Page:Mosquitos (Faulkner).pdf/283

 “I’ve stepped on something,” she said, peering blindly.

Pete rose with a mad inarticulate cry.

“Old man Jackson”—Fairchild continued—“claims to be a lineal descendant of Old Hickory. A fine old southern family with all a fine old southern family’s pride. Al has a lot of that pride, himself: that’s why he won’t take off his shoes in company. I’ll tell you the reason later.

“Well, old man Jackson was a bookkeeper or something, drawing a small salary with a big family to support, and he wanted to better himself with the minimum of labor, like a descendant of any fine old southern family naturally would, and so he thought up the idea of taking up some of this Louisiana swamp land and raising sheep on it. He’d noticed how much ranker vegetation grows on trees in swampy land, so he figured that wool ought to grow the same rank way on a sheep raised in a swamp. So he threw up his bookkeeping job and took up a few hundred acres of Tchufuncta river swamp and stocked it with sheep, using the money his wife’s uncle, a member of an old aristocratic Tennessee moonshining family, had left ’em.

“But his sheep started right in to get themselves drowned, so he made lifebelts for ’em out of some small wooden kegs that had been part of the heritage from that Tennessee uncle, so that when the sheep strayed off into deep water they would float until the current washed ’em back to land again. This worked all right, but still his sheep kept on disappearing—the ewes and lambs did, that is. Then he found that the alligators were—”

“Yes,” murmured Major Ayers, “Old Hickory.”

“—getting them. So he made some imitation rams’ horns out of wood and fastened a pair to each ewe and to every lamb when it was born. And that reduced his losses by alli-