Then, on down the row, behind its own live oaks and magnolias, there would be the Stanton house, locked up and nobody behind the jalousies, for Anne and Adam were in town now, and grown up and never went fishing with me anymore, and the old man was dead. Then on down the row, where the open country began, would be the house of Judge Irwin. We wouldn't stop before we got there. But we'd make a little call on the Judge.

"Boss," I said.

The Boss turned around, and saw the chunky black shape of his head against the brightness of our headlights.

"What you gonna say to him? I asked.

"Boy, you never know till the time comes," he said. "Hell," he amended, "maybe I won't say anything to him a-tall. I don't know as I've got anything to say to him. I just want to look at him good."

"The Judge won't scare easy," I said. No, I didn't reckon the Judge would scare easy, thinking of the straight back of the man who used to swing off the saddle and drop the bridle over a paling on the Stanton fence and walk up the shell walk to the veranda with his Panama in his hand and the coarse dark-red hair bristling off his high skull like a mane and the hooked red nose jutting off his face and the yellow irises of his eyes bright and hard-looking as topaz. That was nearly twenty years before, all right, and maybe the back wasn't as straight now as it had been then (a thing like that happens so slowly you don't notice it) and maybe the yellow were a little bleary lately, but I still didn't reckon the Judge would scare easy. That was one thing on which I figured I could bet: he wouldn't scare. If he did, it was going to be a disappointment to me.

"No, I don't count on him scaring easy," the Boss said. "I just want to look at him."

"Well, God damn it," I popped out, and came up off my shoulder blades before I knew it, "you're crazy to think you can scare him!"

"Take it easy," the Boss said, and laughed. I couldn't see his face. It was just a black blob against the glare of the headlights, with the laugh coming out of it.

"I just want to look at him," the Boss said, "like I told you."

"Well, you sure picked a hell of a time and a hell of a long way to go look at him," I said, not feeling anything but peevish now, and falling back on my shoulder blades where I belonged. "Why don't you get him to see you in town sometime?"

"_Sometime__ ain't ever _now__," the Boss said.

"It's a hell of a thing," I said, "for you to be doing."

"So you think it's beneath my dignity, huh?" the Boss asked.

"Well, you're Governor. They tell me."

  "Yeah, I'm Governor, Jack, and the trouble with Governors is they think they got to keep their dignity. But listen here, there ain't anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain't built that way."

"All right," I said.

"And when I get to be President, if I want to see somebody I'm gonna right out and see 'em."

"Sure," I said, "in the middle of the night, but when you do I hope you leave me at home to get a night's sleep maybe."

"The hell I will," he said. "When I'm President I'm gonna take you with me. I'm gonna keep you and Sugar-Boy right in the White House so I can have you all handy. Sugar-Boy can have him a pistol range in the back hall and a brace of Republican Congressmen to be caddy for him and set up the tin cans, and you can bring your girls right in the big front door, and there's gonna be a member of the Cabinet to hold their coats and pick up hair pins after 'em. There's gonna be a special member of the Cabinet to do it. He's gonna be the Secretary of the Bedchamber of Jack Burden, and he will keep the telephone numbers straight and send back any little pink silk articles to the right address when they happen to get left behind. Tint's got the build, so I'm gonna get him a little operation and put flowing silk pants on him and a turban and give him a tin scimitar like he was a High Grand Shriner or something, and he can sit on a tuffet outside your door and be the Secretary of the Bedchamber. And how you like that, boy, huh?" And he reached back over the back of the front seat and slapped me on the knee. He had to reach a long way back, for it was a long way from the front seat of the Cadillac to my knee even if I was lying on my shoulder blades.

"You will go down in history," I said.

"Boy, wouldn't I!" And he started to laugh. He turned round to watch the lit-up road, and kept on laughing.

Then we hit a little town and beyond it a filling station and lunch stand. Sugar-Boy got some gas and brought the Boss and me a couple of cokes. Then we went on.

The Boss didn't say another word till we hit Burden's Landing. All he said then was, "Jack, you tell Sugar-Boy how to find the house. It's your pals live down here."

Yes, my pals lived down there. Or had lived down there. Adam and Anne Stanton had lived down there, in the white house where their widowed father, the Governor, lived. They had been my friends, Anne and Adam. Adam and I had fished and sailed all over that end of the Gulf of Mexico, and Anne, who was big-eyed and quiet-faced and thin, had been with us, close and never saying a word. And Adam and I had hunted and camped all over the country, and Anne had been there, a thin-legged little girl about four years younger than we were. And we had sat by the fire in the Stanton house–or in my house–and had played with toys or read books while Anne sat there. Then after a long time Anne wasn't a little girl any more. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In that dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen. So now Anne was an old maid living in the city, and even if she did look pretty good yet and wore clothes that didn't hurt her any, her laugh was getting brittle and there was a drawn look on her face as though she were trying to remember something. What was Anne trying to remember? Well, I didn't have to try to remember. I could remember but I didn't want to remember. If the human race didn't remember anything it would be perfectly happy. I was student of history once in a university and if I learned anything from studying history that was what I learned. Or to be more exact, that was what I thought I had learned.

We would go down the Row–the line of houses facing the bay–and that was the place where all my pals had been. Anne, who was an old maid, or damned near it. Adam, who was a famous surgeon and who was nice to me but didn't go fishing with me any more. And Judge Irwin, who lived in the last house, and who had been a friend of my family and who used to take me hunting with him and taught me to shoot and taught me to ride and read history to me from leather-bound books in the big study in his house. After Ellis Burden went away he was more of a father to me than those men who had married my mother and come to live in Ellis Burden's house. And the Judge was a man.

So I told Sugar-Boy how to get through town and to the Row where all my pals lived or had lived. We pulled through the town, where the lights were out except for the bulbs hanging from the telephone poles, and on out the Bay Road where the houses were bone-white back among the magnolias and live oaks.

At night you pass through a little town where you once lived, and you expect to see yourself wearing knee pants, standing all alone on the street corner under the hanging bulbs, where the bugs bang on the tin reflectors and splatter to the pavement to lie stunned. You expect to see that boy standing there under the street lamp, out too late, and you feel like telling he ought to go on home to bed or there will be hell to pay. But maybe you are home in bed and sound asleep and not dreaming and nothing has ever happened that seem to have happened. But, then, who the hell is this in the back seat of the big black Cadillac that comes ghosting through the town? Why, this is Jack Burden. Don't you remember little Jack Burden? He used to go out in his boat in the afternoon on the bay to fish, and come home and eat his supper and kiss his beautiful mother good night and say his prayers and go to bed at nine-thirty. Oh, you mean old Ellis Burden's boy? Yeah, and that woman he married out of Texas–or was it Arkansas?–that big-eyed thin-faced woman who lives up there in that old Burden place now with that man she got herself. What ever happened to Ellis Burden? Hell, I don't know, nobody around here had any word going on years. He was a queer 'un. Damn if he wasn't queer, going off and leaving a real looker like that woman out of Arkansas. Maybe he couldn't give her what she craved. Well, he give her that boy, that Jack Burden. Yeah.