The Unvanquished by William Faulkner Read Free Book Online Page A

was to go, and they decided themselves which one it would be; they decided in the one possible manner in which the victor could know that he had earned his right, the loser that he had been conquered by a better man; Uncle Buddy looked at Uncle Buck and said, “All right, ’Philus, you old butter-fingered son of a bitch. Get out the cards.”
    Father said it was fine, that there were people there who had never seen anything like it for cold and ruthless artistry. They played three hands of draw poker, the first two hands dealt in turn, the winner of the second hand to deal the third; they sat there (somebody had spread a blanket and the whole regiment watched) facing each other with the two old faces that did not look exactly alike so much as they looked exactly like something which after a while you remembered—the portraitof someone who had been dead a long time and that you knew just by looking at him he had been a preacher in some place like Massachusetts a hundred years ago; they sat there and called those face-down cards correctly without even looking at the backs of them apparently, so that it took sometimes eight and ten deals before the referees could be certain that neither of them knew exactly what was in the other’s hand. And Uncle Buck lost: so that now Uncle Buddy was a sergeant in Tennant’s brigade in Virginia and Uncle Buck was hobbling across the square, shaking his stick at me and hollering:
    “By Godfrey, there he is! There’s John Sartoris’ boy!”
    The captain came up and looked at me. “I’ve heard of your father,” he said.
    “Heard of him?” Uncle Buck shouted. By now people had begun to stop along the walk and listen to him, like they always did, not smiling so he could see it. “Who aint heard about him in this country? Get the Yankees to tell you about him sometime. By Godfrey, he raised the first damn regiment in Mississippi out of his own pocket, and took em to Ferginny and whipped Yankees right and left with em before he found out that what he had bought and paid for wasn’t a regiment of soldiers but a congress of politicians and fools. Fools I say!” he shouted, shaking the stick at me and glaring with his watery fierce eyes like the eyes of an old hawk, with the people along the street listening to him and smiling where he couldn’t see it and the strange captainlooking at him a little funny because he hadn’t heard Uncle Buck before; and I kept on thinking about Louvinia standing there on the porch with Father’s old hat on, and wishing that Uncle Buck would get through or hush so we could go on.
    “Fools, I say!” he shouted. “I dont care if some of you folks here do still claim kin with men that elected him colonel and followed him and Stonewall Jackson right up to spitting distance of Washington without hardly losing a man, and then next year turned around and voted him down to major and elected in his stead a damn feller that never even knowed which end of a gun done the shooting until John Sartoris showed him.” He quit shouting just as easy as he started but the shouting was right there, waiting to start again as soon as he found something else to shout about. “I wont say God take care of you and your grandma on the road, boy, because by Godfrey you dont need God’s nor nobody else’s help; all you got to say is ‘I’m John Sartoris’ boy; rabbits, hunt the canebrake’ and then watch the blue bellied sons of bitches fly.”
    “Are they leaving, going away?” the captain said.
    Then Uncle Buck begun to shout again, going into the shouting easy, without even having to draw a breath: “Leaving? Hell’s skillet, who’s going to take care of them around here? John Sartoris is a damn fool; they voted him out of his own private regiment in kindness, so he could come home and take care of his family, knowing that if he didn’t wouldn’t nobody around here be likely to. But that dont suit John Sartoris becauseJohn Sartoris is a damned confounded selfish