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outside now, in the courthouse yard, the five of us, blinking a little at one another as though we had just come out of a cave.
    ‘You’ve got a will, haven’t you?’ Stevens said. Then Virginius stopped perfectly still, looking at Stevens.
    ‘Oh,’ he said at last.
    ‘One of those natural mutual deed-of-trust wills that any two business partners might execute,’ Stevens said. ‘You and Granby each the other’s beneficiary and executor, for mutual protection of mutual holdings. That’s natural. Likely Granby was the one who suggested it first, by telling you how he had made you his heir. So you’d better tear it up, yours, your copy. Make Anse your heir, if you have to have a will.’
    ‘He won’t need to wait for that,’ Virginius said. ‘Half of that land is his.’
    ‘You just treat it right, as he knows you will,’ Stevens said. ‘Anse don’t need any land.’
    ‘Yes,’ Virginius said. He looked away. ‘But I wish.…’
    ‘You just treat it right. He knows you’ll do that.’
    ‘Yes,’ Virginius said. He looked at Stevens again. ‘Well, I reckon I … we both owe you.…’
    ‘More than you think,’ Stevens said. He spoke quite soberly. ‘Or to that horse. A week after your father died, Granby bought enough rat poison to kill three elephants, West told me. But after he remembered what he had forgotten about that horse, he was afraid to kill his rats before that will was settled. Because he is a man both shrewd and ignorant at the same time: a dangerous combination. Ignorant enough to believe that the law is something like dynamite: the slave of whoever puts his hand to it first, and even then a dangerous slave; and just shrewd enough to believe that people avail themselves of it, resort to it, only for personal ends. I found that out when he sent a negro to see me one day last summer, to find out if the way in which a man died could affect the probation of his will. And I knew who had sent the negro to me, and I knew that whatever information the negro took back to the man who sent him, that man had already made up his mind to disbelieve it, since I was a servant of the slave, the dynamite. So if that had been a normal horse, or Granby had remembered in time, you would be underground now. Granby might not be any better off than he is, but you would be dead.’
    ‘Oh,’ Virginius said, quietly, soberly. ‘I reckon I’m obliged.’
    ‘Yes,’ Stevens said. ‘You’ve incurred a right smart of obligation. You owe Granby something.’ Virginius looked at him. ‘You owe him for those taxes he has been paying every year now for fifteen years.’
    ‘Oh,’ Virginius said. ‘Yes. I thought that father.… Every November, about, Granby would borrow money from me, not much, and not ever the same amount. To buy stock with, he said. He paid some of it back. But he still owes me … no. I owe him now.’ He was quite grave, quite sober. ‘When a man starts doing wrong, it’s not what he does; it’s what he leaves.’
    ‘But it’s what he does that people will have to hurt him for, the outsiders. Because the folks that’ll be hurt by what he leaves won’t hurt him. So it’s a good thing for the rest of us that what he does takes him out of their hands. I have taken him out of your hands now, Virge, blood or no blood. Do you understand?’
    ‘I understand,’ Virginius said. ‘I wouldn’t anyway …’ Then suddenly he looked at Stevens. ‘Gavin,’ he said.
    ‘What?’ Stevens said.
    Virginius watched him. ‘You talked a right smart in yonder about chemistry and such, about that smoke. I reckon I believed some of it and I reckon I didn’t believe some of it. And I reckon if I told you which I believed and didn’t believe, you’d laugh at me.’ His face was quite sober. Stevens’ face was quite grave too. Yet there was something in Stevens’ eyes, his glance; something quick and eager; not ridiculing, either. ‘That was a week ago. If you had opened that box to see if that