They said little. A fly bothered her. When the coffee was all gone he put her into the old Cadillac taxi that always stood in front of the depot.

Before he shut the taxi door he said, frowning, “I appreciate it. . . . You’re sweet.”

Now she had torn her handkerchief. She held it up and began to cry. “What’s sweet about me?” It was the look of bewilderment in her face that he would remember.

“To come out, like this—in the rain—to be here. . . .” He shut the door, partly from weariness.

She was holding her breath. “I hope your friend doesn’t die,” she said. “All I hope is your friend gets well.”

But when he woke up the next morning and phoned the hospital, the guitar player was dead. He had been dying while Harris was sitting in the All-Nite.

“It was a murderer,” said Mr. Gene, pulling Mike’s ears. “That was just plain murder. No way anybody could call that an affair of honor.”

The man called Sobby did not oppose an invitation to confess. He stood erect and turning his head about a little, and almost smiled at all the men who had come to see him. After one look at him Mr. Gene, who had come with Harris, went out and slammed the door behind him.

All the same, Sobby had found little in the night, asleep or awake, to say about it. “I done it, sure,” he said. “Didn’t ever’body see me, or was they blind?”

They asked him about the man he had killed.

“Name Sanford,” he said, standing still, with his foot out, as if he were trying to recall something particular and minute. “But he didn’t have nothing and he didn’t have no folks. No more’n me. Him and me, we took up together two weeks back.” He looked up at their faces as if for support. “He was uppity, though. He bragged. He carried a gittar around.” He whimpered. “It was his notion to run off with the car.”

Harris, fresh from the barbershop, was standing in the filling station where his car was being polished.

A ring of little boys in bright shirt-tails surrounded him and the car, with some colored boys waiting behind them.

“Could they git all the blood off the seat and the steerin’ wheel, Mr. Harris?”

He nodded. They ran away.

“Mr. Harris,” said a little colored boy who stayed. “Does you want the box?”

“The what?”

He pointed, to where it lay in the back seat with the sample cases. “The po’ kilt man’s gittar. Even the policemans didn’t want it.”

“No,” said Harris, and handed it over.

Powerhouse

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