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There was one reason he could take the chance and stall. If Marvin and MacMurfee had had it sewed up absolutely tight, and could have ruined the Boss, they would have done it without further ado. They wouldn’t have bothered to dicker. They had some cards, all right, but it wasn’t necessarily a straight flush, and they had to take their gamble, too. They had to wait, while the Boss did his thinking, and hope that he wouldn’t think up anything unpleasant in his turn.

While the Boss did his thinking, I saw Lucy Stark. She wrote me a note and asked me to come to see her. I knew what she wanted. She wanted to talk about Tom. Obviously, she wasn’t finding out anything from Tom himself, or at least, what she considered to be the truth and the whole truth, and she wasn’t talking it over with the Boss for on the matter of Tom she and the Boss had never agreed. So she was going to ask me questions, and I was going to sit and sweat on the red plush upholstery in the parlor of the farmhouse where she was living. But that had to be. Long back, I had made up my mind that when Lucy Stark asked me to do something I was going to do it. It was not exactly that I felt I owed Lucy Stark a debt, or had to make restitution, or do penance. At least, if there was a debt, it was not to Lucy Stark, and if there was restitution to be made it was not to be made to her. If there was a debt, it was, perhaps, due to me, from me. And if restitution was to be made, it was to be made to me, by me. And as for penance, there had been no crime for which I should do it. My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don’t have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.

If you have ever been down toward the Gulf, you know the kind of house. White frame, but with the glitter long gone. One story, a wide gallery across the front with spindly posts supporting the shed over it. A tin roof, with faint streaks of rust showing red in the channel joints. The whole thing set high on brick pillars, to make a cool cobweb-draped cloister underneath, screened on the front side by rank ligustrums and canna beds, for hens to congregate and fluff in the dust and an old shepherd dog to lie and pant in the hot days. It sits pretty well back from the road, in a lawn gone sparse and rusty in the late season. On each side of an anachronistic patch of concrete walk, which dies blankly at the gate where the earth of the highway shoulder shows raw, there are two round flower beds made by lying an old automobile tire on the ground and filling it with wood earth. There are few zinnias in each, hairy like an animal, brilliant in the dazzling sun. At each end of the house is a live oak, not grand ones. Beyond the house, flanking it on each side are the chicken houses and barns, unpainted. But the faded-white decent house itself, sitting there in the middle of the late-summer afternoon, in the absolute quiet of that time of day and year, with the sparse lawn and tidy flower beds and the prideful patch of concrete walk in front, the oaks at each side, is like nothing so much as a respectable, middle-aged woman, in a clean gray gingham dress, with white stockings and black kid shoes, the pepper-and-salt hair coiled on her head, sitting in her rocker with her hands folded across her stomach to take a little ease, now the day’s work is done and the menfolks are in the field and it’s not yet time to think about supper and strain the evening milk.

I stepped gingerly up that patch of concrete walk, as though I were treading on dozens of eggs laid by all those white leghorns back in the chicken run.

Lucy led me into the parlor, which was just the place I had known it would be, the carved black-walnut furniture upholstered in red plush, with a few tassels still left hanging here and there, the Bible and the stereoscope and the neat pile of cards for the stereoscope on the carved black-walnut