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But there was a price to be paid for all this, too, for very shortly Alice and I had nothing to do. We’d wake up in the morning and face each other across our breakfast, which Richard had already prepared. And after we had finished breakfast we would sit and stare into the dregs of our coffee cups while the bees buzzed at the screens and the long summer’s day spread out pitilessly before us.

“What would you like to do today, dear?” Alice would say.

“Well, I thought I’d like to clear out the cellar and make room for my new workshop.”

“He did that Tuesday.”

“Oh, did he?”

“You seem surprised.”

“Surprised?” I laughed. “Nothing about him surprises _ 55 me.

She looked at me and we both laughed aloud. But it was the quick, guarded laughter of careworn people. When we stood up, she leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “Do you suppose he’d permit us to do the dishes?”

“We might just sneak them into the sink right now and do them while he’s out.”

“I’d love to do some dishes,” she said a little wistfully.

“What he doesn’t know will never harm him.” I winked at her, and so we did the dishes.

Between the two of us, we had recently taken to referring to Richard as “he,” or “him.”

Not only did Richard Atlee attend to our physical needs, but apparently he felt it was his duty to minister to our spiritual requirements, as well. Though he never said it, I knew he felt a deep responsibility about what had happened between me and Reverend Horn. It bothered him that we were now without a place of worship, and so on Sundays he would wake us, somewhat earlier than usual. We would wash and put on our Sunday clothes and stumble down to the living room, where we would hold services among ourselves, reading from the Bible and singing from the Hymnal. On these occasions I would preside. During the singing, Richard’s voice could be heard above anyone else’s. With its pathetic croaking and grating nasalities it would fill the room and, so it seemed later on, the whole house.

So the days came and went, moving slowly and uneventfully but bringing with their virtually unbroken tedium a highly encouraging note. We heard nothing from Birge about a police record on Richard, and apparently all efforts to locate such a record had not panned out. Also, to the best of my knowledge, Birge had stopped asking questions of people around town. He had still not come to ask any additional questions of me.

However, there was an ominous note to all this calm. On several occasions, once in the front yard, once in the driveway, and once peering out the library windows, I saw Birge’s station wagon out on the road, cruising slowly past the front of the house. And from the way he went past, I had the distinct impression it wasn’t merely a chance passing. It was perfectly clear, he wanted us to see him.

I never mentioned this to either Alice or Richard, even though it troubled me. But still, from the way things looked, I commenced to believe that the matter was being slowly forgotten. It seems I was wrong. It had not been forgotten. And from an incident that occurred one afternoon, the point was made abundantly clear to me.

For several days, Alice was going through a spell of high fever and sore throat. I had Dr. Tucker out to see her. He confined her to bed and write a prescription for antibiotics. Someone had to get the prescription filled.

Because of the high fever, I didn’t want to leave Alice alone by herself in the house. Nor did I want to leave her with Richard and go myself. Ever since the Petrie incident, I had sensed in Alice a growing although still unspoken fear of Richard Atlee, and quite frankly I didn’t want her to wake from her fever and suddenly find herself alone in the house with him. So there was no one else to send except Richard. I’d made a point of not letting him go into town since the Petrie business. By this time I was fully aware of the hostility some of the people in the town felt toward him. We’d had a rash of nasty, anonymous phone calls, and I dearly wanted to avoid another unpleasant incident.

The situation was clear. I couldn’t leave Alice, and the pharmacy wouldn’t make a delivery that far out of town. So I had virtually no choice but to send Richard to town in the car.

When I presented the problem to him he was eager to go and as flattered this time that I’d trust him with the car as he was the first time I sent him. He seemed oblivious to the fact that the task held certain dangers. He was like a young boy entrusted with the keys to his father’s car.

When he emerged from his room prior to departure, I noted that he’d washed, changed into his suit, and combed back from his forehead the great long flowing locks.

Standing out in the driveway I handed him the keys and registration, as well as money to pay for the drugs.

“Now, Richard, don’t spend a minute more in town than you have to. Just get the prescription filled and come right home. Mrs. Graves needs those pills as soon as possible.”

He nodded his head, and from the way he looked at me I could tell that he knew my concern went a good deal deeper than Mrs. Graves’s needs.

We waited anxiously for him to return, and after two hours had passed, I sensed trouble. I called the pharmacist at the drugstore and was informed that Richard had left with the medicine an hour before. The drive out from town was approximately forty minutes—a half-hour if you sped. Twenty minutes overdue was nothing to be alarmed about. So I went back up to the bedroom, where Alice had dozed off, and sat in a chair beside her bed in the gathering dusk of afternoon. In another half-hour a car pulled into the driveway. Alice was still dozing when I rose and tiptoed from the room.

The first glimpse I got of him was in the kitchen. I imagine I moved toward him smiling, feeling all kinds of gratitude and relief. At first I didn’t even notice the blood. Most of it had clotted and faded into the wild entanglement of his beard. As I say, it was dusk and the light was poor. But then suddenly I was up close beside him and peering into a barely recognizable battered face—blood oozing from the nose and a cut on his lip. He had a nasty bruise over the eye which had started to swell and turn a yellowish violet. The worst of it was the bleeding and the clotted gore which he kept wiping away with the sleeve of his jacket.

“What in God’s name—”

“It’s okay,” he said and thrust the vial of tablets toward me. “How’s Missus?”

Later, when I’d washed him and dressed his cuts, he was still unwilling to talk about it. But gradually I was able to extract from him the major details of the story.

Richard had got to town and had the prescription filled without incident. When he got back to the car, he found an automobile parked directly behind ours. In it were three of ‘the young local toughs. If you’ve ever spent any time in a small town, you know the type very well. Teenagers or in their early twenties—shiftless and surly. Most of the time you find them squatting on the steps of the Post Office or the drugstore, ogling girls, spitting on the pavement, and drinking from quart bottles of beer which, for some curious reason, they keep in paper bags.

At any rate, three of these fellows followed Richard out of town in their car. When he finally got out on the Bog Road, which is a nearly always deserted ten-mile strip of badly chewed-up tar, they forced him to the side of the road, dragged him from the car, and proceeded to beat him. They also took whatever change he had left from the money I gave him for the drugs. It was an insignificant sum of three or four dollars.

“Don’t worry,” said Richard when he’d finished his story. “I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t bother. It’s not important. The important thing is that you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “But they won’t be when I get finished.”

The remark made in that flat, dull emotionless way of his made my blood run cold. It was precisely the kind of thing he had said after his encounter with Petrie’s clerks.

“Now, Richard, I don’t want you to do a thing about this. I’ll take care of it in my way.”

He looked at me oddly. There was nothing mocking or impudent about it. It was more like a skepticism that I saw in his glance—a distrust born, no doubt, of the meek manner in which I accepted the Petrie business. The skepticism and distrust goaded me.

“I promise you, Richard,” I said more forcefully than ever, “Now I want you to promise me that you won’t go off and do something foolish—”

For a moment I thought I saw the trace of a smirk on his lips.

“Like taking the law into your own hands again,” I went on.

He looked at me, oddly surprised for a moment, then shrugged.

“Sure.” He said it with a kind of carefree indifference that made me feel foolish. As if he were saying, “If it means so much to you—”

“Good,” I said, full of false satisfaction, not certain whether or not we’d reached any kind of an understanding.

Something flickered in his eye again, lasting for only a moment. Then it was gone and he seemed more himself. “Missus feeling any better now?”

“Fever’s gone and she’s resting comfortably.”

“Can I go up and see her?”

I looked at the mauled, purple thing that was his face. “Let’s wait till she’s a bit stronger.”

He accepted that easily and smiled his wry, twisted little smile. “I’ll go make her some soup now,” he said. And then he was gone.

The following morning at the stroke of nine I was at Birge’s office in the county courthouse. He was already there at his desk in his shirt sleeves having a doughnut and a cup of coffee from a paper container. When I arrived, he cleaned off the desk top, leaned back in his swivel chair, and threw his booted feet up on the desk.

“Have a seat, Albert,” he said with all that bogus amiability of his.

It was the first time I’d come to see Birge in a professional capacity. I confess I was rattled. I told him the story with emotion and a great deal of unevenness. There were gaps in the narrative, and after I’d told it once, he made me go over it again and fill in for continuity.

“Is the boy all right?” Birge asked when I’d finished. “He’s pretty badly banged up. His face—”

“Any broken bones? Anything requiring the attention of a doctor?” He’d taken out a pad and started scribbling on it.

“No,” I said and our eyes locked for the first time. “What do you propose to do?”

He leaned back in his chair and clasped his raw, red paws behind his head. “What do you propose I do?”

“Find those boys.”

“I don’t have to. I know who they are.”

“Then you’ve heard about this thing already?”

“Heard somethin’.”

“And you haven’t done anything about it?”

“Been intendin’ to,” he said, and studied his fingernails.

“Well, I want to press charges.”

“Charges?”

I had the feeling he was laughing at me. “I want those boys brought in. I’m going to press charges of assault and battery.”

Slowly he uncrossed his legs and lifted them from the desk top. “Oh, you don’t wanna do that.”

“I most certainly do.”

“Only make things worse.”

“Things?” I said, growing a little furious. “What things?”

“The situation, Mr. Graves.”

I’d started off as Albert, and now we were back to Mr. Graves again. “You know,” he went on in his cajoling way, “people ’round here are fond of you and Miz Graves. And you’re as welcome as ever. But—I must say—this boy you got stayin’ up there with you—Why, only the other night Darlene was saying—” I assumed Darlene was Mrs. Birge. It was hard to think of her as having a first name, and Darlene, at that.

“We’ve had some ugly experiences here with drifters and hoboes,” Birge went droning on. “I don’t mind tellin’ you—we don’t countenance ’em. Ordinarily, we run ’em out soon as they come in.”

“The boy’s no drifter or hobo. He worked for the fuel company before he came to me. He’s worked for Washburn. No one’s had a bad word to say about him. Go talk to Washburn.” Birge seemed scarcely to be listening. “He’s proved to be an invaluable help to me,” I went on doggedly.

“Oughtn’t to be in your house.”

“Whom I choose to take into my house is my business.”

“You don’t know nothin’ about him—”

“I know everything I have to know!” I snapped. “Now I want those boys brought in.”

“You don’t wanna press charges,” Birge drawled and crossed his legs again.

“I certainly do. I fully intend to press charges.”

Just then someone stepped into the outer office and waved at Birge through the open door.

“Mawnin’, Darrel.” Birge waved back, and they chatted there for a moment while I slumped in my chair and fumed.

“I have every intention of pressing charges,” I said again when the person had left.

The grin that had been on his face during the brief exchange of a moment before still lingered there. Now it seemed that my words were coming slowly through to him.

“These boys,” he said, “are just a pack of young fools and hotheads. But if you was to press charges against them, there’s some round here who’d take it poorly.”

“I don’t care how they take it!” I was on my feet and thumping his desk. “I want those boys prosecuted. I want justice.”

“Now don’t get yourself all lathered, Albert.” He made a quieting gesture with his hand. “I intend to see you get justice.”

I stood there hunched above him, glowering, my knuckles white and mashed down on the rim of the desk. “How?” I said, full of skepticism.

He lit a vile little stump of a cigar and tossed the match into the paper coffee container. “We don’t wanna go through the business of formal charges, do we?” I watched him as he sucked on the cigar, generating enormous quantities of smoke around himself. “Lemme take these boys aside and put the fear of God in ’em.” He spoke out of the side of his mouth, giving the illusion that he was talking to me in the strictest confidence.

“The fear of God?” I said eagerly. There was something in me that wanted to succumb to him.

“How will you put the fear of God in them?”

Birge puffed deeply on the cigar. “I have my ways.”

“Your ways?”

Birge nodded.

“What ways?” I asked, beginning to yield.

“Never you mind. Just leave this to me.”