500
PARTISAN REVIEW
ply removed, obliterated, the milieu in which alone the forest man
could exist; then the land speculators and the traders in slaves and
whiskey who followed the husbandmen, and the politicians who fol–
lowed the land speculators, printing deeper and deeper the dust
of that dusty widening, until at last there was no mark of Chickasaw
left in it any more; watching (the jail) them all, from the first inno–
cent days when Doctor Habersham and his son and Alex Holston and
Louis Grenier were first guests and then friends of Ikkemotubbe's
Chickasaw clan; then an Indian agent and a land-office and a trad–
ing-post, and suddenly Ikkemotubbe and his Chickasaws were them–
selves the guests without being friends of the Federal Government;
then Ratcliffe, and the trading-post was no longer simply an Indian
trading-post, though Indians were still welcome, of course (since,
after all, they owned the land or anyway were on it first and claimed
it),
then Compson with his race horse and presently Compson began
to own the Indian accounts for tobacco and calico and jean pants
and cooking-pots on Ratcliffe's books (in time he would own Rat–
cliffe's books too) and one day Ikkemotubbe owned the race horse
and Compson owned the land itself, some of which the city fathers
would have to buy from him at his price in order to establish a
town; and Pettigrew with his tri-weekly mail, and then a monthly
stage and the new faces coming in faster than old Alex Holston,
arthritic and irascible, hunkered like an old surly bear over
his
smoldering hearth even in the heat of summer (he alone now of that
original three, since old Grenier no longer came in to the settle–
ment, and old Doctor Habersham was dead, and the old doctor's
son, in the opinion of the settlement, had already turned Indian
and renegade even at the age of twelve or fourteen) any longer
made any effort, wanted, to associate names with; and now indeed
the last moccasin print vanished from that dusty widening, the last
toed-in heelless light soft quick long-striding print pointing west
for an instant, then trodden from the sight and memory of man by
a heavy leather heel engaged not in the traffic of endurance and
hardihood and survival, but in money-taking with it (the print)
not only the moccasins but the deer-hide leggins and jerkin too, be–
cause Ikkemotubbe's Chickasaws now wore Eastern factory-made
jeans and shoes sold them on credit out of Ratcliffe's and Compson's
general store, walking in to the settlement on the white man's Satur-
