Harris cut off the radio, and they listened to the nickelodeon which was playing inside the joint and turning the window blue, red and green in turn.

“Hi,” said the car-hop again as she came out with the tray. “Looks like rain.”

They ate the hamburgers rapidly, without talking. A girl came and looked out of the window of the joint, leaning on her hand. The same couple kept dancing by behind her. There was something brassy playing, a swing record of “Love, Oh Love, Oh Careless Love.”

“Same songs ever’where,” said the man with the guitar softly. “I come down from the hills. . . . We had us owls for chickens and fox for yard dogs but we sung true.”

Nearly every time the man spoke Harris’s cheek twitched. He was easily amused. Also, he recognized at once any sort of attempt to confide, and then its certain and hasty retreat. And the more anyone said, the further he was drawn into a willingness to listen. I’ll hear him play his guitar yet, he thought. It had got to be a pattern in his days and nights, it was almost automatic, his listening, like the way his hand went to his pocket for money.

“That’n’s most the same as a ballat,” said the man, licking mustard off his finger. “My ma, she was the one for ballats. Little in the waist as a dirt-dauber, but her voice carried. Had her a whole lot of tunes. Long ago dead an’ gone. Pa’d come home from the courthouse drunk as a wheelbarrow, and she’d just pick up an’ go sit on the front step facin’ the hill an’ sing. Ever’thing she knowed, she’d sing. Dead an’ gone, an’ the house burned down.” He gulped at his beer. His foot was patting.

“This,” said Harris, touching one of the keys on the guitar. “Couldn’t you stop somewhere along here and make money playing this?”

Of course it was by the guitar that he had known at once that they were not mere hitch-hikers. They were tramps. They were full blown, abandoned to this. Both of them were. But when he touched it he knew obscurely that it was the yellow guitar, that bold and gay burden in the tramp’s arms, that had caused him to stop and pick them up.

The man hit it flat with the palm of his hand.

“This box? Just play it for myself.”

Harris laughed delightedly, but somehow he had a desire to tease him, to make him swear to his freedom.

“You wouldn’t stop and play somewhere like this? For them to dance? When you know all the songs?”

Now the fellow laughed out loud. He turned and spoke completely as if the other man could not hear him. “Well, but right now I got him.”

“Him?” Harris stared ahead.