The Bully grunted without enthusiasm. He was present because Ellie had wanted to come, "t' pick up a purty fer the house," and he wasn't going to have his woman going to an auction alone. Next time, though, she could stay to home. . . .
The chest finally sold for three dollars and a half. Taxes had accumulated for many years on the Neill property, but neither Sheriff Tillinghast nor any of his predecessors had chosen to bring matters to a head while the Baron was in possession. When Baron Neill and his whole clan vanished—no one knew or cared where, so long as the Neills were gone for good—the sheriff had promptly set the tax sale.
There was a good crowd, 300 at least, swirling around the run-down cabin and sheds, but the bidding was slow. At the current rate, the auction wouldn't bring enough to cover the accumulated tax bills.
"I don't like this place airy bit," Ellie murmured, more to herself than to Bully. He grunted noncommittally and, though he didn't draw away from her touch, neither did he circle her with his strong right arm.
The sheriff wiped his brow with a kerchief. His assistants were Mitch Reynolds and Jeb Cage, a pair of idlers working for the promise of whiskey after the auction. Tillinghast motioned them to bring up the next lot.
This place had an atmosphere even after the Neills themselves were gone. It made folk uneasy and weighed down the bidding. Even the sheriff, spurred by the knowledge that part of the taxes he collected went directly into his pocket by law—and another portion arrived there by other means—was unable to raise a proper enthusiasm for his task.
Tillinghast's assistants grunted as they lifted a small travelling case containing a uniformly bound set of books. "Here we go!" the sheriff said. "Must be nigh twinty books right here, 'n a real jam li'l chest besides. Who'll start the bid at five dollas?"
"What're the books?" someone called from the crowd.
"Hit don't signify!" snapped Sheriff Tillinghast. "Why, they's so many I reckon thar's one uv airy thing a man might wish t' read!"
"They're Frinch," Jeb Cage said unexpectedly. If Tillinghast had known the blamed drunken fool could read, he would have told Cage to keep his mouth shut on pain of losing the promised popskull.
The crowd burst out laughing. A number of the folk here spoke French from keelboat journeys down the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi to New Orleans. The vocabulary learned in the cribs of the French Quarter was not the language of Voltaire; and anyway, speaking was not the same as reading.
"Hey, Shuruff!" somebody called. "I figger you know now whur thet Frinchman disappeared on the way from Columbia back in twinny-siven, don't ye?"
"Some of the books, they may be Frinch, I don't know," Tillinghast said loudly in an attempt to retrieve the situation. He wiped his forehead again. "Now, this is a right fine chest. Who'll start the bidding at a dolla a dolla a dolla, who gimme a dolla?"
"Why, I reckon the Frenchman, he give the durn thing t' Baron Neill fer free!" a heckler called from the crowd.
"Aye!" another chimed in. "An' he fed their hogs fer 'em in a neighborly way too er it's a pity!"
"Cull, I don't reckon I want t' stay much longer," Ellie Ransden murmured to the man at her side.
She'd dragged him to the auction for a change, and in the vague hope that something pretty for the cabin might be going at the slight price she and Bullie could afford. She'd ignored who—and what—the Neills were, though. You couldn't separate an object from its past, any more than you'd eat pork from a sow been grubbing in a grave. . . .
"I give ye a dolla," offered a farmer named Murchison. "Reckon the case, hit's worth sompin."
Tillinghast glanced around the personality waiting for sale. He saw his chance to keep the bidding alive by throwing in an item he hadn't a prayer of selling by itself. He raised a cubical box some six inches to a side and placed it atop the chest of books.
"Hyar!" the sheriff called. "We'll sweeten the pot fer all you bettin' men out thar. This here box, hit goes with the books t' boot."
Ellie felt Bully Ransden stiffen as though he had been changed to a statue of oak. She looked at him in surprise. His mouth was slightly open.
"Waal, what's in the durned box, Shurrif?" someone demanded from the back of the crowd.
"Don't rightly know, Windell," Tillinghast replied smugly. "Don't rightly see how hit opens, neither. Reckon airy man with a drap uv sportin' blood'll want the box t' larn fer himse'f, though."
The box made no sound when it was shaken. Either it was empty or, just possibly, it wasn't a box at all: merely a block of wood less dense than it seemed from its hard surface to be.