It seemed swollen from the inside, so grotesquely that the face seemed deformed. The purple tip of a swollen tongue protruded between his lips and the cheeks looked peculiarly distended like nothing so much, Mayfield thought, as if you had sharpened the ends of a stick four or five inches and jammed it into the man’s mouth and forced him to clamp it between his teeth.

The man said something preemptory to him but Mayfield had not an inkling of what he had been told to do. Then the black took his elbow roughly and turned him toward a wagon hitched and waiting at the curb.

Old Marster say you come on, he said.

Mayfield knocked his hand away. Keep your hands to yourself, he said, but the Negro showed no offense. The black, shiny face was impassive save the yellow-looking eyes where glinted a detached light of amusement.

He was being forced toward the wagon.

Sick folks, the black man said. Sick folks need lookin after.

Sick folks? Where? What the hell you after, anyway? Is it his face you want seen to?

He was at the wagon, could smell the horses, a Mastiff across the straw-strewn bed, sleepyeyed yet watchful.

Where are these sick folks?

The white man nodded. Bout a day’s ride, the black man said.

That’s out of the question. Get your own doctor. I have patients in Mossburg to attend to.

No one said anything.

Is it an emergency or what?

The white man said something indecipherable and Mayfield looked at the black man’s face. The black was grinning, his crescent of yellow teeth like grains of corn. Mare foaling, he said.

Mare? By God! I’m not a goddamned veterinarian, I’m a—

The big white man had advanced and abruptly he shoved him, slamming Mayfield against the wagon, knocking his hat into the street. The horses stirred and subsided. He looked up. The man was standing over him, the broadcloth coat open. There was a pistol shoved into the waistband and his hand loosely clasped the grip.

Mayfield got up. He looked up and down the street. It was ten o’clock on a Sunday morning and there was no soul about. He stooped and picked up the hat, brushed it off with his handkerchief. That was when the man had taken the hat and jammed it on his head.

As they went past the city limits and into open country, the doctor said, Folks’ll be looking for me, you know

The whiskered man said something. The black turned toward him. Old Marster he say you hush your mouth, she ain’t missin you nothin to what she goin to.

He sat silent in the wagon and thought about his wife. She was waiting to go to church. He thought of her opening the door, looking impatiently up and down the road for him. The day wearing on, her worry mounting. After a while he tried not to think of her at all.

At noon they stopped where there was a stream. The horses drank. They were in a sylvan wilderness, a place that seemed never to have known human habitation. The men had something in a bag: food, biscuits, some kind of meat. They didn’t offer him any. The Negro ate in a silent concentration, his jaws working over the tough meat.