Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner

descended a little stiffly, but her eyes were shining and her dry old cheeks were flushed.
    “How fer y’all been?” Simon asked from the door.
    “We’ve been to town,” she answered proudly, and her voice was clear as a girl’s. Town was four miles away.
    After that the significance grew slowly. He received intimations of it from various sources. But because of his deafness, these intimations came slowly since they must come directly to him and not through overheard talk. The actual evidence, the convincing evidence, came from old man Falls. Eight or tentimes a year he walked in from the county farm, always stopping in at the bank.
    One day a week later old man Falls came in to town and found old Bayard in his office. The office was also the directors’ room. It was a large room containing a long table lined with chairs, and a tall cabinet where blank banking forms were kept, and old Bayard’s roll-top desk and swivel chair and a sofa on which he napped for an hour each noon.
    The desk, like the one at home, was cluttered with a variety of objects which bore no relation whatever to the banking business, and the mantel above the fireplace bore still more objects of an agricultural nature, as well as a dusty assortment of pipes and three or four jars of tobacco which furnished solace for the entire banking force from president to janitor and for a respectable portion of the bank’s clientele. Weather permitting, old Bayard spent most of the day in a tilted chair in the street door, and when these patrons found him there, they went on back to the office and filled their pipes from the jars. It was a sort of unspoken convention not to take more than a pipeful at a time. Here old man Falls and old Bayard retired on the old man’s monthly visits and shouted at one another (they were both deaf) for a half hour or so. You could hear them plainly from the street and in the adjoining store on either side.
    Old man Falls’ eyes were blue and innocent as a boy’s and his first act was to open the parcel which old Bayard had for him and take out a plug of chewing tobacco, cut off a chew and put it in his mouth, replace the plug and tie the parcel neatly again. Twice a year the parcel contained an entire outfit of clothing, on the other occasions tobacco and a small sack of peppermint candy. He would never cut the string, but always untied it with his stiff, gnarled fingers and tied it back again. He would not accept money.
    He sat now in his clean, faded overalls, with the parcel on his knees, telling Bayard about the automobile that had passed him on the road that morning. Everyone had seen or heard of young Bayard’s low gray car, but old man Falls was the first to tell his grandfather how he drove it. Old Bayard sat quite still, watching him with his fierce old eyes until he had finished.
    “Are you sure who it was?” he asked.
    “Hit passed me too fast fer me to tell whether they was anybody in hit a-tall or not. I asked when I fetched town who ’twas. Seems like ever’body knows how fast he runs hit except you.”
    Old Bayard sat quietly for a time. Then he raised his voice:
    “Byron.”
    The door opened quietly and the book-keeper entered—a thin, youngish man with hairy hands and covert close eyes that looked always as though he were just blinking them, though you never saw them closed.
    “Yes, sir, Colonel,” he said in a slow, nasal voice without inflection.
    “ ’Phone out to my house and tell my grandson not to touch that car until I come home.”
    “Yes, sir, Colonel.” And he was gone as silently as he appeared.
    Bayard slammed around in his swivel chair again and old man Falls leaned forward, peering at his face.
    “What’s that ’ere wen you got on yo’ face, Bayard?” he asked.
    “What?” Bayard demanded, then he raised his hand to a small spot which the suffusion of his face had brought into relief. “Here? I dont know what it is. It’s been there about a week. Why?”
    “Is it