'I guess you must have had a chance to read my story by now,' Shooter said. He spoke as casually as a man commenting on the weather.

'I did.'

Shooter nodded gravely. 'I imagine it rang a bell, didn't it?'

'It certainly did,' Mort agreed, and then, with studied casualness: 'When did you write it?'

'I thought you'd ask that,' Shooter said. He smiled a secret little smile, but said no more. His arms remained crossed over his chest, his hands laid against his sides just below the armpits. He looked like a man who would be perfectly content to remain where he was forever, or at least until the sun sank below the horizon and ceased to warm his face.

'Well, sure,' Mort said, still casually. 'I have to, you know. When two fellows show up with the same story, that's serious.'

'Serious,' Shooter agreed in a deeply meditative tone of voice.

'And the only way to sort a thing like that out,' Mort continued, 'to decide who copied from whom, is to find out who wrote the words first.' He fixed Shooter's faded blue eyes with his own dry and uncompromising gaze. Somewhere nearby a chickadee twittered self-importantly in a tangle of trees and was then quiet again. 'Wouldn't you say that's true?'

'I suppose I would,' Shooter agreed. 'I suppose that's why I came all the way up here from Miss'ippi.'

Mort heard the rumble of an approaching vehicle. They both turned in that direction, and Tom Greenleafs Scout came over the nearest hill, pulling a little cyclone of fallen leaves behind it. Tom, a hale and healthy Tashmore native of seventy-something, was the caretaker for most of the places on this side of the lake that Greg Carstairs didn't handle. Tom raised one hand in salute as he passed. Mort waved back. Shooter removed one hand from its resting place and tipped a finger at Tom in a friendly gesture which spoke in some obscure way of a great many years spent in the country, of the uncountable and unrecollected number of times he had saluted the passing drivers of passing trucks and tractors and tedders and balers in that exact same casual way. Then, as Tom's Scout passed out of sight, he returned his hand to his ribcage so that his arms were crossed again. As the leaves rattled to rest on the road, his patient, unwavering, almost eternal gaze came back to Mort Rainey's face once more. 'Now what were we saying?' he asked almost gently.

'We were trying to establish provenance,' Mort said. 'That means -'

'I know what it means,' Shooter said, favoring Mort with a glance which was both calm and mildly contemptuous. 'I know I am wearing shitkicker clothes and driving a shitkicker car, and I come from a long line of shitkickers, and maybe that makes me a shitkicker myself, but it doesn't necessarily make me a stupid shitkicker.'

'No,' Mort agreed. 'I d............