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entered the big tiled bathroom. He wore the bottoms of a suit of long thermal underwear and carried what looked like the carcass of a squirrel. He climbed down into the sunken bath, where, after turning on a heavy flow of water, he proceeded to rend and devour the dead rodent. He did this with skill and gusto. I used up all my film taking pictures of the process—whereupon I heaved my own dinner into the shrubbery beneath the magnolia tree.
    Turnabout, they say, is fair play. . . .
    Later, I sent Brian Nollinger duplicates of the developed photographs and a letter attesting to their authenticity. I added a P.S.: “The ball’s in your court, Doc.”

    The anthropology professor was one of those urban people who refuse to own an automobile. He got around the Emory campus on foot or bicycle, and he bummed rides to the Yerkes field station with whichever of his colleagues happened to be going that way. In the middle of March, he arrived in Beulah Fork on a Greyhound bus, and I met him in front of Ben Sadler’s hole-in-the-wall laundry (known locally as the Greyhound Depot Laundry) on Main Street. After introducing Nollinger to Ben (dry cleaner and ticket agent nonpareil) as my nephew, I led the newcomer across the street to the West Bank, where, for over a year, I had lived in the upstairs storage room and taken all my meals in the restaurant proper. Although I could have easily afforded to build a house of my own, or at least to rent a vacation chalet near Muscadine Gardens, I refused to do so in the dogged expectation that RuthClaire and I would eventually reunite at Paradise Farm.
    “Take me out there,” Nollinger said over a cold Budweiser in the empty dining area late that afternoon.
    “I’d have to call first. And if I tell her why we want to come, she’ll hang up.”
    My “nephew” fanned his photos of Adam out across the maroon tablecloth. “You didn’t have an invitation to take these, Mr. Loyd. Why so prim and proper now?”
    “My unscrupulosity has well-defined limits.”
    Nollinger sniggered. Then he tapped one of the prints. “Adam, as your ex-wife calls the creature, is definitely a protohuman. Even though I’m a primate ethologist and physical anthropologist, not a hotshot fossil finder like the Leakeys or A. Patrick Blair, I’d stake my reputation on it.” He reconsidered. “I mean, I’d establish my reputation with a demonstration of that claim. Adam is a living specimen of the hominid Homo habilis or Homo zarakalensis , depending on which ‘expert’ you consult. In any case, your wife has no right to keep her amazing friend cloistered away incognito on Paradise Farm.”
    “That’s what I’ve always thought. Edna Twiggs is bound to find out sooner or later, and RuthClaire’ll have hell to pay in Beulah Fork.”
    “Mr. Loyd, your wife’s foremost obligation is to advance our knowledge about human origins.”
    “That’s a narrow way of looking at it. She also has her reputation to consider.”
    “Sir, haven’t you once wondered how a prehistoric hominid happened to show up in a pecan grove in western Georgia?”
    “A condor dropped him. A circus train derailed. I don’t care, Dr. Nollinger. What’s pertinent to me is his presence out there, not the weird particulars of his arrival.”
    “All right, but I think I know how he got here.”
    We each had another beer. My visitor sipped moodily at his while I explained that the best approach to RuthClaire might be Nollinger’s masquerading as a meter reader for Georgia Power. While ostensibly recording her kilowattage, he could plead a sudden indisposition and ask to use the bathroom or lie down on the sofa. RuthClaire was a sucker for honest working people in distress, and Nollinger could buy a shirt and trousers similar to those worn by Georgia Power employees at Plunkett Bros. General Store right here in town. Once he got into the house, who could say what might happen? Maybe RuthClaire would introduce him to her hirsute boarder and