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they knew better how to appreciate him. Certainly they were safer from certain complications and entanglements. Quicker to come to the point than young girls too, no doubt, young town girls at any rate, who, even when they know very well exactly what is on a man’s mind, and even when they have no intention of denying it to him, still like to have a face put on the matter. And, too, they make a man feel beholden, unlike a married woman, who is more liable to realize that she has given no more than she has gotten. So he was very friendly. Friendly with husbands of pretty wives and polite to the husbands of the plain ones, and very democratic about it, often having to supper some town lawyer or doctor and his wife, along with one of his herdsmen or crop clerks who had a pretty wife. And he would take the husband hunting and would assist him to an intimacy with women of whom he himself had tired—for he had the rare ability of parting friends with a mistress.
    All of which, by the late years, was enough to make a man a little suspicious of his friendship. For I take it that most men, for a time anyhow, like to think their wives attractive to others. But the Captain, though no man could claim intimacy with him, did not want for friends. For fortunately there was a sure way of enjoying his friendship without suspicions. That was so long as Mrs. Hannah was not friendly with your wife.
    But there were plenty with whose wives she had been friendly, and so there were men who were not too sorry when, to raise a posse, the Captain was brought downtown, lying, for all to see, in the bed of that pickup truck, unrecognizable except by his clothes, that mild spring afternoon fifteen years ago. There were some, though they never dared show it of course, who were not too shocked at the manner of his death. And there are others who have learned in the years since that they too had just as much reason to wish him dead. Then, there are others with just as much reason who to this day do not suspect it.

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    Now, after outliving herself fifteen years, Mrs. Hannah had gone to her reward—whatever that was. One wondered what she thought her reward would be. Heaven, no doubt. And then one could imagine her deliberately doing something at the last minute to insure going to hell, so as not to be separated from her Theron. Though, perhaps Mrs. Hannah thought Theron had been choiring with the angels these fifteen years. Hadn’t that been her meaning in that tombstone she had had put up for him?
    The first of us to get to the graveyard that morning found the two strangers—who had been in such a rush, who couldn’t wait—sitting on that grass-grown mound beside the old open grave, looking quite confounded in their expectations of a back-country graveyard. We arrived just one minute ahead of Deputy Sheriff Bud Stovall, coming to check on these unusual proceedings. The Negroes that the two strangers had hired would be needed mainly to fill in the grave afterwards, but after fifteen years the walls of it had caved in and leaves and branches enough fallen down and piled up in it to make it indecently shallow to bury a body in. The two Negroes let themselves down in the hole and set to work. The two strangers got off the mound and out of the way of the dirt that commenced to fly. At first, while you could still see the Negroes’ heads above the ground, the dirt was black; then they began to get below the silt and their heads gradually disappeared and the dirt thrown up was red clay.
    Such was the funeral Mrs. Hannah gave herself—no ceremony, no procession, no preacher and no sermon, nothing but a bare interment. No one doubted—even before we were shown the proof—that this was as she herself had willed. She had not been one to miss such an opportunity, and besides, no one could have done it for her; she had no living kin—not even anyone to crumble in the customary first clod of dirt upon the coffin. She was