“You live fine, ma’am, for any one lives plumb alone.”

She sat down opposite him, wiping back the wet gray hair from her forehead, and poured herself a convivial cup of coffee.

“Jim—that was my husband—an’ Pa always did say if they was good rations in the house they’d orter be on the table. I ain’t got over the habit.”

“You been livin’ alone quite some time?”

“Jim’s fifteen year dead. Pa ’bout six.”

“Don’t you never go nowheres?”

“I got no way to go. I kep’ up stock for two-three year after Pa died, but ’twa’n’t wuth the worry. They’s a family lives two mile closer to town than me, has a horse an’ wagon. I take ’em my list o’ things ’bout oncet a month. Seems like . . .”

He scarcely listened.

A change of atmosphere in her narrative indicated suddenly to him that she was asking him about himself.

“You a stranger?”

She was eager, leaning on the table waiting for his answer.

He finished a saucer of preserved figs, scraping at the rich syrup with relish. He tilted back in his chair luxuriously and threw the match from his cigarette in the general direction of the wood stove. He was entirely at home. His belly well filled with good food, his spirit touched with the unfailing intoxication to him of a woman’s interest, he teetered and smoked and talked of his life, of his deeds, his dangers.

“You ever heerd the name o’ Trax Colton?”

She shook her head. He tapped his chest significantly, nodding at her.

“That’s me. You’ve heerd tell, if you on’y remembered, o’ me leavin’ here a few years back on account of a little cuttin’ fuss. I been on the east coast—Daytona, Melbourne, all them places. The fuss blowed over an’ I come back. Fixin’ to take up business here.”

He frowned importantly. He tapped a fresh cigarette on the table, as he had learned to do from his companions of the past years. He thought with pleasure of all that he had learned, of the sophistication that lay over his Cracker speech and ways like a cheap bright coat.

“I’m an A-1 bootlegger, ma’am.”

For the time being he was a big operator from the east coast. He told her of small sturdy boats from Cuba, of signal flares on the St. Augustine beach at midnight, of the stream of swift automobiles moving in and out just before high tide. Her eyes shone. She plucked at the throat of her brown-checked gingham dress, breathing quickly. It was fitting that this dark glamorous young man should belong to the rocket-lit world of danger. It was ecstasy painful in its sharpness, that he should be tilted back at her table, flicking his fragrant ashes on her clean, lonely floor.