next week. I'll rest up, and kick you all around next week."

He lit a cigar, a big grey man with long legs and a good-humored mouth, and he watched Dan Paray throw one short; then he strolled over to kibitz at the checker game between Fat Sam Hogan and Windy Harris, at one of the tables near the door. Late morning sunlight slanted in through the window by the table and struck light off Windy's glasses as he leaned across the board, thumped a checker three times and said triumphantly, "King me, Sam. You're getting blind, I swear. Or dumber."

Behind his back Ben Bates heard a shoe ring against the stake; then he heard it spin off, and he grinned at Owen Urey's bullfrog cussing.

Tom Pace was saying urgently, "Look—look, Jim, damn it, you didn't no more shoot down that plane singlehanded than I did. We was all shooting. Godamighty—where you get off claiming you brung it down?"

Ben turned and sat down at the table next to the checker game, and stretched his legs in the sunlight. He raised thick brows like clumps of steel-wool at Tom and at old Jim Liddel, who sat in his pillowed armchair like a thin, scowling, bald, mansized spider.

"You keep talking so high and mighty," Tom said, "we'll carry you out o' here and take you and dump you in the creek. You can tell the fish about who got the plane."

"Still arguing over who planted the shot, huh," Ben grinned. "Regular feud, you two."

"Well, hell, Ben," Tom said, and bit down on his gums so his whiskers almost hid the end of his nose. "I just get filled up on this old windbag hollering how he—"

"You go call me a windbag once more, Tom Pace," Jim Liddel said, and he stirred his all but helpless body in the armchair, "you're gonna have a sore eye, you seventy year old whippersnapper. I brung it down."

"In a hog's behind, you brung it down, Mister Dan'l Boone!"

"It 'us just after I let loose it started smoking," old Jim snarled, "and nobody else was shooting right then! You're gonna get a sore eye, I swear—tobacco in it. I can spit to where you sit, and I can spit faster'n you can move, I bet, unless you're faster'n a fly, and you ain't. You just ask anybody who was there ... it 'us just after I shot it started—"

Tom Pace thumped the table. "I was there, you old ... now, now, Jim, don't 

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