of my grand-daddy. He got shot up at Vicksburg before his father could locate him and drag him back home. Granny used to say, 'All my life I've believed in the solid South and the Democratic Party. I believed they were good; and if they aren't, I don't want to know about it.'"

Belcher laughed and shook his head. I gave Joey a frantic S.O.S. When Belcher gets going on the Civil War, no one else gets a word in for solid hours.

Joey didn't move, but he said, "What story?" very incredulously, and then he glanced at me and winked.

"That Martian story," Belcher said. "The one about the colony on Mars and the new race of Earth-Mars men that springs up—I've forgotten the title. They say Fitz-James O'Brien never could remember the titles of his stories either."

Joey said, "You never gave me any such yarn," and this time he really meant it.

Belcher said, "You're crazy."

Down at the other end of the table someone wanted to know who O'Brien wrote for.

I said, "He's dead. He wrote 'The Diamond Lens.'"

"He was the first pulp writer," Belcher said. "Most folks believe Poe invented the short story. Land-sake! Poe never wrote a short story. He wrote mood pieces. O'Brien was the first. He wrote great short stories and great pulp stories."

I said, "If you're looking for the father of the pulp industry, why don't you go back far enough? There was a boy named Greene in the late Sixteenth Century."

"You mean 'Groatsworth of Wit' Greene?"

"The very same. Only forget that piece of junk. It was his last grab at a dollar. Get hold of a catalogue some day and see the quantity of pulp he poured out to make a living. Pamphlets and plays and what not."

Someone said, "Greene a pulp writer?" He sounded shocked.

I said, "Brother, when he turned that stuff out, it was pulp. Passes three hundred years and it turns into literature. You figure it out."

Belcher waved his hand. "I was talking about the invention of the short story," he said. "O'Brien—"

I tried to cut him off. "I thought O'Brien predated Poe."

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