“He’s already started something. You can’t do nothing to him now. Even if you were to put him in the hospital, when he got healed up, he’d be out here with that satchel planting that salt.” He let Harry help him to the wagon. “Get me back up there. I might as well watch this sitting down. It’ll take a long time.”

—

THE NEGROES had arrived shortly after Mister Harper returned to the wagon and had clustered down the road. The white men had watched them carefully, looking for something that might help them to understand what they were seeing. But they had found only a reflection of their own dismay, tempered perhaps with tolerance. They don’t know nothing neither. You can see that. It’s like he’s an Egyptian, and they don’t know no more about this than they know, than we all know, about riding a camel.

Out across the partially whitened field, Tucker had continued to fling the hail-like crystals, had made trip after trip, filling the satchel and emptying its contents, handful after abundant handful on the field. The sun had curved down toward the trees; when Tucker was finished it was no more than three fingers above the horizon. He came back across the field and tossed the satchel on the still unexhausted mound, and in the silence of the late afternoon, wiping sweat from his face with his sleeve, surveyed his day’s work and then went into the house.

“Would you look at that?” Stewart turned from the fence. “What a waste of good salt. I bet you could make a lot of ice cream with that much salt.” He was joking.

“Keep quiet, Stewart.” Mister Harper leaned forward. “Maybe you’ll learn something.”

The door opened and Tucker came into the yard carrying, in one hand, an ax, in the other, a rifle. He leaned both against the corral fence and disappeared around the house. When he came back he was leading his horse, an old gray animal with a slight limp, and a cow the color of freshly cut lumber. He opened the gate of the corral and for an instant stared at the animals, petting first one and then the other. Harry saw him stand straighter and heave, then pull them into the corral, close the gate, climb and sit on the fence with the rifle across his knees.

He shot the horse in the head just behind the ear and sticky blood ran down its neck and left foreleg. It stood for a full ten seconds, its lids stretched over bulging eyes, took a blind step and collapsed. The cow, smelling death and blood, steamed across the corral at top speed, her udders swinging violently. After she was hit, she kept moving until she banged into the fence, bounced back, turned to Tucker with the quizzical expression of a woman who has just been slapped for no apparent reason, screamed and crumpled. Tucker climbed down and looked them over.