And then the sharp faced man held out a paper and said, ‘Paper, mister?’

Newman took the paper from the man’s blackened little hand and paid his dime. He knew that Fred and Carlson were looking at him and he felt that they were waiting for him to say something about Finkelstein on his own. He dropped the paper and it opened on the sidewalk. The little man helped him as he bent over to gather the sections together. Why couldn’t he say something, any of the things he had so often said to himself about the Jew? His teeth grated against each other, presumably because he had dropped the paper, but he knew it was because of his inability even to mutter a curse against the man who was sitting beside the store a few yards behind him. And the only reason he could imagine for his hesitancy was that he had always been vehemently against peddlers and here he was buying from one, and Fred and Carlson were standing there waiting for him to speak and act like a man who had never had a feeling against peddlers. It was an insolent pressure upon him that he did not want and as he stood erect with the paper again under his arm he looked at Carlson whose teeth were obviously false, and a fear opened in him that they were making him into something he was not.

He laughed and patted the paper under his arm. ‘Don’t know why they make them so thick. By the way,’ he said quickly, ‘I heard your dogs barking last night. Anything wrong?’

Fred said, ‘Must’ve been the moon,’ and scratched his thigh lazily. Carlson kept studying Newman’s face with a thinking expression that had suspicion in it. Fred continued, ‘There was a full moon last night. Notice it, Carlson?’

Unwilling to be distracted from his intense concentration upon Newman, Carlson glanced at Fred, and, still worried, said, ‘Yes.’

‘You mean they really bark at the moon, eh?’ Newman said with wonder, quite as though he had just learned the fact. Why was Carlson looking at him that way?

‘Sure, didn’tyou ever hear of that?’ Fred said.

‘No, I never did,’ Newman said. And turning to Carlson, asked, ‘Is that a scientific fact?’

‘Oh yes,’ Carlson said, absently.

Without allowing Carlson’s mind to wander from the new subject, Newman pursued. ‘I was reading in the Eagle about this scientist who says we’ll be traveling to the moon in rockets after the war.’

‘Oh, that’s impossible,’ Carlson decided flatly. ‘Anybody tries it will be smashed to pieces. Why …’

Newman listened with relief now that he had the searching expression wiped from the bank man’s face.

For a few minutes the three stood on the corner talking about rockets. Then Newman shifted the paper under his arm, and with an easy smile, said, ‘Well, I better get home. My mother’s waiting for the paper.’

‘See ya,’ Fred said.

‘Bye,’ Carlson nodded.

‘Thanks, mister,’ the peddler smiled.