He paid me. Both payments. We won’t have to take it.”

I shook my head. “You must be a fast talker,” I said. “I’m glad I don’t owe you any money.”

She turned towards the car. “Oh, he’d been intending to pay it. He just hadn’t been to town. Hadn’t we better go?”

“I guess so,” I said. The whole thing was queer, but if he’d paid her there was no use hanging around.

We had just reached the car and were starting to get in when I looked up and saw the man walking towards us. He had come out of the trees on the road we had come in on, and was carrying a gun which looked like a .22 pump in the crook of his arm. She saw him, too. Her eyes were uneasy and when she glanced quickly sidewise at me, I knew it was Sutton and that she had been lying when she said she’d seen him down at the spring.

2

He was A big man, around six feet and heavy all the way up, and walked with a peculiar short stride which some people might have called mincing but wasn’t. It was the flat-footed shuffle of a bear or a heavyweight fighter, and men who move that way are balanced and hard to push off their feet. He was dressed in bib overalls and a faded blue shirt, and besides the gun he was carrying two fox squirrels by their tails. He appeared to be around thirty-five or thirty-eight, with a stubble of dark beard on an unlined, moon-shaped face, and he had the expression in his eyes of a man enjoying some secret and very dirty joke.

“Hello,” I said.

He came up and stopped, glancing from Gloria Harper to me and back again. “Hello. You boys looking for somebody?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A man named Sutton. Would that be you?”

“You’ve got me, men. What can I do for you?”

Before I could say anything she spoke up hurriedly. “It’s about the car, Mr. Sutton. I—I mean could I talk to you for a minute?”

I waited to see what was going to happen next. She’d already told me he had paid up, which was obviously impossible, so what was she going to do? I could feel her begging me not to say anything.

He turned and looked at her again. “Why, you sure can, honey.” He was affable and cooperative, while the grin he gave her was crawling with that secret joke of his. It was edged with something like contempt and left her standing there naked and hot-faced and without any pride at all.

Her eyes were miserable and they begged “Please,” as she looked towards me and then turned to walk to the shack with him. I leaned against the door of the car and watched them. He sat down on the porch and left her standing and took out a cigarette without offering her one. Just the way he sat there and watched her was a slap in the face, full of calculated insolence and that dirty humor of his. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but he was apparently enjoying it.

In a minute she turned away from him and came back to the car.