They rode without talking while the sun went down in red clouds and the radio program changed a few times. Harris switched on his lights. Once the man with the guitar started to sing “The One Rose That’s Left in My Heart,” which came over the air, played by the Aloha Boys. Then in shyness he stopped, but made a streak on the radio dial with his blackly calloused finger tip.

“I ’preciate them big ’lectric gittars some have,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Looks like north.”

“It’s north,” said Harris. “Smoke?”

The other man held out his hand.

“Well . . . rarely,” said the man with the guitar.

At the use of the unexpected word, Harris’s cheek twitched, and he handed over his pack of cigarettes. All three lighted up. The silent man held his cigarette in front of him like a piece of money, between his thumb and forefinger. Harris realized that he wasn’t smoking it, but was watching it burn.

“My! gittin’ night agin,” said the man with the guitar in a voice that could assume any social surprise.

“Anything to eat?” asked Harris.

The man gave a pluck to a low string and glanced at him.

“Dewberries,” said the other man. It was his only remark, and it was delivered in a slow and pondering voice.

“Some nice little rabbit come skinnin’ by,” said the man with the guitar, nudging Harris with a slight punch in his side, “but it run off the way it come.”

The other man was so bogged in inarticulate anger that Harris could imagine him running down a cotton row after the rabbit. He smiled but did not look around.

“Now to look out for a place to sleep—is that it?” he remarked doggedly.

A pluck of the strings again, and the man yawned.

There was a little town coming up; the lights showed for twenty miles in the flat land.

“Is that Dulcie?” Harris yawned too.

“I bet you ain’t got no idea where all I’ve slep’,” the man said, turning around in his seat and speaking directly to Harris, with laughter in his face that in the light of a road sign appeared strangely teasing.

“I could eat a hamburger,” said Harris, swinging out of the road under the sign in some automatic gesture of evasion. He looked out of the window, and a girl in red pants leaped onto the running board.

“Three and three beers?” she asked, smiling, with her head poked in. “Hi,” she said to Harris.

“How are you?” said Harris. “That’s right.”

“My,” said the man with the guitar. “Red sailor-boy britches.” Harris listened for the guitar note, but it did not come. “But not purty,” he said.

The screen door of the joint whined, and a man’s voice called, “Come on in, boys, we got girls.”