But
then I said, you are foolish. He had the money from the bank. I did
not know. And then my house was on fire. No, it was not my boy that
went away; it was that _cachorra_ all the time. You darned fools!
Did you think I was waiting for my own boy?"
"Now I show you all," he said at the end. "And now I can get hanged."
No one ever touched Boaz Negro for that murder. For murder it was in
the eye and letter of the Law. The Law in a small town is sometimes
a curious creature; it is sometimes blind only in one eye.
Their minds and imaginations in that town were arrested by the
romantic proportions of the act. Simply, no one took it up. I
believe the man, Wood, was understood to have died of heart-failure.
When they asked Boaz why he had not told what he knew as to the
identity of that fugitive in the night, he seemed to find it hard to
say exactly. How could a man of no education define for them his own
but half-denied misgivings about the Law, his sense of oppression,
constraint and awe, of being on the defensive, even, in an abject way,
his skepticism? About his wanting, come what might, to "keep clear
of the Law"?
He did say this, "You would have laughed at me."
And this, "If I told folk it was Wood went away, then I say he would
not dare come back again.
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