full extent of the law, and you can tell him so.”
“But maybe another drugstore would,” she said.
“Then I don’t want to know it. Me, that’s—” Then I looked at her. But it’s a hard life they have; sometimes a man … if there can ever be any excuse for sin, which it can’t be. And then, life wasn’t made to be easy on folks: they wouldn’t ever have any reason to be good and die. “Look here,” I said. “You get that notion out of your head. The Lord gave you what you have, even if He did use the devil to do it; you let Him take it away from you if it’s His will to do so. You go on back to Lafe and you and him take that ten dollars and get married with it.”
“Lafe said I could get something at the drugstore,” she said.
“Then go and get it,” I said. “You won’t get it here.”
She went out, carrying the package, her feet making a little hissing on the floor. She bumbled again at the door and went out. I could see her through the glass going on down the street.
It was Albert told me about the rest of it. He said the wagon was stopped in front of Grummet’s hardware store, with the ladies all scattering up and down the street with handkerchief to their noses, and a crowd of hard-nosed men and boys standing around the wagon, listening to the marshal arguing with the man. He was a kind of tall, gaunted man sitting on the wagon, saying it was a public street and he reckoned he had as much right there as anybody, and the marshal telling him he would have to move on; folks couldn’t stand it. It had been dead eight days, Albert said. They came from some place out in Yoknapatawpha county, trying to get to Jefferson with it. It must have been like a piece of rotten cheese coming into an anthill, in that ramshackle wagon that Albert said folks were scared would fall all to pieces before they could get it out of town, with that homemade box and another fellow with a broken leg lying on a