“What I bet is, you got yourself one of your mama’s sheets and went outside at night. Now ain’t that true? Why, sure, it is. You made believe you was a spook and hid behind a bush and when somebody passed, you jumped out. ‘Boo!’ We all did that. But think back, Glad. You was with a lot of other spooks, I bet, you wasn’t by yourself.”

“Oh, shut up, French, you talking crazy!”

“No, I ain’t. I’m saying that those fellas out there ain’t no different from the kids at Halloween. They got to be bunched together and they got to hide behind bedsheets because every one of them is scared to death. In the daylight you’d laugh at them; they’d laugh at themselves.”

“I don’t know about all that, French. It might could be: I never said they wasn’t chicken-shit. But they ain’t alone. They together. All it takes is one to say ‘Let’s do it’ and the whole damn bunch’ll do it.”

Stuart Porterfield said, “That’s a fact, French, that’s a fact.”

“They only trying to scare us! Take it easy. There ain’t nothing going to happen tonight; it ain’t the way they work. This here is just a warning, like; a chance to strut a little. Come on, now, forget about them. Finish up your coffee!”

Stuart Porterfield took out a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his forehead slowly, and as all the others did, stared out.

They say they pay a whole lot better in New York, he thought; a plasterer can make himself a pile there, easy. . . .

Up the gravel path the cars rolled, headlights reaching out beyond the farthest rise, the men in sheets inside the cars all straight and silent.

The license plates were varied: some were from Farragut County, some from nearby towns, and several from other Southern states.

But no one looked at the licenses.

“I didn’t know they still had such a membership,” said Elbert Peters, looking down upon the seemingly endless parade.

“I didn’t either,” Charley Hughes said. The cards lay on the table, the half-drunk bottles of beer, the can of peanuts, all untouched since John Holbert’s call, his breathless “Go look out the window!”

Helene Peters, Elbert’s wife, sat in a chair. Her eyes were wide.

“You know, in a way, though,” Charley Hughes said, “I’m kind of glad to see them. When I was in Georgia, oh, it must be twenty years ago, they had all sorts of demonstrations—but I always missed the fun. It got so I didn’t really believe there was a Ku Klux Klan.” He smiled good-naturedly, glanced at his friends, and picked up a bottle of beer.

“Who’s the Dragon in Caxton?” he asked.