“Screw that!” Evenwrite shouted. “We been waiting, like I said, for too damn long as it is! Oh me, Draeger, don’t you understand? What I been saying about this rain? We can’t wait much longer or there won’t be no work no way goddammit, can’t you see?” Evenwrite’s face looked as though he might explode in tears of rage and frustration. He’d never had to deal with a man like this! What is it, Mr. Draeger? In all the years of woodsbulling drunk riggers and lazy bushlers and government scalers who cheated you blind and owners who wanted done yesterday what was humanly impossible to have done tomorrow—What is it you have over poor stupid Floyd, Mr. Draeger?—in all them years foremanning all them sonsabitches, never one of them as unreasonable as this! What is it you know? Or leastways never one of them who frustered him so. “I mean can’t you see?” Maybe it was the surroundings; hadn’t he always managed dealing with sonsabitches out in the brush? Draeger took a small swallow from the water glass and set it down. “I understand the weather problem, Floyd; I’m sorry if I implied doing absolutely nothing; I know you have your back against the wall so to speak ...but when I said wait, I meant only to hold off taking any action that would only make Mr. Stamper more obstinate.” “Hold off till when? Till spring? Summer?” “Until we find some way to make clear to him just how his stand is harming his friends.” He had taken a ball-point pen from his pocket and was studying the tip of it. “Hank Stamper don’t have any friends,” Evenwrite muttered; then, trying to resume his old woods-bossing manner, demanded scornfully, “You mean you don’t even have some kind of plan for straightening this out?” “Not exactly a plan,” Draeger answered. “Not yet, anyway.” “Nothing but wait, huh? Is that it? Just wait?” Draeger was doodling on the placemat, absorbed in his thoughts: “For the time being, yes,” he said. “Well, what do you know about that. Like we couldn’t wait ourselfs, without any help from a college graduate making ten thousand a year of our goddam money . . . what do you think of that?” When Draeger gave no indication that he had heard, Evenwrite went on. “Anyhow, if it’s all the same to you, I think me and the boys will get our horsewhip and tend to making this horse turn around and go our direction, while you’re waiting.” Draeger looked up from his doodling. “Pardon me?” “I said me and the guys are gonna go ahead and handle this thing. Plain and simple. With our plain old dumb-ass head-on approach.” “That being?” “Why, a picket to start with. Like we shoulda done the first thing . . .” “You can’t legally—” “Legal be damned!” Evenwrite interrupted, momentarily losing his cool. “You think Hank Stamper’s gonna call the cops in on us? Or that any of ’em would come if he did? Huh?” He felt his frustration mounting again, but this time he closed his eyes and drew a deep breath to try to stop his outbreak of anger; there wasn’t no sense letting the sonofabitch know he was getting under his hide. “So we’ll just . . . all right start off tomorrow...with a picket.” No sense acting like a goddam heathen...he’d show them that Floyd Evenwrite could by god be poised and passionless too, in any sonofabitching surrounding! “Then we will see what we will see.” Draeger watched him for a moment, smiling his sad smile, then shook his head. “I suppose there’s nothing I can say to—” “To make me hold off any longer? No.” He shook his head in turn, calm and self-contained as they come. “I suppose there ain’t.” Yessir, as self-possessed as the best of them . . . except, for a little itch troubling his throat, a cold picked up on that goddam cold-ass boatride, most likely. Hell! “Do you think,” Draeger wanted to know, “that you will be doing anything more than mollifying your natural punitive desires?” Evenwrite cleared his throat. “I think by god—” and had started to let the sonofabitch know—in a completely self-contained and self-possessed fashion—just by god exactly what he thought, before he recalled that he could never remember for certain whether “punitive” meant weak and sick-looking or strong and sharp-smelling. “I think that”—and what in the living hell was “mollify”?—“that uh under the circumstances . . .” Still, he kept his cool; he didn’t panic. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath and launched a sigh that would reveal to all concerned how simply overcome he was with disgust for this whole conversation ...but halfway through this sigh he was stricken by that old familiar tickle deep in his throat: oh no! Not here; not now! He couldn’t sneeze now, just as he was getting such a good grip on the situation! He clenched his teeth. He clamped his lips tight. His face swelled out red and desperate from his wet collar, like a prewar inner tube bulging out through a split in the casing just before it burst ...not now! Because he hated to sneeze indoors. Ever since childhood Evenwrite had been afflicted with a sneeze of such magnitude that it could have turned every head for blocks in his direction by virtue of volume alone, but more than that—above and beyond their acoustical power—his sneezes distinguished themselves by carrying a message as well, always the same message, forceful and invariable: as though he had stopped whatever he’d been doing and shouted—at the top of his lungs—haw... haw...hot shit! In the woods this resounding declaration had been a cause for kidding and fun, and even a bit of unconfessed pride. In the woods. But somehow it didn’t go over as well in other areas. In church, or at a meeting, when he felt a sneeze coming on, he was always torn between letting it—hoping those present would either miss the message or excuse it—and bottling it back in his mouth............