it could wait. Right now I was too parched and dehydrated to think of loading the station wagon before I’d had something to drink.

The somnolent hush of midday lay over the clearing. I crossed to the large building and entered. Jewel Nunn was sweeping the floor of the lunch-room. She turned, with something tense and apprehensive about her face, but it was gone instantly when she saw who I was. “Oh,” she said.

I wondered what she had been afraid of. And why had she kept her back to the door, if she were afraid? She certainly must have heard me stepping up on the porch.

“You have anything cold to drink?” I asked.

“Just cokes,” she said.

“I’ll have one. And a glass of water, if I might.”

She went around behind the counter and opened the icebox. I tried again to think of some way of broaching the subject of those twenty-dollar bills without causing her to wonder why I’d ask about an odd thing like that. There didn’t seem to be any. Maybe I was slowing up.

She uncapped the bottle and poured me a glass of water from a jar in the icebox. I took a long drink of the water and then began on the coke. She started to return to her sweeping. I took out my wallet and extracted a ten-dollar bill, intending to settle up for the cabin and boat.

She glanced at it, and reached under the counter for the cigar box. Setting it on top, she opened it and glanced inside. “Haven’t you got anything smaller?” she asked.

She thought I merely wanted to pay for the drink. I started to explain I was leaving, but then it occurred to me I ought to take one more look into that box before committing myself. That was what I’d come out here for, wasn’t it? I moved a casual step nearer and glanced down.

There was no twenty in it, new or old. Besides the silver it contained only some ones, a couple of fives, and a ten. Well, I asked myself disgustedly, are you satisfied? Ready to go home now?

“I wanted—” I began, and then stopped suddenly, my eyes riveted on the ten-dollar bill. It was on top, in plain sight. And along one end of it was a narrow, reddish-brown stain.

Five

Maybe it had been there all the time. The only thing I’d been watching for was a twenty, so I could have overlooked it. No. I thought swiftly. Last night there had been nothing in that box except ones and fives. This morning the other fisherman had paid for his breakfast with another single, while I’d given them a five.

Somebody had come in here and paid for something with that ten, receiving one of the fives in change. And it had been this morning. I could feel the hair prickle along the back of my neck.

“Haven’t you got anything smaller than that?” she asked again.

I snapped out of it. She was staring at me curiously.

“Oh, I said. I poked a hand in my pocket and found a quarter. “Here you are. And give me another one while you’re at it. I’m really thirsty.”

I still had my own ten in my hand when she turned to open the refrigerator. It took only a fraction of a second to drop it in the box and pick up the other one. When she swung back around I was putting it in my wallet. I put the quarter on the counter and she gave me a nickel from the box in change, entirely unaware of the switch. There was no reason she should notice it; that stain was so narrow along the end you’d never pay any attention to it unless it had some significance for you. I was wild to examine it, but it’d have to wait. Right now there was something more important.

I sat down on one of the stools and took another drink of the coke. She walked back to where she’d left the broom leaning against the wall near the small window at the end of the room.

I lit a cigarette and swung around on the stool. “Did you ever model clothes?” I asked.

The broom stopped. She turned. “No. Why?.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. The way you walk, perhaps. You never had any training at all?”

She shook her head. Her eyes watched me, but you couldn’t read anything in them. “What made you think I had?”

I gestured with the hand holding the cigarette. “Form. Line. Flow. Call it anything.