You come into the town at night and there are the voices.

We had got to the end of the Row, and I saw the house bone-white back among the dark oak boughs.

"Here it is," I said.

"Park out here," the Boss said. And then to me, "There's a light. The bugger ain't in bed. You go on and knock on the door and tell him I want to see him."

"Suppose he won't open up?"

"He will," the Boss said. "But if he won't you make him. What the hell do I pay you for?"

I got out of the car and went in the gate and started up the shell walk under the black trees. Then I heard the Boss coming after me. We went up the walk, with him just behind me, and up the gallery steps.

The Boss stood to one side, and I pulled open the screen and knocked on the door. I knocked again; then looking in through the glass by the door I saw a door open off the hall–where the library was, I remembered–then a side light come on in the hall. He was coming to the door. I could see him through the glass while he fumbled with the lock.

"Yes?" he asked.

"Good evening, Judge," I said.

He stood there blinking into the dark outside, trying to make out my face.

"It's Jack Burden," I said.

"Well, well, Jack–well I'll be jiggered!" And he put out his hand. "Come in." He even looked glad to see me.

I shook hands and stepped inside, where the mirrors in the peeling gold frames glimmered on the walls in the rays of the not bright side light, and the glass of the big hurricane lamps glimmered on the marble-top stands.

"What can I do for you, Jack?" he asked me, and gave me a look out of his yellow eyes. They hadn't changed much, even if the rest of him had.

"Well," I began, and didn't know how I was going to end, "I just wanted to see if you were up and could talk to–"

"Sure, Jack, come on in. You aren't in any trouble, son? Let me shut the door first, and–"

He turned to shut the door, and if his ticker hadn't been in good shape for all his near three scores and ten he'd have dropped dead. For the Boss was standing there in the door. He hadn't made a sound.

As it was, the Judge didn't drop dead. And his face didn't show a thing. But I felt him stiffen. You turn to shut a door some night and find somebody standing there out of the dark, and you'll take a jump, too.

"No," the Boss said, easy and grinning, taking his hat off his head and stepping inside just as though he'd been invited, which he hadn't been, "no, Jack isn't in any trouble. Not that I know of. Nor me either."

The Judge was looking at me now. "I beg your pardon," he said to me, in a voice he knew how to make cold and rasping like an old phonograph needle scraping on an old record, "I had forgotten for the moment how well your needs are provided for."

"Oh, Jack's making out," the Boss said.

"And you, sir–" the Judge turned on the Boss, and slanted his yellow eyes down on him–for he was a half a head taller–and I could see the jaw muscles twitch and knot under the folds of red-rusty and seamed skin on his long jaw, "do you wish to say something to me?"

"Well, I don't know as I do," the Boss remarked offhand. "Not at the moment."

"Well," the Judge said, "in that case–"

"Oh, something might develop," the Boss broke in. "You never can tell. If we get the weight off our arches."

"In that case," the Judge resumed, and it was an old needle and an old record and it was scraping like a file on cold tin and nothing human, "I may say that I was about to retire."

"Oh, it's early yet," the Boss said, and took his time giving Judge Irwin the once-over from head to toe. The Judge was wearing an old-fashioned velvet smoking jacket and tuxedo pants and a boiled shirt, but he had taken off his collar and tie and the collar button was shining just under the big old red Adam's apple. "Yeah," the Boss went on, after he'd finished the once-over, "and you'll sleep better if you wait before going to bed and give that fine dinner you had a chance to digest."

And he just began walking down the hall toward the door where the light was, the door to the library.

Judge Irwin looked at the Boss's back as the Boss just walked away, the Palm Beach coat all crumpled up where it had crawled on the Boss's shoulders and the old sweat-stains of the afternoon showing dark at the armpits. The Judge's yellow eyes were near to popping out of his face and the blood was up in his face till it was the color of calf's liver in a butcher shop. Then he began to walk down the hall after the Boss.

I followed the pair of them.

The Boss was already sitting in a big old scuffed leather easy chair when I went in. I stood there against the wall, under the bookshelves that went up to the ceiling, full of old leather books, a lot of them law books, that got lost in the shadows up above and made the room smell musty like old cheese. Well, the room hadn't changed any. I could remember that smell from the long afternoons I had spent in that room, reading by myself or hearing the Judge's voice reading to me, while a log crackled on the hearth and the clock in the corner, a big grandfather's clock in the corner, a big grandfather's clock, offered us the slow, small, individual pellets of time. It was the same room. There were the big steel engravings on the wall–by Piranesi, in the heavy, scrollwork frames, the Tiber, the Colosseum, some ruined temple. And the riding crops on the mantel and on the desk, and the silver cups the Judge's dogs had won in the field trials and the Judge had won shooting. The gun rack, over in the shadow by the door, was out of the light from the big brass reading on the desk, but I knew every gun in it, and knew the gun's feel.

The Judge didn't sit down. He stood in the middle of the floor and looked down at the Boss, who had his legs stuck out on the red carpet. And the Judge didn't say anything. Something was going on inside his head. You knew that if he had a little glass window in the side of that tall skull, where the one-time thick, dark-red, mane-like hair was thinned out now and faded, you could see inside and see the wheels and springs and cogs and ratchets working away and shining like a beautiful lot of well-kept mechanism. But maybe somebody had pushed the wrong button. Maybe it was just going to run on and on till something cracked or the spring ran down, and nothing was going to happen.

But the Boss said something. He jerked his head sideways to indicate the silver tray with the bottle and the pitcher of water and a silver bowl and two used glasses and three or four clean ones which sat on the desk, and said, "Judge, I trust you don't mind Jack pouring me a slug? You know Southern hospitality."

Judge Irwin didn't answer him. He turned to me, and I said, "I didn't realize, Jack, that your duties included those of a body servant, but, of course, if I am mistaken–"

I could have slapped his face. I could have slapped that God-damned handsome, eagle-beaked, strong-boned, rubiginous-hided, high old face, in which the eyes weren't old but were hard and bright without any depth to them and were an insult to look into. And the Boss laughed, and I could have slapped his God-damned face. I could have walked right out and felt the two of them there, alone in that cheese-smelling room together till hell froze over, and just kept on walking. But I didn't, and perhaps it was just as well, for maybe you cannot ever really walk away from the things you want most to walk away from.

"Oh, nuts," the Boss said, and stopped laughing, and heaved himself up out of the leather chair, and made a pass at the bottle and sloshed out some whisky into a glass and poured in some water. Then he turned round, and grinning up to the Judge, stepped toward me and held out the glass. "Here, Jack," he said, "have a drink."

I can't say that I took the drink. It got shoved into my hand, and I stood there holding it, not drinking it, and watched the Boss look up at the Judge Irwin and say, "Sometimes Jack pours me a drink, and sometimes I pour him a drink and–" he stepped toward the desk again–"sometimes I pour myself a drink."