“But just to make sure it’s evidence—” He tilted the jar up and took a swig out of it. He choked a little.

“How about it?” the other one asked.

The gold-tooth one looked kind of puzzled. “I don’t know. Strong enough to be moon, all right. But it’s got a little funny taste. Here, see what you think.”

The moustache one looked a little doubtful. Then he says, “Well, hell, he was drinkin’ it.” So he tilted it up and swallowed.

He looked kind of puzzled too.

“See,” Uncle Sagamore says. “I told you. It’s just a remedy. But you boys is kind of young to be usin’ it. You don’t want to blame me if you start chasin’ the gals around like banty roosters after a pullet when you get back to town.”

The gold-tooth one still looked a little doubtful. “You can’t kid me,” he says. “I know moon when I taste it.” But he thought about it for a minute and then took another drink.

“Well, I don’t know,” he says. “It would be kind of silly if we took it in and it was medicine.”

“You ought to know better than to believe anything Sagamore Noonan says,” the moustache one told him. “Here. Let me have it again.”

He took another one too. But he couldn’t seem to make up his mind either.

“Well, take her in if you just got to,” Uncle Sagamore says. “But you might as well set and visit a spell. Ain’t no hurry.”

“No, we’ll just run along,” they says. “This was all we was after. Didn’t want you to catch that typhoid.” They started to turn around.

Uncle Sagamore lifted the shotgun down kind of absent-minded and set it across his knees. He broke it, lifted the shells out and looked at them like he wanted to be sure they was really in it, and then slid ‘em back in and closed the gun again. He was sliding the safety catch back and forth, just to be doing something, the way a man scribbles with a pencil while he’s talking on the telephone. They watched him. The moustache one licked his lips.

“Sure you boys can’t set a spell?” Uncle Sagamore asked. “No use you rushin’ off in the heat of the day.”

They stopped. The gold-tooth one says, “Uh—well—”

“That’s the trouble nowadays,” Uncle Sagamore went on. “People just don’t take the time to be neighborly. Come a-chargin’ in here like a highlifed shoat to save a man from comin’ down with that typhoid, and then before he can hardly thank ‘em for what they done they get another burr under their crupper and go tearin’ off to hell an’ gone to save some other pore taxpayer from something. Man was to just set once in a while he’d live longer.”

The two sheriff’s men looked at each other again and then out at the car like it had suddenly gone a long way off and they wasn’t sure they could make it that far in the hot sun.