274
PARTISAN REVIEW
fifth road. "Only three roads remain." And with growing anxiety
he hurried to get home before night fell.
He found the fifth road, which was much longer, and he
was
obliged to leave the market place even earlier. He took this road sev–
eral times without meeting a thing. But one day he saw an old man
sitting at the roadside. The horse stopped and pricked up its ears.
"Giddap, old boy," said the man, spurring it on.
But the horse stood stock still. The man on the roadside had two
clear gray eyes; he had a nose, but no mouth. Nevertheless he spoke:
"Your horse doesn't want to go," he said.
"How are you able to speak, man? How can you speak without
a mouth?"
The man raised his hand in the air. It was a very white hand
and in it was
,a
mouth which spoke. The rider passed around
him,
but the next day when he saw the old man sitting in the bend of
the road, he turned tail and went back to the market place. He
looked for the other road, the sixth one. Only two remained. He
was
sure of finding something on the sixth road too, and he said to
him·
self, "What awaits me on this road?" Now he found a tree which,
instead of growing, diminished. First it was very large, but every
day it seemed to shrink a little. After passing
it
for two weeks, he
noticed that the tree had become a shrub, had taken human fonn,
and was about to speak. He heard a whispering which could have
been the sound of fallen leaves, and then part of a song's refrain:
Of my wood are gallows made,
Of my wood.
...
The rider said, "I know now. On that tree a man was hanged two
weeks ago."
Resigned and crestfallen, he looked for the seventh road. He
knew that this was the last and that
if
he should have to give it up,
there would be nothing to do but go by no road at all, since the
white men had appropriated all the others.
Then he had an idea which seemed very appropriate. Perhaps
all these mishaps, which always befell him at the same hour, would
no longer occur by the light of day; and he decided to return early,
so that when he got home the sun would not yet have set. "Hereafter,
I shall always return by day," he said.
