They worked fast and I went out and looked up the road now and again to see if Uncle Benny was coming. Doc had stopped at the Standard filling-station on his way, to leave the news, and we could see the people there stirring around and going out to look, the same as we were doing. When we dragged the roll of wire fencing out into the road we hollered to them so they could see what we were doing and they all cheered and waved their hats. The word had spread, and the young uns begun traipsing barefooted down to the road, until some of their mammies ran down and cuffed them and hurried them back home out of the way of Uncle Benny. The men strung the fencing tight across the road between the garage on one side and our smoke-house on the other. They nailed it firm at both ends.

Doc said, “Leave me drive the last nail, men—it may be the last thing I can do for Benny this side of Chattahoochie.”

I talked the men into unloading their guns.

“He’ll have to stop when he sees the barricade,” I said, “and then you can all go in on him with your guns drawed and capture him. I just can’t hear to a loaded gun being drawed on him, for fear of somebody getting excited and shooting him.”

Doc wiped the sweat off his forehead and he said, “Men, this is a mighty serious occasion. I’d be mighty proud if you’d all have a little snort on me,” and he passed the bottle.

“Here’s to Uncle Benny, the way we all knowed him before he went cold-out crazy,” he said.

And then we heerd a shouting up the dirt road and young uns whistling and women and girls screaming and chickens scattering.

“Yonder comes Uncle Benny!”

And yonder he came.

The Model-T was swooping down like a bull-bat after a mosquito. The water was boiling up out of the radiator in a foot-high stream. The seven pieded bird-dogs were hanging out of the back seat and trembling as if they craved to tell the things they’d seen. And behind Uncle Benny was a string of deputy sheriffs in Fords and Chevrolets and motorcycles that had gathered together from every town between Oak Bluff and Ocala. And Uncle Benny was hunched over the steering wheel with them two tufts of goat-horn hair sticking up in the breeze—and the minute I laid eyes on him I knowed he wasn’t one mite crazier than he ever had been. I knowed right then Doc had laid out to get even with him and had lied on him all the way down the road.