His walk along the lake path had been both long and slow, and Amy's call hadn't been the only thing Mort had thought about as he picked his way over or around the occasional downed tree or paused to skip the occasional flat stone across the water (as a boy he had been able to get a really good one - what they called 'a flattie' - to skip as many as nine times, but today four was the most he'd been able to manage). He had also thought about how to deal with Shooter, when and if Shooter turned up again.

It was true he had felt a transient - or maybe not-so-transient - guilt when he saw how close to identical the two stories were, but he had worked that one out; it was only the generalized guilt he guessed all writers of fiction felt from time to time. As for Shooter himself, the only feelings he had were annoyance, anger . . . and a kind of relief. He was full of an unfocussed rage; had been for months. It was good to finally have a donkey to pin this rotten, stinking tail on.

Mort had heard the old saw about how, if four hundred monkeys banged away on four hundred typewriters for four million years, one of them would produce the complete works of Shakespeare. He didn't believe it. Even if it were true, John Shooter was no monkey and he hadn't been alive anywhere near that long, no matter how lined his face was.

So Shooter had copied his story. Why he had picked 'Sowing Season' was beyond Mort Rainey's powers of conjecture, but he knew that was what had happened because he had ruled out coincidence, and he knew damned well that, while he might have stolen that story............