'So that Sunday came, a year after that day and three years after he had suggested to Miss Rosa that they try it first and if it was a boy and lived, they would be married. It was before daylight and he was expecting his mare to foal to the black stallion, so when he left the house before day that morning Judith thought he was going to the stable. What Judith knew and how much about her father and Wash's granddaughter nobody knew, how much she could not have helped but know from what Clytie must have known (may have or may not have told her, whether or no) since everybody else white or black in the neighborhood knew who had ever seen the girl in the ribbons and beads which they all recognized, how much she may have refused to discover during the fitting and sewing of that dress (Father said Judith actually did this; this was no lie that the girl told Wash: the two of them alone all day long for about a week in the house: and what they must have talked about, what Judith must have talked about while the girl stood around in what she possessed to call underclothes, with her sullen defiant secret watchful face, answering what, telling what that Judith may or may not have tried to shut her eyes to, nobody knew). So it was not until he failed to return at dinner time that she went or sent Clytie to the stable and found that the mare had foaled in the night but that her father was not there. And it was not until midafternoon that she found a half-grown boy and paid him a nickel to go down to the old fish camp and ask Wash where Sutpen was, and the boy walked whistling around the corner of the rotting cabin and saw maybe the scythe first, maybe the body first lying in the weeds which Wash had not yet cut, and as he screamed he looked up and saw Wash in the window, watching him. Then about a week later they caught the nigger, the midwife, and she told how she didn't know that Wash was there at all that dawn when she heard the horse and then Sutpen's feet and he came in and stood over the pallet where the girl and the baby were and said, "Penelope — " (that was the mare) " — foaled this morning. A damned fine colt. Going to be the spit and image of his daddy when I rode him North in '61. Do you remember?" and the old nigger said she said, "Yes, Marster" and that he jerked the riding whip toward the pallet and said, "Well? Damn your black hide: horse or mare?" and that she told him and that he stood there for a minute and he didn't move at all, with the riding whip against his leg and the lattices of sunlight from the unchinked wall falling upon him, across his white hair and his beard that hadn't turned at all yet, and she said she saw his eyes and then his teeth inside his beard and that she would have run then only she couldn't, couldn't seem to make her legs bear to get up and run: and then he looked at the girl on the pallet again and said, "Well, Milly; too bad you're not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable" and turned and went out. Only she could not move even yet, and she didn't even know that Wash was outside there; she just heard Sutpen say, "Stand back, Wash.
Don't you touch me," and then Wash, his voice soft and hardly loud enough to reach her: "I'm going to tech you, Kernel": and Sutpen again: "Stand back, Wash!" sharp now, and then she heard the whip on Wash's face but she didn't know if she heard the scythe or not because now she found out that she could move, get up, run out of the cabin and into the weeds, running — '
'Wait,' Shreve said; 'wait. You mean that he had got the son at last that he wanted, yet still he — '
