Thomason was speaking to them all, trying to bring some reason into the conversation. He was beginning to sense, almost smell in the air, that they were listening and believing Bobby-Joe. “But we ain’t seen him today, boy. He ain’t drove by here at all after yesterday; he ain’t been hanging around the colored section helping them pack. And there ain’t been no other fellows around here making sure they all had a way to travel.” He was losing them, like grain between his fingers and wished Mister Harper was there to keep reason, or Harry to slow them down.

“He didn’t have to see that,” Bobby-Joe went on. “Why should he? Them northern niggers don’t really care about the niggers down here. They just want to give us white folks trouble and make us all, white and black, unhappy. His job was over when he started them off. Then all he had to do was sit in the back of that car and laugh his ass off, all he had to do was watch the fun. What he care about how they got away? They all traveled without any help from anybody anyways.”

Thomason sighed. “Well, all right then. So what? So he caused it. Can’t do nothing about it now.”

This silenced them all for a moment. Bobby-Joe sat again and lit a cigarette. The rest stared off above the roof tops at a few bright stars. Someone asked for a match. Someone else gave it to him.

“It’s all over now.” Thomason went on. “There ain’t no reason to get all bothered about it. If he did it, I reckon he did himself a good job. There ain’t nothing more to say.” Give a little to get a little, Thomason was thinking.

The men nodded, murmured agreement.

“Boy, if I could get my hands on him, I’d surely have something to do.” Bobby-Joe pounded his fist into his hand. “I’d punch that smile right off his face.”

Had they been sitting across the Highway, they might have seen the car come over the Ridge, its lights tilted upward as it climbed through Harmon’s Draw, illuminating a small rim of the horizon like a tiny, cold rising moon. Then it gained the crest, tipped downward like a delicately balanced scale, bathed the road in front of it in one long stream. The light was visible and the car behind it dark, so had they been looking, they would have seen only the shaft swooping toward town, until they would no longer have seen the shaft either, just one ball of light made up of the lamps and the grill. Then as it got closer, they would have seen, not the one ball, but two distinct head lamps and finally the lamps and above them the faint patch of green with a light-skinned Negro’s face in the right corner. It was that close when they noticed the stream in the street in front of them, lighting the buildings across the way, and they turned toward its source to count, as the car sped by, the number of Negroes they expected to find inside, not that they were tallying any totals, just counting individual carloads only to forget them almost immediately. But there was only the light-skinned Negro in front of the limousine, and in back, two figures, the nearer, a Negro with long graying hair and dark circles for eyes, sunglasses, reclining as if in a beach chair. Then Bobby-Joe hopped to his feet, rushed into the middle of the Highway in enough time to be obscured by the dust and exhaust and the shadows, and the men on the porch could hear him screaming out of the veil of dirt: “Hey you, you God-damn preaching son of a black bitch, stop that car! You hear me, nigger? STOP THAT CAR! I WANT TO TALK TO YOU! STOP THAT CAR!”