Sure enough, he come to a stop as sudden as if the Angel Gabriel had hollered “Whoa.” He teetered on his legs, like the underpinnings of a house wavering in a storm. He sunk down to the ground and heaved a relieved kind of a sigh and he didn’t move no more. Wherever ’twas he’d had it in his mind to go, he’d done got there.

“He’s dead,” Will called. “Snort’s dead.”

All the Oak Bluff folks come running, men and women and young uns. It was like a person had died. A annoying kind of a person, but you can’t be annoyed for nearly thirty year without feeling soberlike when the hand of death ends it.

“Well, men,” I said to Jim and Luty, “I reckon now you’re proud you made up your quarrel, and the old feller on his last legs.”

They nodded. Then something come to me like a lightning bolt. It come to me the creetur’d been as ornery dying as he was a-living. He’d done died right smack in the middle of my sweet potatoes.

I held in a while, not wishing not to show no respect.

Then I said, “I reckon you’ll be hauling the pore feller off together to bury him. You, Jim, and Luty, together.”

“Well,” Jim said, hesitant, “I hadn’t yet takened possession of him. He was yet working for Luty. And drunk to boot. But if it don’t come too high, I reckon I’d as lief bear my share.”

Luty didn’t say nothing. Jim couldn’t think of nothing but the expense, but Luty was deep-grieved. Then Jim brightened. He was fixing to get his money’s worth in meanness.

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s a satisfaction to know he was on his way home to me. Old Snort sure lit out for my place when his last hour come.”

Luty looked up then. He faced Jim and he studied him. I could see his look plain in the moonlight. It was the same look he’d had when he throwed the bream in the creek.

“Well, Jim,” he said, and his voice was slow and easy and cold as ice, “seeing as how you say he was on his way to you and them sneaking cows, I don’t figure it’s my responsibility. He’s your mule, Snort is. You been wanting him for yours all his life. Now you take him.”

And he turned and walked off home and his hound behind him.

“Indeed you’ll not get out of it that-a-way, Luty Higgenbotham,” Jim hollered. “I might of knowed you’d try to get out of paying your just dues. I’ll not lift a hand to bury him.”

A desperate kind of a feeling come over me.

“But Jim!” I called. “But Luty! The creetur’s in my sweet potatoes!”