498
PARTISAN REVIEW
in the full glare of the stump-pocked clearing during those first sum–
mers, solitary on its side of the dusty widening marked with an oc–
casiollal wheel but mostly by the prints of horses and men: Petti–
grew's private pony express until he and it were replaced by a
monthly stagecoach from Memphis, the race horse which Jason
Compson traded to Ikkemotubbe, old Mohataha's son and the last
ruling Chickasaw chief in that section, for a square of land so large
that, as the first formal survey revealed, the new courthouse would
have been only another of Compson's outbuildings had not the t.own
Corporation bought enough of it (at Compson's price ) to forefend
themselves being trespassers, and the saddle-mare which bore Doc–
tor Habersham's worn black bag (and which drew the buggy after
Doctor Habersham got too old and stiff to mount the saddle ), and
the mules which drew the wagon in which, seated in a rocking
chair beneath a French parasol held by a Negro slave girl, old Mo–
hataha would come to town on Saturdays (and came that last
time to set her capital X on the paper which ratified the disposses–
sion of her people forever, coming in the wagon that time too, bare–
foot as always but in the purple silk dress which her son, Ikkemo–
tubbe, had brought her back from France, and a hat crowned with
the royal-colored plume of a queen, beneath the slave-held parasol
still and with another female slave child squatting on her other side
holding the crusted slippers which she had never been able to get
her feet into, and in the back of the wagon the petty rest of the un–
marked Empire flotsam her son had brought to her which was
small enough to be moved; driving for the last time out of the
woods into the dusty widening before Ratcliffe's store where the
Federal land agent and his marshal waited for her with the paper,
and stopped the mules and sat for a little time, the young men of
her bodyguard squatting quietly about the halted wagon after the
eight-mile walk, while from the gallery of the store and of Holston's
tavern the settlement-the Ratcliffes and Compsons and Peabodys
and Pettigrews (( not Grenier and Holston and Habersham, because
Louis Grenier declined to come in to see it, and for tlle same rea–
son old Alec Holston sat alone on that hot afternoon before the
smoldering log in the fireplace of his taproom, and Doctor Haber–
sham was dead and his son had already departed for the West with
his bride, who was Mohataha's granddaughter, and
his
father-in-
