
“I thought him and Anse never traded,” I said.
“Sho,” Eustace said. “All they liked was the horse. Like I said to Mr. Snopes, he was letting this team go for fifty dollars, because if his uncle Flem had a just kept them Texas horses when he owned them, Anse wouldn’t a never—”