Now, I don’t care if you make whiskey till you’re ass deep in it but don’t make it on my land. If the law found that still they’d come down on me, not you.”

“That’s about the way I figured it too,” Hardin said. “Did you bust it up?”

“You damn right I did. I broke that whiskey too.”

“Now, you ortnt done that.”

“Why Goddamn you. If the son of a bitch hadn’t been so heavy I’d’ve dumped it in your front yard. I don’t know who you are or where you come from. Nor what kind of a deal you run on Hovington here. But I’ll tell you one thing. Don’t mess with me. If piece one of that thing goes up on my ground again, me and you goin around and around.”

Hardin’s face looked as if the skin had suddenly been drawn taut. “I never took a order in my life from a tenant-farmin redneck and I’m too old to start now.”

Winer grasped him by the front of the shirt and jerked and slapped him hard openhanded then slung him backward into the mud. Hardin looked like a drunken bird falling, legs askew as if they were too fragile to maintain his weight: he lit sitting and fumbling out a pistol. Winer saw what he was about and advanced rapidly on him, his knife out and his left hand on the blade opening it when Hardin shot him in the left eye. He fell straight forward like something suspended from a rope suddenly cut and landed across Hardin’s body, a leaden weight that pinned the other man for a moment where he lay. Hardin shoved at him, cursing. He could feel Winer’s blood seeping down his side. He came scrambling from beneath the body, tearing his bloody shirt off as he rose.

He stood leaning into the rain, hands on knees, his sides heaving. The door opened a crack and yellow light spilled into the yard and in this light rain fell plumb and silver.

“Dallas?” Pearl said

He could hear the rain beating on the tin. The knife lay gleaming in the mud beneath his feet, half open. “Shut the fuckin door,” he said. The light disappeared. He picked up the knife and wiped it on his trousers. He closed and pocketed it, stood trying to think what to do.

Pale light from the weeping heaves. By this light Winer’s face upturned, right eye staring up unblinking, left a black hole, long hair fanned out sliding through the mud, head leaving a weallike track in the slick yard. Mouth open a little, a glint of spare light off the gold teeth.

Hardin had him by the feet, a leg under each arm, walking backward through the yard toward the spring. Winer was a big man and every few minutes Hardin had to stop and rest and catch his breath. He rested hunkered over the dead man’s feet and scanning the road for car lights. Then rising and taking up the legs again and hurrying until they were out of sight in the brush and he could breathe a little easier. The going was rough until they reached the limestone lip of the pit and he moved faster here, Winer’s head bouncing a little across the uneven stone floor. He dragged him through the honeysuckle to the lip of the pit and paused to go through his pockets, storing in his own such miserable chattel as he found.