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 co-operative, 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 humour 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.