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was a pipeline company car, a half-ton pickup, with a timekeeper and Higby, the chief high-pressure, in it. Trailing behind a ways was one of the company’s big flatbed trucks. The car stopped, and Higby nodded to me and shook hands with Four Trey.
    “Starting a new jungle?” he said. “Or were you just out for a walk or something?”
    “Or something,” Four Trey said. “You want to hear about it before you give us a ride?”
    Higby said God forbid hearing about it at any time; he had more than enough to think about already. “You can have some hours with your ride, if you want ’em. Use you rigging up camp.”
    “I guess we could be persuaded,” Four Trey said. “You don’t have any other engagements do you, Tommy?”
    I said, “Huh?” and then I said carelessly that I guess I didn’t have anything scheduled that couldn’t be postponed.
    The timekeeper was fidgeting, tapping on the steering wheel. Higby told us to climb in the back, giving us a pursedlip look to let us know he didn’t care for the guy.
    We had a fast ride into town—too fast for the road. Four Trey and I were bouncing around every step of the way, and we both took a banging from the loose tools that flew up from the truck bed. By the time we reached town, we were both of a mind to cloud up and rain all over the timekeeper. But Higby saw how we felt, I guess, and he hustled him off on an errand in one direction and sent us in another to round up a rigging-up crew. So the guy didn’t get the pasting he deserved.
    We went down to the jungle and passed the word. By dusk about fifty men were piled on the big flatbed truck, sitting around its edges with their legs hanging off. Higby had hired on the cook from the Greek’s restaurant, and he rode in the back of the pickup with Four Trey and me, sitting on his working-stiff’s bindle and carrying his knives and cleavers in a dish towel.
    As we drove out of town ahead of the truck, I looked around for Carol. But there was no sign of her or her homemade house-car. And I was relieved in a way and sort of sad in another. Sorry that I wouldn’t ever be seeing her again. I’d never had much to do with girls—nothing at all, to tell the truth. It seemed a shame to be losing one, the only one I could have cared about, before I ever got to know her.
    We were about a mile from camp when the truck began to honk wildly, flashing its lights. Four Trey banged on the roof of the pickup and shouted to Higby. Without slacking speed, the pickup wheeled around on the prairie, and went back to where the truck had stopped.
    A man had been killed. He had been sitting near the rear of the flatbed, and apparently a wheel had caught his dangling feet, snatching him from the truck and slamming him down against the rocky earth.
    Higby glanced at the body; looked quickly away with a sadly bitter curse. “Dammit to hell, anyway. Anyone know the poor devil?”
    Someone said the man’s name was Bones, but someone else said it wasn’t his real name. He was just called that because he was so thin. No one knew who he was. On a pipeline hardly anyone ever knew who anyone else was. Pipeliners didn’t have names or homes or families.
    Higby stooped down and went through the dead man’s pockets as well as he could, under the circumstances. There was nothing in them except some matches and a practically empty sack of Bull Durham. No wallet, no letters. No Social Security card, naturally, since this was before the days of Social Security.
    Higby straightened, rubbing his hands against his trousers. He turned to the timekeeper, a prissy owlish-looking guy with gold-rimmed spectacles. His name was Depew, and he wore a hairline moustache and store-new khakis.
    “I’ll phone a report into Matacora tomorrow,” Higby told him. “You can put that in your job log. Meanwhile, we’ll have to get him buried.”
    Depew frowned importantly, pursing his lips. “We can’t assume any funeral expenses, Higby. Riding on the truck was his