“I knew that was your car, Mr. Harris,” said the boy. He was nervously trying to tuck a Bing Crosby cretonne shirt into his pants like a real shirt. Then he looked up and said, “They was tryin’ to take your car, and down the street one of ’em like to bust the other one’s head wide op’m with a bottle. Looks like you would ’a’ heard the commotion. Everybody’s out there. I said, ‘That’s Mr. Tom Harris’s car, look at the out-of-town license and look at all the stuff he all time carries around with him, all bloody.’”

“He’s not dead though,” said Harris, kneeling on the seat of his car.

It was the man with the guitar. The ceiling light had been turned on. With blood streaming from his broken head, he was slumped down upon the guitar, his legs bowed around it, his arms at either side, his whole body limp in the posture of a bareback rider. Harris was aware of the other face not a yard away: the man the guitar player had called Sobby was standing on the curb, with two men unnecessarily holding him. He looked more like a bystander than any of the rest, except that he still held the beer bottle in his right hand.

“Looks like if he was fixin’ to hit him, he would of hit him with that gittar,” said a voice. “That’d be a real good thing to hit somebody with. Whang!”

“The way I figure this thing out is,” said a penetrating voice, as if a woman were explaining it all to her husband, “the men was left to ’emselves. So—that ’n’ yonder wanted to make off with the car—he’s the bad one. So the good one says, ‘Naw, that ain’t right.’”

Or was it the other way around? thought Harris dreamily.

“So the other one says bam! bam! He whacked him over the head. And so dumb—right where the movie was letting out.”

“Who’s got my car keys!” Harris kept shouting. He had, without realizing it, kicked away the prop, the guitar; and he had stopped the blood with something.

Nobody had to tell him where the ramshackle little hospital was—he had been there once before, on a Delta trip. With the constable scuttling along after and then riding on the running board, glasses held tenderly in one fist, the handcuffed Sobby dragged alongside by the other, with a long line of little boys in flowered shirts accompanying him on bicycles, riding in and out of the headlight beam, with the rain falling in front of him and with Mr. Gene shouting in a sort of plea from the hotel behind and Mike beginning to echo the barking of the rest of the dogs, Harris drove in all carefulness down the long tree-dark street, with his wet hand pressed on the horn.