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wheel.”
    I said I thought I could see how. If the truck went down in a rut on one side, and if the guy slid out to the edge, and if they hit a bad jolt—all at the same time, kind of. “That’s a lot of ifs,” I admitted. “But, well, why would anyone want to kill a bo like Bones?”
    “The answer is in your question, Tommy. What was Bones like? Who was he? What was his background?” Four Trey shook his head. “Offhand, however, I’d say he was killed because he recognized someone who couldn’t afford to be recognized. If he was killed, that is, and I’m by no means sure that he was.”
    I laughed a trifle nervously. “You sounded pretty sure a moment ago. Maybe you should tell Higby what you suspect.”
    Four Trey said firmly that he guessed he maybe shouldn’t, and I shouldn’t either. “I’ll tell you about Frank Higby,” he went on. “Frank’s got a line to build. He has to eat line, sleep line, think line, and he can’t be bothered with anything else. He wouldn’t cover up a murder, of course, but he sure as hell wouldn’t go looking for one either. And he wouldn’t be exactly fond of a guy who did it for him.”
    I nodded and said I supposed he was right, but he made Higby sound pretty callous. Four Trey yawned and said that life was a pretty callous proposition when you got right down to it. The callousness was more subtle on the upper levels; you knifed a man by cutting off his credit or pulling a slick double-cross. Down in the dirt where we were, you simply knifed him.
    He lighted another cigarette, slid a glance at me in the glow of the match. His expression changed, and he laughed softly, giving me an amiable nudge in the ribs.
    “Aah, for God’s sake, Tommy. I haven’t got you upset, have I?”
    “Oh, no, of course not,” I said. “What the hell anyway?”
    “What the hell?” he agreed. “We were tired and hungry and thirsty and we had some time to kill. So I’ve been tossing the bull around. I was just talking, understand? I didn’t mean anything by it, and you aren’t to think anything of it.”
    “Sure,” I said, relieved. “You really think it was an accident, then?”
    “Didn’t I just say so?” he said.
    “Yeah, sure,” I said. But, of course, he hadn’t said that at all.

7
    A long while passed, and no one came to pick us up. Finally, we gathered up our tools and started into camp on foot. But we hadn’t gone very far before Higby came roaring up the trail in the pickup. He was late because dust had clogged the car’s carburetor—he blamed it on Depew’s driving. He looked more tired than we felt as we rode into the camp, now lit up like a carnival with lanterns.
    Higby took us to the main high-pressure tent, the only one with a floor and screens, and had us marked down for three hours’ work. We got our badges at the same time, then went over to one of the long tables sitting out on the prairie—a table made out of planks laid on sawhorses—and washed with river water and laundry soap.
    Everyone else had been fed sometime before. The cook and his seconds and flunkeys were now busy cleaning up and doing what they could to prepare for six o’clock breakfast. Ordinarily, since they worked on straight salary instead of hourly wages, you couldn’t have got a cup of coffee from ’em if you’d held a gun to their heads. But the cook knew me and he knew about us burying Bones—“a victim of capitalist brutality”—so he fixed us up fine.
    Coffee with a big slug of Jamaica ginger in it (jake is almost pure alcohol). Then a whole platter of canned roast beef with hashed-brown potatoes and canned peaches and warmed-over biscuits. I ate and ate, only stopping because I was afraid of getting sick. Four Trey had finished ahead of me, so we carried our dishes back into the kitchen tent, thanked the cook and went out into the starlit night.
    A heavyset old guy with a shaved head and only one arm was fussing around at the wash benches. Laying out bars of laundry