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

"I'm trying to find a young lady, Miss Temple Drake. I probably just missed her,
didn't I'll'
"She's not here any longer," the clerk said. "She quit school about two weeks
ago." He was young: a dull, smooth face behind horn glasses, the hair meticulous. After a
time Horace heard himself asking quietly:
"You dont know where she went?"
The clerk looked at him. He leaned, lowering his voice: "Are you another
detective?"
"Yes," Horace said, "yes. No matter. It doesn't matter." Then he was walking
quietly down the steps, into the sunlight again. He stood there while on both sides of him
they passed in a steady stream of little colored dresses, bare-armed, with close bright
heads, with that identical cool, innocent, unabashed expression which he knew well in
their eyes, above the savage identical paint upon their mouths; like music moving, like
honey poured in sunlight, pagan and evanescent and serene, thinly evocative of all lost
days and outpaced delights, in the sun. Bright, trembling with heat, it lay in open glades
of mirage-like glimpses of stone or brick: columns without tops, towers apparently
floating above a green cloud in slow ruin against the southwest wind, sinister,
imponderable, bland; and he standing there listening to the sweet cloistral bell, thinking
Now what? What now? and answering himself: Why, nothing. Nothing. It's finished.
He returned to the station an hour before the train was due, a filled but unlighted
cob pipe in his hand. In the lavatory he saw, scrawled on the foul, stained wall, her
pencilled name, Temple Drake. He read it quietly, his head bent, slowly fingering the
unlighted pipe.
A half hour before the train came they began to gather, strolling down the hill and
gathering along the platform with thin, bright, raucous laughter, their blonde legs
monotonous, their bodies moving continually inside their scant garments with that
awkward and voluptuous purposelessness of the young.
The return train carried a pullman. He went on through the day coach and entered
it. There was only one other occupant: a man in the center of the car, next the window,
bareheaded, leaning back, his elbow on the window sill and an unlighted cigar in his
ringed hand. When the train drew away passing the sleek crowds in increasing reverse,
the other passenger rose and went forward toward the day coach. He carried an overcoat
on his arm, and a soiled, light-colored felt hat. With the corner of his eye Horace saw his
hand fumbling at his breast pocket, and he remarked the severe trim of hair across the
man's vast, soft, white neck. Like with a guillotine, Horace thought, watching the man
sidle past the porter in the aisle and vanish, passing out of his sight and his mind in the
act of flinging the hat onto his head. The train sped on, swaying on the curves, flashing
past an occasional house, through cuts and across valleys where young cotton wheeled
slowly in fanlike rows.
The train checked speed; a jerk came back, and four whistle-blasts. The man in
the soiled hat entered, taking a cigar from his breast pocket. He came down the aisle
swiftly, looking at Horace. He slowed, the cigar in his fingers. The train jolted again. The
man flung his hand out and caught the back of the seat facing Horace.
"Aint this Judge Benbow?" he said. Horace looked up into a vast, puffy face
without any mark of age or thought whatever-a majestic sweep of flesh on either side of a
small blunt nose, like looking out over a mesa, yet withal some indefinable quality of