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ride that far. I reckon I'm gonter have to drive it so the sooner I starts, the quicker it will be." He said: "Hee hee hee." He said: "Come on, Miss Sarah."
    "Will it be all right, Boon?" Grandmother said.
    "Yessum, Miss. Sarah," Boon said. Grandmother and Mother got in. Before Boon could close the door, Ned was already in the front seat.
    "Get out of there," Boon said.
    "Go ahead and tend to your business, if you knows how to," Ned said. "I aint gonter touch nothing until I learns how, and just setting here aint gonter learn me. Go on and hook up, or whatever you does to it."
    Boon went around to the driver's side and set the switches and levers, and went to the front and jerked the crank. On the third pull, the engine roared.
    t " B p°nI" Grandmother cried.
    "It's all right, Miss Sarah!" Boon hollered above the noise, running back to the guiding wheel.
    "I dont care!" Grandmother said. "Get in quick! I'm nervous!" Boon got in and quieted the engine and shifted the levers; a moment, then the automobile moved quietly and slowly backward out of the shed, into the lot, the sunshine, and stopped.
    "Hee hee hee," Ned said.
    "Be careful, Boon," Grandmother said. I could see her hand gripping the stanchion of the top.
    "Yessum," Boon said. The automobile moved again, backward, beginning to turn. Then it moved forward, still turning; Grandmother's hand still gripped the stanchion. Mother's face looked like a girl's. The car went slowly and quietly across the lot until it was facing the gate to the lane, to the outside, to the world, and stopped. And Boon didn't say anything: he just sat there behind the wheel, the engine running smooth and quiet, his head turned just enough for Grandmother to see his face. Oh yes, maybe he wasn't a negotiable-paper wizard like Grandfather, and there were folks in Jefferson that would say he wasn't much of anything else either, but for this skirmish anyway he was a skirmish fighter of consummate skill and grace. Grandmother sat for maybe a half a minute. Then she drew a long breath and expelled it.
    "No," she said. "We must wait for Mister Priest." Maybe it wasn't a victory, but anyway our side—Boon— had not only discovered the weak point in the enemy's (Grandfather's) front, by suppertime that night the enemy himself would discover it too.
    Discover in fact that his flank had been turned. The next afternoon (Saturday) after the bank closed, and each succeeding Saturday afternoon, and then when summer came, every afternoon except when rain was actually falling, Grandfather in front beside Boon and the rest of us in rotation—Grandmother, Mother, me and my three brothers and Aunt Callie that nursed us in turn, including Father, and Delphine and our various connections and neighbors and Grandmother's close friends in their ordered rote —in the linen dusters and goggles, would drive through Jefferson and the adjacent countryside; Aunt Callie and Delphine in their turns, but not Ned. He rode in it once: that one minute while it backed slowly out of the garage, and the two minutes while it turned and moved slowly forward across the lot until Grandmother lost her nerve and said No to the open gate and the public world, but not again. By the second Saturday he had realised, accepted —anyway become convinced—that even if Grandfather had ever intended to make him the official operator and custodian of the automobile, he could have approached it only over Boon's dead body. But although he declined to recognise that the automobile existed on the place, he and Grandfather had met on some unspoken gentlemen's ground regarding it: Ned never to speak in scorn or derogation of its ownership and presence, Grandfather never to order Ned to wash and polish it as he used to do the carriage—which Grandfather and Ned both knew Ned would have refused to do, even if Boon had let him: by which Grandfather visited on Ned his only punishment for his apostasy: he refused to give Ned the public chance to refuse to