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it.”
    “The way you imagined you saw him down at the spring? And collected the car notes?”
    “All right, all right,” she said desperately. “I lied about it. But why can’t you leave me alone?”
    “When I see something being passed around I like to get my share. I’m just a pig that way.”
    Her shoulders slumped and she looked down at her feet. “Well, now that you’ve expressed your opinion of me, could we go on to town?”
    “What’s your hurry? We’re just getting acquainted. And besides, you haven’t taken care of my car payments yet.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “You, angel. Did I tell you that you had nice legs?” I started to go on from there, but she brushed the skirt down and shoved away and finally she did hit me. “O.K.,” I said. “You don’t have to call the Marines. I can take a hint.” I switched on the ignition and turned the car back on the road. She was silent all the way back to town, just sitting in the corner of the seat rolling her handkerchief into a ball in her hands.
    It was easy to see something was wrong before we got there. A column of black smoke climbed straight into the sky from somewhere in town and a highway patrol car came boiling up behind us and careened past with its siren howling. I hit the accelerator and fell in behind it, wondering where the fire was and hoping it wasn’t the rooming house I’d moved into yesterday.
    It wasn’t. It was a greasy-spoon hamburger shack beyond the cotton gin on the other side of the street. Smoke, red-laced with flame, boiled out of the rear door and the window while the front of the place was a traffic jam of men trying to get in with hoses and other men trying to fight their way out with tables and chairs and a big jukebox. The street was blocked with swollen white hoses and the one piece of fire-fighting equipment, an old pumper left over from the ’Twenties, while volunteer firemen ran back and forth carrying axes and yelling at each other. I slowed down, trying to get a better look, but the highway cop waved me on with a furious gesture of his arms, shouting something I couldn’t hear above the uproar and pointing to the cross street detouring around the block.
    I went up a couple of blocks and then turned back to the main street again, past the corner where the bank was. It was deserted here. Everybody was down at the other end fighting the fire or just gawking and getting in the way. When I turned in at the lot the other salesman was gone and Harshaw was alone in the office. As I got out I looked at her, wondering if she was going to say anything, but the big eyes were stony and blank, not even seeing me. She was probably scared blue of what I might say to Harshaw but she’d die before she’d plead again. She was a sweet-looking kid taking a beating about something, and suddenly I was ashamed and wanted to apologize.
    “Wait—” I started. She turned her head and looked at me as if I were something crawling out of a cesspool and went on into the office with her back straight.
    Harshaw was on the phone when I came in and she was waiting to talk to him. He hung up in a minute and looked across at me.
    “You get the car?” he asked.
    “No,” I said. I sat down and lighted a cigarette.
    “Why not?”
    He had a habit of barking like a non-com, and he looked like one, like an old master sergeant with thirty years in. He was stocky and square-faced, around fifty-five, with a mop of iron grey hair, and the frosty grey eyes bored into you from under bushy overhanging brows. There were little tufts of hair in his ears, and he always had a cigar clamped in his mouth or in his hand.
    I don’t know why I did it. “Because he paid Miss Harper,” I said.
    He grunted. “Just have to do it again next month. The guy’s a dead-beat. What’s afire down there? The gin?”
    “No. Hamburger joint across from it.”
    “Well, how about hanging around while I go to dinner?”
    That burned me a