124 WAS LOUD. Stamp Paid could hear it even from the road. He walked toward the householding his head as high as possible so nobody looking could call him a sneak, although hisworried mind made him feel like one. Ever since he showed that newspaper clipping to Paul D andlearned that he'd moved out of 124 that very day, Stamp felt uneasy. Having wrestled with thequestion of whether or not to tell a man about his woman, and having convinced himself that heshould, he then began to worry about Sethe. Had he stopped the one shot she had of the happinessa good man could bring her? Was she vexed by the loss, the free and unasked-for revival of gossipby the man who had helped her cross the river and who was her friend as well as Baby Suggs'?

　　"I'm too old," he thought, "for clear thinking. I'm too old and I seen too much." He had insisted onprivacy during the revelation at the slaughter yard — now he wondered whom he was protecting.

　　Paul D was the only one in town who didn't know. How did information that had been in thenewspaper become a secret that needed to be whispered in a pig yard? A secret from whom? Sethe,that's who. He'd gone behind her back, like a sneak. But sneaking was his job — his life; thoughalways for a clear and holy purpose. Before the War all he did was sneak: runaways into hiddenplaces, secret information to public places. Underneath his legal vegetables were the contrabandhumans that he ferried across the river. Even the pigs he worked in the spring served his purposes.

　　Whole families lived on the bones and guts he distributed to them. He wrote their letters and readto them the ones they received. He knew who had dropsy and who needed stovewood; whichchildren had a gift and which needed correction. He knew the secrets of the Ohio River and itsbanks; empty houses and full; the best dancers, the worst speakers............