minutes before closing time it came along as if I’d written the script myself. Two fishermen stopped in on their way back to Sanport. They had seven bass, the smallest of which weighed three pounds.

“Where?” I asked, hanging over their icebox.

“Sumner Lake,” they replied.

“With live bait? Or hand grenades?”

“Fly-rod bugs. Cork poppers. . . .”

“Cut it out,” I said. “In August?”

“It’s the truth,” they said. “We found an underground spring. The water was this cool. . . .”

Otis had come out too. He glanced resignedly from the fish to me and sighed. “How long’ll you be gone?

“Where?” I asked.

“Hah,” he said mournfully.

Sumner Lake was perfect. It was ninety miles in the opposite direction. “Well, if you insist. But I wouldn’t knock off go fishing for anybody but you.”

“You want Pete to come in?”

Pete was his boy, the fourteen-year-old who looked like a Sherman tank. During summer vacations he sometimes filled down here when I went fishing.

“Sure,” I said. I went back in the shop and picked up the 3-h.p. motor I used on rental skiffs. I put it in the back of the station wagon, along with a can of fuel. We locked up.

“I’ll be back Wednesday night or Thursday,” I said. “And, look. If another of those twenties comes in, call the F.B.I, in Sanport. They want us to watch for them; here’s the serial number of the other one.”

I drove home. When I pulled into the drive under the oaks I saw her Chrysler was in the garage. So she was home, and probably loaded to her silken ears with my inhumanity to dear Mr. Selby. Here we go again, I thought.

She was in the kitchen writing a check for Reba for the day’s housecleaning, wearing a lightweight knit thing that looked as if she’d been built into it by an oriental sybarite with a do-it-yourself kit. It was strange; her clothes were never tight on her but you didn’t have any trouble sensing that their occupant wasn’t a collegiate pole-vaulter. Well, maybe there a Turk somewhere back in my ancestry and I was just sensitive to the voluptuous wave-form of her particular radiation. She’d been to the beauty shop, and her hair-do gleamed like embossed and highly polished chrome. The full-mouthed and broad-planed face was as outrageously blonde as the rest of her, faintly sensuous and at the same time stamped with that strong suggestion of purely female cussedness that was no lie at all.

She turned the blue eyes on me now and smiled with sweet deadliness. “Oh. Home so early, dear? I didn’t think you’d be able to get away.”

This was for Reba’s benefit, and you could see it was fooling her. She took her check and started retreating toward the back door before she got blood on her.

I opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. “Oh,” I said. “Something important came up, sweet. I’m going fishing.”

“Isn’t that nice. Reba, Mr. Godwin is going fishing. Does your husband fish much?”

“Yes’m,” Reba said. “He fish ever’ now an’ then.”

“Well, I think it’s so wonderful for men to have a hobby, don’t you?”

“Yes’m,” Reba said. She left. She was forty-something and had learned what this world does to non-combatants.

The blue eyes flashed. The first pitch was high and inside and smoking. “Well! Just leave me sitting there like a fool! You couldn’t get away from your precious toys for five minutes to show a little consideration for your wife, but you can drop everything to go fishing. And what do you suppose Mr. Selby thought?”

She couldn’t make me lose my temper now. I was too excited about this other thing, and I wasn’t even thinking about her. “Oh, he didn’t mind,” I said. “Think how he enjoyed looking at your legs.”

I took a drink of the beer and did a brief impersonation of the oleaginous Mr. Selby stalking a crossed thigh. He was the devious type, the long-range planner; he maneuvered into position and then caught the target obliquely on a passing shot.

“Mr. Selby is a gentleman—!”

“Which is more than you can say for some people you know,” I said. “Did you bring home that paper you wanted me to sign?”

“I told you it had to be notarized,” she snapped.

“So you did. Well, by God, that’ll teach me a lesson; the next time you whistle I’ll dash right over.”

“You enjoy humiliating me, is that it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s actually just confusion. I get busy down there and forget which way I’m supposed to jump when