A wild impatience began to get hold of me. I wanted to get going, to put it back in the car and run.

Run where? I thought.

The world wouldn’t hold me, and I knew it. It wouldn’t take them an hour to figure it out if I disappeared now. They could add too. I couldn’t leave. The only way I could beat them was the one I’d known from the first, and that was to keep my head down and wait it out. After a month or so, when the heat began to die down … I gathered the bag up and went out the door of the crib.

Picking a spot near the rear wall of the crib, inside one of the stalls, I scraped the old manure out of the way with a piece of shingle, and started to dig. The ground was sand, and easy to gouge up with the shingle. I was careful to place all the loose dirt in one pile. When I was down about eighteen inches, I rolled the bag of money into as tight a ball as I could make it, and shoved it into the hole. Then, just before I started scooping the dirt back in, I thought of something. I lifted it out and began looking over the undershirt. There was a laundry mark on it, all right. Taking out my knife, I sawed out the piece of cloth and stuck a match to it, then ground the ashes into the bottom of the hole. If anybody did happen to stumble on to it I’d lose the money, but they’d never tie it to me.

I put it back in the hole and began filling it, tamping the dirt down with my fist until it was as firm as the rest of the ground. The little which was left over I spread evenly around, then raked the dried manure and old straw back over the whole area.

Snapping off the light, I went back to the door. The old house was just a faintly darker shadow in the night, off there to the left, and as I looked towards it I thought for the hundredth time of that other day and what Sutton had said to her and the way she detested and feared him. There was something insane about it. You could keep trying for years to add it up and you’d never come out with an answer that made sense. She wouldn’t even know Sutton. The hell she didn’t—!

I shook them off angrily. What business was it of mine? But, as always, when I gathered her up and threw her out of my mind there was a little of her left over, the way there is in a room a girl has just walked through.

I went out and got in the car, but instead of heading right back to town I drove on down to the river and went swimming by the bridge. When I did go back I stopped in at the restaurant to get a cup of coffee. The waitress looked at my head and smiled.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Did I forget to put on my hair?”

She grinned. “No. But it looks like you left it out in the rain.”

“I been swimming,” I said. “They caught the bank robbers yet?”

“No. But they got enough cops around here to catch Dillinger.”

“You don’t even remember Dillinger,” I said. “You were just a kid in a three-cornered Bikini.”

She laughed, tickled about it.