Page:Requiem for a Nun (1919) Faulkner.djvu/12

II

THE COURTHOUSE

Even the jailbreak was fortuity: a gang — three or four — of Natchez Trace bandits (twenty-five years later legend would begin to afiirm, and a hundred years later would still be M it, that two of the bandits were the Harpes hemselves. Big Harpe anyway, since the circumstances, the method of the breakout left behind like a smell, an odour a kind of gargantuan and bizarre playfulness at »ce humorous and terrifying, as, if the settlement had Fallen, blundered, into the notice or range of an idle and whimsical giant.Which — that they were the Harpes — ^was impossible, since the Harpes and even the last of Mason’s ruffians were dead or scattered by this time, and the robbers would have had to belong to John Murrel’s organisation — if they needed to belong to any at all other than the simple firaternity of rapine.) captflred by chance by an in-cidental band of civilian more-or-less militia and brought in to the Jefferson jail because it was the nearest one, the militia band being part of a general muster at Jefferson two days before for a Fourth-of-July barbecue, which by the second day had been refined by hardy eUmination into one drunken brlwling which rendered even the hardiest survivors vulnerable enough to be gected from the settlement by the civilian residents, the band which was to make the capture having been carried, still comatose, in one of the evicting wagons to a swamp four miles firom Jefferson known as Hurricane Bottoms, where they made camp to regain their strength or at least their legs, and where that night the four — or three — bandits, on the way across country to their hide-out firom their last exploit on the Trace, scumbled onto the campfire. And here report di'^ded; some said tbat the sergeant in command of the militia recognised one of the bandits as a deserter fix>m his