check. She dropped to her knees beside me.

“Barney,” she whispered wildly. “Barney, why do I do it?”

My arms tightened around her and for an instant I was caught up again in that old, wonderful, eternal woman-feel of her, the way it had been at first. I held her roughly, almost fiercely, and then I was fully awake and it was gone. Clumsy, clumsy, I thought mockingly. There is no room in the higher echelons of industry for impetuous high-school boys. Move over, son; you’re not even on the payroll. I stood a little way apart and watched myself with professional detachment as I went about consolidating the advance position, reflecting at the same time that in courtship the male could suffer no greater handicap than sincerity.

When I left to go downtown at seven thirty she was sleeping peacefully beside the cool freshness of the open bedroom window while a mockingbird erupted with the glittering and showy repertoire of a concert violinist in the magnolia just outside. I whistled as I backed the station wagon out of the drive under the big oaks.

* * *

Wardlow’s business district consisted of one street three blocks long. The highway traffic ran through it, slowed by twenty-five mile-an-hour speed limit signs at the city limits and one traffic light in the center of town where the bank, Headley’s Drug Store, Woolworth’s, and Joey’s Cafe stood on the four corners athwart the intersection of Main and Minden Streets. Most of the residential area lay to the north and west, largely on this end of Minden Street.

There were few cars about this early in the morning. I crossed Main when the light changed and drove on to the store. It was two blocks farther east on Minden, near the railroad tracks. There was little else over here—a fruit-packing shed, Homer Jolinson’s body-and-fender shop, and a used car lot. The store was a long brick building in the center of an otherwise vacant lot that took up most of the block. Around the sides and in front the lot had been covered with white pea gravel for a parking area. I drove around to the right side and parked.

The building had originally housed an automobile showroom and garage. The dealer had given up the ghost during the war years when there were no cars to be had. McCarran bought it for a low figure just before his death of a heart attack in 1952. He was already retired then, having sold his hardware store and farm implement agency the year before because of bad health, but the inactivity bored him so he had opened the small tackle shop in the front of this old building, more for a hobby than anything else. He was fond of hunting and fishing, and the place made a good spot for old cronies to hang out and second-guess the shots they’d missed and the bass that got away. He’d been shrewd enough to see the growing boom in small boats and outboards that had started right after the war, but his health and the fact he already had it made had prevented his doing much about it. He sold a few motors, and that was about it. In two years I’d built it up to where it cleared seven thousand a year.

There were big plate glass windows in front on either side of the door. I unlocked the door and went in. There were no partitions inside except that enclosing the small office on the right about a third of the way back and the motor repair shop at the extreme rear of the building. Up front, next to the windows, were the glass showcases that held fishing tackle and miscellaneous skin-diving equipment. At the left, opposite the showcases, was a counter behind which were the guns, rods, and water-skis. From there on back to the doorway leading into the repair shop the whole floor area was taken up with boats and trailers and the stock of outboard motors we kept on hand.

We didn’t open until eight thirty. I closed the door behind me, leaving it on the spring lock, and went into the office. It was partitioned off from the rest of the floor by varnished plywood panels seven feet high, and there was a window I’d had cut through the outer wall for ventilation. I opened it now, switched on a light because the whole interior was somewhat dim until the big sliding doors on each side had been opened,