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coat pocket. They were about the size of the boxes kitchen matches come in, but stronger, and I had three dozen of them and some about twice as large in one of the bags in the cabin. When I got back I wrapped them in brown paper for mailing and wrote on them the address Charlie had given me. It was an actual address, some friend of his who knew about the deal.
    Early Monday morning I took them down to the post office and mailed them. Neither the clerk nor the usual post-office loiterers paid much attention to me. As soon as it was ten o’clock I went around to the bank. I had a cashier’s check for six hundred dollars made out to Julius Reichert, which I had bought in New Orleans.
    There were two desks in the railed-in area up front, before you got to the tellers’ cages. They were both empty. I cursed myself for coming too early. I’d wanted to get a look at him, at least. Well, it didn’t matter too much. I’d be in and out often enough. As I went past, toward the tellers’ cages, I sneaked a look at the names on the desks. The rear one was his. H. C. Goodwin, it said.
    I deposited the check and made out a signature card to open an account. The teller gave me a checkbook. As I started to turn away, he asked, “Are you new here in town, Mr. Reichert?”
    “Yes,” I said shortly.
    “Going to make Wyecross your home?”
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    As I moved away from the window I saw a man entering the gate in the railing up front. I slowed, waiting to see which desk he went to. He hung up the Western-style hat on a rack and sat down at Goodwin’s desk, the rear one. I turned, very casually, and looked at him, feeling the hard beat of the pulse in my throat. This was one of them, at least. Not the big one, but one of them. There was nothing about him that I remembered at all, but then I had seen him only two or three times, sixteen years ago. He had a square, tanned face with sun wrinkles at the corners of the eyes. The eyes themselves were brown and alert behind gold-rimmed glasses, and his hair, which was also brown, was thinning out high on his temples. It wasn’t a hard or unpleasant face any way you looked at it. Well, I thought, Charlie looks like a well-fed angel or an archbishop, when he hasn’t got his hand in your pocket.
    It was a little hard to connect the bank cashier and big landowner with the bull-o’-the-woods on a construction job in an O. Henry banana republic of sixteen years ago, but as Charlie had said, he came here originally and had more or less inherited the bank job along with the bank stock and land when his father died.
    I went on out. The next stop was a hardware store in the next block. It had a small sporting-goods department in the rear. I walked back and stared owlishly at the half-dozen rifles and shotguns standing on a shelf behind the counter. In a minute a clerk came over.
    “Yes, sir?” he said. “What can I do for you?”
    “Oh,” I said, “I was just wondering. When can you shoot jack rabbits?”
    He smiled, a little pityingly. “Any time you see one, and got a gun.”
    “Then they don’t have any closed season on them?”
    “Nope. On cottontails, yes; but not on jacks.”
    You could see him thinking: Dumb dude.
    “I see,” I said. “Well, I’d like to buy a gun. A twenty-two.”
    “Sure.” He reached back on the shelf and picked up a little slide-action pump. “This is a nice job.” Then he stopped and looked at me with inspiration. “You really want to blow up some jacks? Let me show you something.”
    He put the .22 down on the counter and reached back again. This one was a bigger rifle with a long telescope sight.
    “Look,” he said. “Here’s a job. It’ll explode a jack at two hundred yards like a bowl of Jello. It’s a two-twenty Swift, a custom deal with a ten-power scope. Man it was ordered for never did come back. I’d buy it myself if I had the money.”
    “How much is it?” I asked innocently.
    “Let you have it for three