two while they fished, but once in a while they did sell some to the people who lived around in the bottom, mostly when they ran short of something and they didn’t want to make the long trip in to town. Like this morning. One of the Hildebrand boys had driven over for a can of baking powder and some evaporated milk. Yes, just before I came in.

Keep going, honey.

Up on the road out of the bottom, and one of the boys had a dog named Trixie? No, that wasn’t the Hildebrands. Those people were named Sorensen. The Hildebrands weren’t really boys, they were grown men, actually, twins, about twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and meaner than cat’s milk. Their names were Jack and Judson. Judson had been in the penitentiary for cutting a man up in a fight. They lived over on the west side of the lake with their father and they raised ribbon cane that they made syrup out of in the fall, and lots of people thought they made moonshine, too, all the year around. No women at all; neither of the boys was married, and their mother was dead. They did their own cooking, and it was probably pretty bad. Maybe that was what made ‘em so mean. Did they trade here much? No, very little. They didn’t get along very well with George. They went to town every Saturday and the old man made them buy the groceries and put them in the car before they started getting liquored up and looking for a dance where they could start a fight. . . .

The Hildebrands didn’t sound too promising. They wouldn’t have spent as much here as those two twenties, to begin with. And if they’d got hold of a lot of money suddenly in some way, the F.B.I, wouldn’t have had any trouble finding it out long before this. There’d have been a steady stream of it being loosed on the countryside through cat-houses, beer joints, and crap games, not to mention large amounts through fines for disturbing the peace. Granted, one of them had been in prison, but where was the connection with Haig? Of course he d been in the sneezer once himself, but that was two thousand miles away in San Quentin.

But who was left? The man who had passed me on the lake? No one else?

The upper end of the lake? Yes, there were a few people living up there, mostly men, but you didn’t see much of them. Except that weird one, of course. And he was gone. But really gone. No, he hadn’t moved away; not that kind of gone. In fact, he was down here this morning. I might have seen him pass in his boat. What she meant was weird gone. You know, not quite right. Oh, he was harmless, and you felt sorry for him, but there just wasn’t any sense trying to talk to him. Yes, he was around a lot. He came down about twice a week after his groceries and his comic books. . . .

Comic books? I remembered them then. So that was why they were here. Well, you could certainly scratch him. But, God, there must have been somebody else. I went on listening; maybe she would come up with the right one after awhile.

George called him Two-Gun, but his real name was Cliffords. She thought it was Walter Cliffords, or was it Wilbur Cliffords. Well, it didn’t matter, anyway. Even to him. About half the time he thought he was Sergeant Friday and then for a while he’d be Wyatt Earp. When he was Wyatt Earp he wore a big straw sombrero and a gun-belt and holster with a six-shooter. . . . Yes, a real one. George said it was a .36 or a .38 or something about that size. He shot snakes with it. He’d been up there for years, as far as she knew. Used to work for the Southern Pacific, didn’t he, or something like that—anyway, he had a disability pension and he didn’t do anything but hunt and fish all the time, living alone like a hermit, and it was no wonder he was a little, well, you know. It must be a pretty good pension, too, because it was actually a fact he must buy at least twenty or thirty dollars worth of comic books and true detective magazines from them every month, to say nothing about his groceries and the shotgun