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By Root 5667 0

to barbecue a steer, and she began to tell him and he went to the truck and taken out that suitcase and opened it and taken out a blanket. Then we had it, sho enough. It was like those two fellows that used to be in the funny papers, those two Frenchmen that were always bowing and scraping at the other one to go first, making out like we had all come away from home just for the privilege of sleeping on the ground, each one trying to lie faster and bigger than the next. For a while I was a mind to say, ‘All right. If you want to sleep on the ground, do it. Because be durned if I want to.’ But I reckon you might say that I won. Or that me and him won. Because it wound up by him fixing their blanket in the truck, like we all might have known all the time it would be, and me and him spreading mine out before the fire. I reckon he knew that would be the way of it, anyhow. If they had come all the way from south Alabama like she claimed. I reckon that was why he brought in all that firewood just to make a pot of coffee with and heat up some tin cans. Then we ate, and then I found out.”

Found out what? What it was he wanted to do?

Not right then. I reckon she had a little more patience than you He continues: “So we had eaten and I was lying down on the blanket. I was tired, and getting stretched out felt good. I wasn’t aiming to listen, anymore than I was aiming to look like I was asleep when I wasn’t. But they had asked me to give them a ride; it wasn’t me that insisted on them getting in my truck. And if they seen fit to go on and talk without making sho nobody could hear them, it wasn’t any of my business. And that’s how I found out that they were hunting for somebody, following him, or trying to. Or she was, that is. And so all of a sudden I says to myself, ‘Ah-ah. Here’s another gal that thought she could learn on Saturday night what her mammy waited until Sunday to ask the minister. They never called his name. And they didn’t know just which way he had run. And I knew that if they had known where he went, it wouldn’t be by any fault of the fellow that was doing the running. I learned that quick. And so I heard him talking to her, about how they might travel on like this from one truck to another and one state to another for the rest of their lives and not find any trace of him, and her sitting there on the log, holding the chap and listening quiet as a stone and pleasant as a stone and just about as nigh to being moved or persuaded. And I says to myself, ‘Well, old fellow, I reckon it ain’t only since she has been riding on the seat of my truck while you rode with your feet hanging out the back end of it that she has travelled out in front on this trip.’ But I never said anything. I just lay there and them talking, or him talking, not loud. He hadn’t even mentioned marriage, neither. But that’s what he was talking about, and her listening placid and calm, like she had heard it before and she knew that she never even had to bother to say either yes or no to him. Smiling a little she was. But he couldn’t see that.

“Then he give up. He got up from the log and walked away. But I saw his face when he turned and I knew that he hadn’t give up. He knew that he had just give her one more chance and that now he had got himself desperated up to risking all. I could have told him that he was just deciding now to do what he should have done in the first place. But I reckon he had his own reasons. Anyway he walked off into the dark and left her sitting there, with her face kind of bent down a little and that smile still on it. She never looked after him, neither. Maybe she knew he had just gone off by himself to get himself worked up good to what she might have been advising him to do all the time, herself, without saying it in out and out words, which a lady naturally couldn’t do; not even a lady with a Saturday night family.

“Only I don’t reckon that was it either. Or maybe the time and place didn’t suit her, let alone a audience. After a while she got up and looked at me, but I never moved, and then she went and climbed into the