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little. I’d wasted the whole morning running an errand for him and now he wanted me to wait around while he went to eat. I got up from the table and started to the door. “Sure,” I said. “As soon as I get back from mine.”
    He glared at me. “Maybe you won’t like this job.”
    “That’s right,” I said. “Maybe I won’t.”
    I went out, and as I started angling across the street she caught up with me, headed for the loan office. She walked alongside, not looking up, and when I glanced around at her the top of that blonde strawstack was just on a level with my eyes.
    “Thank you,” she said quietly.
    “Forget it.” I turned at the kerb and went on up the sidewalk.
    Down the street I could see the smoke still boiling into the sky and the jam of cars and people around the fire engine. The restaurant was deserted, like everything else in this end of town, and when I sat down at the counter the lone waitress hurried up eagerly.
    “Are they going to save it?” she asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t been down there. How’d it start?”
    “Somebody said a grease fire in the kitchen.”
    “Oh. Well, how’s the grease here? You got a menu?”
    She shook her head. “The dinner’s not ready. Cook’s gone to the fire. I could fix you a sandwich, though.”
    “Never mind,” I said. “Just a glass of milk and a piece of pie.”
    It was awful pie and the crust was like damp cardboard. I wasn’t hungry anyway, because of the heat, and I kept thinking about the girl and the whole crazy thing out there at the oil well. Why was she taking the responsibility for Sutton’s car payments, and why had he looked at her that way? He hadn’t been just taking her clothes off; he was doing it in company, with his face full of that dirty joke of his. The simplest explanation, of course, was that he knew something about her and she didn’t dare take the car away or even try to collect for it. But when I’d tried a little pressure politics myself I got smeared in nothing flat. Why? I gave up, but I couldn’t get rid of her entirely because random parts of her kept poking into my mind, the odd gravity about her eyes, the way she walked, and the way the top of her head reminded you of a kid with sun-burned hair. She added up to something I couldn’t quite place, and then I knew what it was—an ad-writer’s picture of The Girl Back Home. For God’s sake, I thought. I got up and pushed some change across the counter and went out. I had to go to the bank.
    I still had about two hundred dollars in a bank in Houston which I hadn’t had time to get when I left there, and if I didn’t put through a draft for it right away I’d be going hungry. I had about forty dollars in my pocket. I went up the street in the white sunlight, not meeting anybody and absently watching the confusion down at the other end. A shower of sparks went pin-wheeling upwards in the smoke and I decided the roof of the place must have fallen in at last.
    The bank was a little deadfall on the corner, and when I went inside it was dim and a little cooler than the street. It had a couple of tellers’ cages and a desk behind a railing in the rear, but there was nobody in the place—nobody at all. I stood there for a moment looking around, wondering if they operated the place like a serve-yourself market. I went over and looked through the grilles above the cages, thinking somebody might have passed out with a heart attack and be lying on the floor. Money was lying around on the shelf but there was no one in either cage.
    Then I heard someone step inside the door behind me. A voice said, “Wheah the fiah, Mister Julian? Heered the sireen and the people a-runnin’ but ain’t nobody tell me wheah the fiah is at.”
    I looked around. It was a gaunt, six-foot figure, a Negro, dressed in what looked like the trousers of some kind of lodge uniform and a white T-shirt with a big, frayed straw hat on his head. Then I saw the cane and dark