“Well, I think I’d rather starve than have that man around me.”
Tommy guffawed.
“Popeye’s all right.
He’s just a little curious.”
He walked on, shapeless against the hushed glare of the road, the sandy road.
“I be dog if he aint a case, now.
Aint he?”
“Yes,” Benbow said.
“He’s all of that.”
The truck was waiting where the road, clay again, began to mount toward the gravel highway.
Two men sat on the fender, smoking cigarettes; overhead the trees thinned against the stars of more than midnight.
“You took your time,” one of the men said. “Didn’t you?
I aimed to be halfway to town by now.
I got a woman waiting for me.”
“Sure,” the other man said.
“Waiting on her back.”
The first man cursed him.
“We come as fast as we could,” Tommy said.
“Whyn’t you fellows hang out a lantern?
If me and him had a been the Law, we’d a had you, sho.”
“Ah, go climb a tree, you mat-faced bastard,” the first man said.
They snapped their cigarettes away and got into the truck.
Tommy guffawed, in undertone.
Benbow turned and extended his hand.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“And much obliged, Mister——”
“My name’s Tawmmy,” the other said.
His limp, calloused hand fumbled into Benbow’s and pumped it solemnly once and fumbled away.
He stood there, a squat, shapeless figure against the faint glare of the road, while Benbow lifted his foot for the step.
He stumbled, catching himself.
“Watch yourself, Doc,” a voice from the cab of the truck said.
Benbow got in.
The second man was laying a shotgun along the back of the seat.
The truck got into motion and ground terrifically up the gutted slope and into the gravelled highroad and turned toward Jefferson and Memphis.
3
On the next afternoon Benbow was at his sister’s home. It was in the country, four miles from Jefferson; the home of her husband’s people. She was a widow, with a boy ten years old, living in a big house with her son and the great aunt of her husband: a woman of ninety, who lived in a wheel chair, who was known as Miss Jenny.
She and Benbow were at the window, watching his sister and a young man walking in the garden.
His sister had been a widow for ten years.
“Why hasn’t she ever married again?” Benbow said.
“I ask you,” Miss Jenny said.
“A young woman needs a man.”
“But not that one,” Benbow said.
He looked at the two people.
The man wore flannels and a blue coat; a broad, plumpish young man with a swaggering air, vaguely collegiate.
“She seems to like children.
Maybe because she has one of her own now.
Which one is that?
Is that the same one she had last fall?”
“Gowan Stevens,” Miss Jenny said.
“You ought to remember Gowan.”