“What say?” asked the xylophone player.

“My husband happens to be the Baptist preacher of Victory,” said Mrs. Carson in a loud, clear voice. “Isn’t that lucky? I can get him here in five minutes: I know exactly where he is.”

They were in a circle around the xylophone player, all going into the white waiting room.

“Oh, I feel just like crying, at a time like this,” said Aimee Slocum. She looked back and saw the train moving slowly away, going under the bridge at Main Street. Then it disappeared around the curve.

“Oh, the hope chest!” Aimee cried in a stricken voice.

“And whom have we the pleasure of addressing?” Mrs. Watts was shouting, while Mrs. Carson was ringing up the telephone.

The band went on playing. Some of the people thought Lily was on the train, and some swore she wasn’t. Everybody cheered, though, and a straw hat was thrown into the telephone wires.

The Hitch-Hikers

Tom Harris, a thirty-year-old salesman traveling in office supplies, got out of Victory a little after noon and saw people in Midnight and Louise, but went on toward Memphis. It was a base, and he Was thinking he would like to do something that night.

Toward evening, somewhere in the middle of the Delta, he slowed down to pick up two hitch-hikers. One of them stood still by the side of the pavement, with his foot stuck out like an old root, but the other was playing a yellow guitar which caught the late sun as it came in a long straight bar across the fields.

Harris would get sleepy driving. On the road he did some things rather out of a dream. And the recurring sight of hitch-hikers waiting against the sky gave him the flash of a sensation he had known as a child: standing still, with nothing to touch him, feeling tall and having the world come all at once into its round shape underfoot and rush and turn through space and make his stand veiy precarious and lonely. He opened the car door.

“How you do?”

“How you do?”

Harris spoke to hitch-hikers almost formally. Now resuming his speed, he moved over a little in the seat. There was no room in the back for anybody. The man with the guitar was riding with it between his legs. Harris reached over and flicked on the radio.

“Well, music!” said the man with the guitar. Presently he began to smile. “Well, we been there a whole day in that one spot,” he said softly. “Seen the sun go clear over. Course, part of the time we laid down under that one tree and taken our ease.”