through now if it t-t-t-takes a lifetime!” Then, turning to his brother, he said shortly: “All right, Gene. C-c-come on. We’re g-g-getting out of town.”
Without further speech, they walked on down the street until they came to the place where Luke’s car was parked.
“W-w-w-what do you want to d-d-d-do, Gene?” he said quietly. “Do you want to go over to D-d-Daisy’s tonight?”
The boy shook his head: “No,” he said thickly. “Home. Home. Let’s get out of here. Got to go home now.”
Luke said nothing for a moment, thrusting his fingers through his hair. “W-w-w-well,” he muttered at length, “perhaps you’re right.”
XLV
They left town at once.
Luke drove savagely going out of town. He kept his big clumsy hands gripped hard upon the rim of the steering wheel, his brow knit and furrowed by its ridge of wrinkles, his face taut and drawn from the tension of his nerves. From time to time he would thrust his clumsy fingers strongly through his flashing mass of hair, laugh a wild jeering “whah-whah” of rage and exasperation, and then say in a voice so packed with sneering bitterness and contempt that it was hard to keep from laughing at him:
“S—t! Resisting an officer in the p-p-p-p-performance of his duties! Now ain’t that nice?” he said in a voice of mincing refinement and daintiness. “W-w-w-wy the nice neat nigger-Baptist God-damned sons of bitches!” he snarled. “The cheap grafting South Car’lina bastards! D-d-d-d-disorderly conduct! S—t!” he snarled with a savage, dainty, mincing bitterness that was somehow wildly and explosively funny.
Meanwhile they were speeding along through quiet streets that even in the night-time had the worn and faded dustiness of autumn, past withered lawns, by frame-houses which had the same faded dusty look, and under trees on which the dry leaves hung and fluttered: the mournful, worn, weary feeling told of departed summer, evoked sadly the memory of a savage heat, and the sorrowful ghosts and omens of the autumn were everywhere about them. October was there with its strange, brooding presences of sorrow and delight—its sense of something lost and vanished, gone for ever, its still impending prescience of something grand and wild to come. Above them the ragged cloudy sky had
