I came out and started to go into the room in front of the kitchen, when I stopped, remembering something that was funny. It was that white rutabaga. It was cold, but the pot was on a stove with a fire in it.

I went back and looked in the pot again. Then I felt the top of the stove. It was cold too. But I’d seen smoke coming out of the pipe. I stepped back out in the yard and looked up. By golly, there wasn’t any smoke now. But there had been. I was sure of that.

I went back in the kitchen, still trying to figure it out, and raised one of the stove lids and put my hand down on the ashes in the firebox. They was as cold as the rutabaga. There sure was some funny things happened around Uncle Sagamore’s, I thought.

I could hear Pop yelling hello again, and then calling me, so I went into the front room. It was the living-room. There was a big mud fireplace on the right, with a shotgun lying on some forked sticks up above the mantel. Most of the chairs had bottoms wove out of strips of cowhide with the hair still on. Besides the door that went out on to the front porch there was another one on the left that went into another bedroom. I looked in there before I went out. There was nobody in it. The whole house was empty. When I stepped out on the porch the smell hit me again. It seemed to be worse there than anywhere else. I ran down the steps and out by the car. Pop was there, still fanning the air with his hat and cussing bitter and disgusted like.

“Why in hell didn’t I have sense enough to go to Narragansett Park?” he says.

“Aw, Pop,” I says. “I like it here. Except for the smell.”

“Yeah, but what are we going to do? Sagamore ain’t here. He’s probably been drafted. Nobody around here except that old squirrel down there hammering boards together. Nowhere else around here we can go.”

Right behind us somebody said, “Howdy, Sam.”

We whirled around, and there was a man standing in the front door, leaning against the jamb with a shotgun hanging in the crook of his arm. I just stared at him. I couldn’t figure out how he’d got there.