“Why can’t we move from here?” Sidney wondered, touching Vance’s shoulder ever so lightly with his outstretched fingers. “Light out . . .”

“And leave the house and everything . . . ?”

“Sell it.”

“Who’d buy it, Sid . . . It’s most finished . . . See how dilapidated it looks even by starlight . . . It’s all but turned to powder.”

Vance waited in silence a while. Sid took his hand then in his, pressed it, then let it go.

“We could go swimming tomorrow over at Barstow’s . . . Sid, you always was a good swimmer and diver.”

“Yeah, I guess you thought so . . . anyhow. . . .”

The next day they set off about ten o’clock for Barstow’s. They walked through the south end of the cornfield which eventually showed up on Doc Ulric’s property, then past a stretch of cottonwood trees, up quite a sandy bluff, and at last down to the river itself.

Vance had stripped and had secured his clothes partly under some stones and was already in the water. Sidney, gazing at the river from the edge of the shore, dispiritedly undressed, but then at the last moment, although having already wet his feet to go in, he stood stock still, lifting his nose like a deer that smells danger.

A young man, about Sidney’s age, had just crossed down the sloping path that led to the river in his truck, behind which was a trailer with two young horses inside who were whinnying and kicking vehemently, one of them making the attempt despite the cramped quarters and narrow confinement to rear on his hind legs. The truck driver came to a halt, and staring at Sidney thunderstruck, had jumped out of his vehicle and advanced a few steps still wearing the awestruck look on his countenance.

Both Vance and Sidney recognized him as the “son of the renderer,” also called by the villagers the “scissors-­grinder,” and between whom and the De Lakes brothers there had always been “bad blood,” almost a kind of obscure and muted feud which many claimed was behind Brian McFee’s having been shot to death.

Roy Sturtevant, the newcomer or “renderer,” had stopped then, his bewilderment, if anything, increasing, and he had stretched out his hands finally not to greet Sidney or embrace him but as a further, and involuntary, expression of his incredulity and amazement at seeing De Lakes.

Sidney flinched and drew back several paces, for, as he was later to explain to Vance, the very sight of a man’s hands coming toward him since he had been in prison made him uneasy, but to see Roy Sturtevant approaching him in this fashion, unexpected as his coming had been also, was more than he could bear. It brought back to him in a dizzying rush all the terrible events which had led up to his having been convicted and imprisoned.