I straightened my back. The sweat run down in my eyes so I couldn’t see. I rubbed them. When I opened them, it seemed to me I seed Jim and Luty standing in front of me. That pair. They didn’t look to me like nothing I’d sic a good dog onto.

“Forty year,” I said. “That’s long enough.”

And all of a sudden my patience was wore out.

I walked down to Will’s garage. I stopped a fruit truck to carry me into Tray City and up to the office of the Tray City Bugle. The man at the desk looked at me, me all red and wet and dirty.

“Fetch me paper and pencil,” I said. “I got a little news item will be of interest to all your Oak Bluff subscribers.”

“Glad to have it,” he said. “We appreciate our country readers.”

I wrote. He takened it. He glanced it over careless and changed my spelling. He called a boy to go hurry it to Joe so’s it’d make the Sunday paper. And this is what I wrote and the Bugle printed:

“OAK BLUFF’S VARMINTS

“Oak Bluff has lost by death one of its three pet varmints. The one that died was named Snort. He was the best of the three. The ones left are named Jim and Luty. These remaining varmints have had the advantage of human contact and have lots of the ways of persons. Visitors passing through Oak Bluff are invited to stop and take a look at these clever creatures, that Providence chose to make them varmints and denied them being men.”

And when Jim and Luty come back home outen the swamp, where they been hiding out until folks quits coming and laughing, I ain’t taking nothing back. And them that claim I had no right to make a fun-box outen the pair, for them I say:

They ain’t never had no two ornery, long-eared, butt-headed, quarrelling men to leave no dead mule in their sweet-potato patch.

The Enemy

A mockingbird chirped from the roof-tree of the Milford cabin. His note was as dry as the weather. A basin of water was emptied from a rear window and the bird flew instantly to the puddle. He splashed hurriedly in the few seconds before the water sank into the hot sand.

Doney Milford called to him from the window, “ ’Twon’t do you no more good than me. I’m hot again a’ready.”

The room in his father’s house used by young Tom Milford and his wife was a low lean-to. The August heat lay trapped inside it. Tom had a brief sense of being trapped, too, like a dog in too small a kennel. The front room would make a fine bedroom, but his father kept it piled with such things as tanned cowhides, saddles and sweet feed for the horses, and would not allow them to be disturbed.