and he dropped it into the canvas bag hanging from his shoulder.

“That was good shootin’, Bob, considerin’ you ain’t done none in a couple of years,” he said. Then he added hesitantly, as though he didn’t want to hurt my feelings, “But yore brother’d a’ got ‘em both.”

I nodded, remembering that Lee and Sam had hunted a lot together. “Lee’s a natural,” I agreed. “It’s hard for him to miss.”

“By the way, I seen him last Sat’day.”

“You did?” I said. “How was he?”

“Oh, he looked fine. He was out to the house.” He didn’t say any more, as if he took it for granted I knew what Lee had been out there for. I did. Sam ran a still down in the Black Creek bottoms behind his house. I used to know where it was when I was a kid and living with my grandfather on his place across the other side of the bottom, but I had never advertised the fact. It wasn’t the kind of knowledge that was considered good for you. “I was sorry to hear about yore daddy, Bob,” he said after a while. The Major had been dead about six months now.

“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t he ever screw you out of anything?”

Sam flushed and looked away in embarrassment and seemed to be trying to think of something to change the subject.

“Ought to be able to go coon hunting pretty soon, Sam,” I said. “How about if I come out some night and we try the bottom down below the house?”

“Why, that’d be fine. Any night you can make it, just let me know.”

I thanked him for letting me shoot the bird and crawled back through the fence and got into the Ford. I rolled on down the grade and clattered over the loose flooring of the little bridge over the creek at the bottom of the hill. The thought of seeing Lee and Mary again made the morning perfect, and I grinned. There wasn’t anybody like him. Maybe he was wild, but then lots of young bucks like him were, and he would settle down. It was funny, too, that when I got to thinking of some of the things he had done it always seemed as if he were the younger brother. As a matter of fact, he was nearly four years older than I. He was almost twenty-six.

When we were growing up, though, and in high school, he had always been an older brother, even though he got into more trouble than I did. He had been a good buffer between the Major and me, and I knew that if it hadn’t been for Lee I would have left home long before I did. It wasn’t that he fought my battles for me; with the Major I fought my own battles. It was more that Lee didn’t have to fight. He knew how to get along with people, knew that charm would get you things from them that obstinacy never could.

The troubles he got into were spectacular. When he was seventeen and still a junior in high school he had run away with a married woman.

Two

It was around ten as I drove slowly up South Street toward the square. The town was quiet and the square almost deserted. It was Friday. Tomorrow the place would be full of Fords parked fender to fender and farmers and their wives would be standing in bunches around the sidewalks and going in and out of the stores, but right now the whole town seemed to drowse under the washed blue of the sky, soaking up the warmth of the sun.

I braked to a standstill at the stop line where South Street opens into the square and looked up at the old courthouse, red and dusty and ugly, with white bird droppings spattering its walls, and swallows and sparrows circling around high up under its ornate eaves.

Swinging through the right-hand side of the square, I turned and went out North Elm, where the trees almost met over the street like a tunnel and the houses were friendly old landmarks and the lawns were wide and well kept. Eight blocks out I turned off the street to the left in the middle of the block onto the graveled driveway.

Nearly all the rest of the houses along the street were close to the sidewalks on small lots and they had grown up there long after the old Crane house was built. It sat back in the far corner of