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barrel that stands out in front of the city hall, in a specially constructed shelter which is locked up every night. Each Saturday afternoon at three o'clock, the drum is spun around by the head majorette of the county high school, and a ticket is drawn. The winner receives a few hundred dollars, and six months of congratulations and stale jokes and slant-eyed envy from his friends.
    The scheme works. This drawing, as the lottery was called, was and continues to be an enormous success in the small rural town - in the entire county in fact - where gambling is something that people did in Nevada and on television and nowhere else. For the first time in their lives, the people of Pine Cone were being offered something for nothing. The town is mobbed all day on Saturday, so that it is difficult to drive a car those three blocks through the centre of Pine Cone. Fanners and their wives and their eight children who before had gone to one of the larger towns nearby now come to Pine Cone, do their shopping, carefully (and laboriously) fill out the tickets, deposit them in the rusting drum, and desperately pray for the few hundred dollars that, in truth, would make a substantial difference in the quality of their lives for many months to come.
    On Saturday morning, the stores are crowded with people who spend money with glad hearts, knowing that they may have the chance to make it all back in the afternoon. All day there is a line in front of the city hall, everyone in town sticking his few or many tickets through the narrow slot in the top of the barrel. Everyone likes to give it a 'lucky' spin, in hopes that the motion will increase the chance that their own ticket will be pulled out by the pretty blonde girl in the high white boots, and the gold tassels on her stovepipe hat.
    The few hundred dollars would mean much to almost anyone living in Pine Cone, for it is not a prosperous community. The richest men in town are the two lawyers, the president of the bank, the dentist, the three general practitioners, and the chiropractor. The richest - the dentist - makes in his best years, with half the eighth grade class going into braces, no more than thirty-two thousand dollars. Certain people stand to inherit money someday, but their kin are hanging stubbornly on to their sorry lives; others have wealthy relatives in other parts of the state, but a rich relative, everyone knows, has a tighter fist than a three-day-old corpse. And everyone, no matter his income, has the same trouble with mortgages and overdrafts.
    The residential area that lies to the north of Commercial Boulevard cannot exactly be called fashionable, but it is the most desirable area of the town. Here live the professionals, the store owners, and the schoolteachers. Factory workers live in less substantial housing south of Commercial Boulevard. The black section of Pine Cone is on the eastern edge of the town, geographically separated by Burnt Corn Creek. Here the people are often very poor indeed.
    The oldest houses in Pine Cone stretch along the highway leading out of the town to the west: they are pleasant, well-constructed buildings, though not to the modem taste. The people who live in them are old, proud, impoverished, and not much thought about. The grammar school is located north of Commercial Boulevard; the junior high school to the south of it. Older students have to take the bus every day to the county high school in Elba. The munitions factory had been constructed just to the west of the town, but recently the town expanded its boundaries so as to include it. It is screened from the highway by heavily wooded vacant lots. Cheap housing for workers had been recently erected up to the parking lot of the plant, and for many people, the Pine Cone Munitions Factory, in the very corner of Pine Cone, is its centre.
    The people of Pine Cone recognise one principal division of themselves: black and white. Other divisions can be seen, but they don't matter as much. All the