The small, dark man who had been talking of family life in a high-pitched voice put down his fork and squinted.

“That’s the Klan,” said Porterfield.

“You guess?”

“Hell, yes. Look at the sheets, and all. That there’s the Klan.”

The other customers had paused in their talk and all were staring now. The owner, French Rosier, a big, scarred man, wiped the palms of his hands on his spotted apron quietly.

“What they gonna do?” asked Andrew McGivern.

“I don’t know.” Stuart Porterfield shredded a paper napkin from an aluminum dispenser, touched his mouth and swiveled on the stool. “Christ, I don’t know what they gonna do.”

“I tell you this,” said a husky young man, to no one, “if they on the Hill for trouble, I see to it they ain’t disappointed.”

“You shut up, Glad Owens, now, you just shut up with all that,” said French Rosier. “Ain’t a damn thing happened yet.”

“Maybe they’re kids,” a man on the last stool said, “having a little fun, you know.”

“No,” the young man said. “They ain’t kids.”

“How do you know? Where you get this inside informa-tion?”

No one moved. They sat with their heads turned slightly, watching.

“. . . twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine,” said Stuart Porterfield.

“There sure a lot.”

“Yeah.” Porterfield was rigid on the stool, the stained and yellowed cigarette close to his flesh, the clinging ash about to fall. Above the café’s grill a plastic radio made hissing sounds: the radio was cracked from all the times it had been dropped, and the cracks had spread, unhealed, the Scotch-tape bandages now curled and blistered, dropping. On the wall a cheap alarm clock ticked. A tinted photograph of a smiling man in uniform hung crooked: To my Dad, This is the life, Sandy.

Stuart Porterfield felt the bite of the fiery tip, but he did not look down. Slowly his fingers pulled the paper from the tobacco, crushed the wrinkled flakes, transformed the glowing end to black ash.

“Fifty-seven!” said the husky young man. “Bullshit they ain’t planning somethin’. Listen, why we sitting here like dummies with our women home alone?”

“Don’t move,” said French, “I’m tellin’ you.”

“Don’t move! Like hell!”

“Glad, I seen all this before in other places,” French Rosier said, wiping his hands. “You got no call to be afraid.”

The boy got up and glared and walked across the floor and stood there.

“Listen,” French went on, “all those fellas want to do is scare us. They just like a bunch of kids on Halloween. You remember when you was a little boy, on Halloween?”

Glad Owens did not answer.