The Reivers by William Faulkner Page B

you calls it to get all joogled up to where it would decide to blow up too. What did you aim for me to do? That was just four miles from town. You'd make me walk back home."
    "This is ten miles now," Boon said. "What makes you think you aint going to walk them back home?"
    I said, rapidly, quickly: "Have you forgot? That was Wyott's about two miles back. We might just as well be two miles from Bay St Louis."
    "That's right," Ned said pleasantly. "The walking aint near so fur from here." Boon didn't look at him long.
    "Get out and fold up that tarpollyon where it wont take up no more room than it has to," he told Ned. "And air it off some too if we got to ride with it."
    "It was all that bumping and jolting you done," Ned said. "You talk like I broke my manners just on purpose to get caught."
    Also, Boon lit the headlights while we were stopped, and now he wiped his feet and legs off on a corner of the tarpaulin and put his socks and shoes on and rolled his pants back down; they were already drying. The sun was gone now; already you could see the moonlight. It would be full night when we reached Ballenbaugh's.
    I understand that Ballenbaugh's is now a fishing camp run by an off-and-on Italian bootlegger—off I mean during the one or two weeks it takes each new sheriff every four years to discover the true will of the people he thought voted for him; all that stretch of river bottom which was a part of Thomas Sutpen's doomed baronial dreaim and the site of Major de Spain's hunting camp is now a drainage district; the wilderness where Boon himself in his youth hunted (or anyway was present while his betters did) bear and deer and panther, is tame with cotton and corn now and even Wyott's Crossing is only a name.
    Even in 1905 there was still vestigial wilderness, though most of the deer and all the bears and panthers (also Major de Spain and his hunters) were gone; the ferry also; and now we called Wyott's Crossing the Iron Bridge, THE Iron Bridge since it was the first iron bridge and for several years yet the only one we in Yoknapatawpha County had or knew of. But back in the old days, in the time of our own petty Chickasaw kings, IssetibbeJha and Moke-tubbe and the regicide-usurper who called himself Doom, and the first Wyott came along and the Indians showed him the crossing and he built his store and ferry-boat and named it after himself, this was not only the only crossing within miles but the head of navigation too; boats (in the high water of winter, even a small steamboat) came as it were right to Wyott's front door, bringing the whiskey and plows and coal oil and peppermint candy up from Vicks-burg and carrying the cotton and furs back.
    But Memphis was nearer than Vicksburg even by mule team, so they built a road as straight from Jefferson to the south bend of Wyott's ferryboat as they could run it, and as straight from the north end of the ferry-boat to Memphis as they could run that. So the cotton and freight began to come and go that way, mule- or ox-drawn; whereupon there appeared immediately from nowhere an ancestryless giant calling himself Ballenbaugh; some said he actually bought from Wyott the small dim heretofore peaceful one-room combined residence and store, including whatever claim he (Wyott) considered he had in the old Chickasaw crossing; others said that Ballenbaugh simply suggested to Wyott that he (Wyott) had been there long enough now and the time had come for him to move four miles back from the river and become a farmer.
    Anyway, that's what Wyott did. And then his little wilderness-cradled hermitage became a roaring place indeed: it became dormitory, grubbing station and saloon for the transient freighters and the fixed crews of hard-mouthed hard-souled mule skinners who met the wagons at both edges of the bottom, with two and three and (when necessary) four span of already geared-up mules, to curse the heavy wagons in to the ferry on one side of the river, and from the ferry to high ground once