Later on, she told herself, I’ll go over to the library and see if Miss Plummer can dig out some school records for me. Might as well use up all this nervous energy doing something besides worrying. I’m a fool. After all, Nick had been rampaging around about hunting for years and nothing bad had ever happened. He kept his counsel, and what he did was his own business. And with Old Pete, anyway, he would be safe. Drunk or sober, Old Pete could be trusted, she had to grant him that. And he liked Nick because Nick was a listener and, God knows, Old Pete was a natural-born talker. In fact, she thought, smiling her thin smile, all Jem really needed to get a history of the town was a tape recorder and an indefinite number of cans of beer and let Old Pete talk for days till he had talked out all he knew.

“No time to be going. Too late,” Pete had said first, coming to his door, unshaven, his eyes red. “I haven’t even had my supper, man. You come in here and we’ll see.

“I saw a New York car go up the hill two hours ago. Please, Pete.”

Pete gave the tall man at his door a shrewd look.

“What ails you, Nick?”

Nick scratched his head and frowned.

“Nothing. I just don’t want to see Cornelius Chapman’s deer butchered.”

Old Pete chuckled.

“It wouldn’t hurt Cornelius.”

But then he saw a queer light in Nick’s eyes, just a flicker. It came and went. And something told him not to bait Nick. The only anger to fear is the anger of a gentle man.

“I’ll go alone,” Nick said, and turned away.

“Oh, hang on—don’t be in such a rush.” And it was agreed that they would go together. Nick refused to come in. Coming in, as he knew from experience, would mean being shown around this cozy palace of Old Pete’s and listening to a long, rambling talk. He waited outside, smoking, watching Flicker bark excitedly at a squirrel.

The trouble was that, slow as Nick’s own pace was usually, he had been feeling so nervous and tuned up since the hunting season had begun that the half hour he waited was hard to bear. He lit one cigarette from another, and his hands were shaking—no way for a man with a rifle to behave. He called Flicker and rubbed the top of the dog’s head, and that contact with an animal, a good animal, did help. When he let Flicker run again, the tension had flowed out.