Big Six opened the window and said, “Push off, mother-raper. Quit pissing on this car.”

The drunk turned and peered at him through bloodshot black eyes. “I’ll piss on you, black boy,” he muttered in a Southern voice.

“I’m gonna see you do it,” Big Six said, stuck the toothpick in his change pocket and opened the door.

“Let him go on,” George Drake said. “Here comes Jackson down the stairs.”

“I’m gonna flatten him is all,” Big Six said. “Ain’t gonna take a second.”

In the right side mirror, George noticed two colored men coming from beside the house in front of which he was parked. They were carrying battered Gladstone bags like pullman porters on their way to work. They started across the street. The back window of the Cadillac was coated with snow, and he lost them in the rear-view mirror.

“Hurry up, man!” he called just as Big Six reached out a hand to clutch the drunk by the shoulder.

The drunk swung a long arc with his right hand, which he had held out of sight, and plunged the blade of a hunting knife through Big Six’s head. It went in above the left temple, and two inches of the point came out on a direct line above the right temple. Big Six went deaf, dumb and blind, but not unconscious. He teetered slightly and groped about aimlessly like an old blind man.

“Gooooodammmmm!” George Drake said, pushing open the door with his left hand, while reaching inside of his coat for his pistol with his right.

He had his left foot down on the street, buried in the snow, and his left hand gripping the edge of the door for leverage, when a noose was dropped over his head and he was jerked backward. A knee caught him in the back, and he felt as though his spine was broken. His hat fell off. The sap landed right above his left ear, and lights exploded in his head as he lost consciousness.

“Put him in the back,” the white man said from the other side, of the car. “And put the kiesters in the trunk.”

He turned his head, gave a last look at Big Six and forgot him.

Big Six was walking slowly down the sidewalk, dragging his feet in the snow. The wound bled scarcely any; a thin trickle ran down his cheek from where the point of the knife protruded. His eyes were open; his hat was on his head. But for the bone knife-handle sticking from one temple and two inches of blade from the other, he looked like the usual drunk. He was calling silently for George to help him.

The white man got into the back of the car and took hold of the end of the noose. One of the colored men got behind the wheel; the other was at the back, putting away the Gladstone bags.

A shining black hearse backed carefully from the garage beside the funeral parlor. It straightened up and pulled to the curb. A fat black man in a dark chauffeur’s uniform got out and closed the garage door. He looked across the street toward the Cadillac.