William Faulkner, SANCTUARY – WordPress.com - literature save 2

eneath his nightshirt, a tousled fringe of hair standing wildly about his bald head; three
other men passed the hotel running. They appeared to come from nowhere, to emerge in
midstride out of nothingness, fully dressed in the middle of the street, running.
"It is a fire," Horace said. He could see the glare; against it the jail loomed in stark
and savage silhouette.
"It's in that vacant lot," the proprietor said, clutching his trousers. "I cant go
because there aint anybody on the desk . . . "
Horace ran. Ahead of him he saw other figures running, turning into the alley
beside the jail; then he heard the sound of the fire; the furious sound of gasoline. He
turned into the alley. He could see the blaze, in the center of a vacant lot where on market
days wagons were tethered. Against the flames black figures showed, antic; he could hear
panting shouts; through a fleeting gap he saw a man turn and run, a mass of flames, still
carrying a five-gallon coal oil can which exploded with a rocket-like glare while he
carried it, running.
He ran into the throng, into the circle which had formed about a blazing mass in
the middle of the lot. From one side of the circle came the screams of the man about
whom the coal oil can had exploded, but from the central mass of fire there came no
sound at all. It was now indistinguishable, the flames whirling in long and thunderous
plumes from a white-hot mass out of which there defined themselves faintly the ends of a
few posts and planks. Horace ran among them; they were holding him, but he did not
know it; they were talking, but he could not hear the voices.
"It's his lawyer."
"Here's the man that defended him. That tried to get him clear."
"Put him in, too. There's enough left to burn a lawyer."
"Do to the lawyer what we did to him. What he did to her. Only we never used a
cob. We made him wish we had used a cob."
Horace couldn't hear them. He couldn't hear the man who had got burned
screaming. He couldn't hear the fire, though it still swirled upward unabated, as though it
were living upon itself, and soundless: a voice of fury like in a dream, roaring silently out
of a peaceful void.
XXX
The trains at Kinston were met by an old man who drove a seven passenger car. He was
thin, with gray eyes and a gray moustache with waxed ends. In the old days, before the
town boomed suddenly into a lumber town, he was a planter, a landholder, son of one of
the first settlers. He lost his property through greed and gullibility, and he began to drive
a hack back and forth between town and the trains, with his waxed moustache, in a top
hat and a worn Prince Albert coat, telling the drummers how he used to lead Kinston
society; now he drove it.
After the horse era passed, he bought a car, still meeting the trains. He still wore
his waxed moustache, though the top hat was replaced by a cap, the frock coat by a suit
of gray striped with red made by Jews in the New York tenement district. "Here you are,"