The Boss quit studying Judge Irwin's face, which didn't show anything. He let himself sink in the chair, shrugged his shoulders, and lifted the glass up for a drink. Then he said, "Suit yourself, Judge. But you know, there is another way to play it. Maybe somebody might give Callahan a little shovelful on somebody else and Callahan might grow a conscience all of a sudden and repudiate his endorser. You know, when this conscience business starts, ain't no telling where it'll stop, and when you start the digging–"

"I'll thank you, sir–" Judge Irwin took a step toward the big chair, and his face wasn't the color of calf's liver now–it was long past that and streaked white back from the base of the jutting nose–"I'll thank you, sir, to get out of that chair and get out of this house!"

The Boss didn't lift his head off the leather. He looked up at the Judge, sweet and trusting, and then cocked his eyes over to me. "Jack," he said, "you were sure right. The Judge don't scare easy."

"Get out," the judge said, not loud this time.

"Those old bones don't move fast," the Boss murmured sadly, "but now I have tried to do my bounden duty, let me go." Then he drained his glass, set it on the floor beside the chair, and rose. He stood in front of the Judge, looking up at him, squinting again, cocking his head to one side again, like a farmer getting ready to buy a horse.

I set my glass on the shelf of the bookcase behind me. I discovered that I hadn't touched it, not since the first sip. _Well, to hell with it__, I thought, and let it stand. Some nigger boy would get it in the morning.

Then, as though he had decided against buying the horse, the Boss shook his head and passed around the Judge, as though the Judge weren't a man at all, or even a horse, as though he were the corner of a house or a tree, and headed for the hall door, putting his feet down slow and easy on the red carpet. No hurry.

For a second or two the Judge didn't even move his head; then he swung round and watched the Boss going toward the door, and his eyes glittered up there in the shadow above the lamp.

The Boss laid his hand on the doorknob, opened the door, and then, with his hand still on the knob, he looked back. "Well, Judge," he said, "more in pain than wrath I go. And if your conscience decides it could gag at Callahan, just let me know. In, of course–" and he grinned–"a reasonable time."

Then he looked over to me and said, "Let's haul ass, Jack," and started down toward the front door, out of sight.

Before I could get into lower gear, the Judge swung his face in my direction, and focused his eyes on me, and his upper lip lifted under that nose to form a smile of somewhat massive irony, and he said, "Your employer is calling you, Mr. Burden."

"I don't use any ear trumpet yet." I said, and pulled off toward the door, and thought to myself: _Christ, Jack, you talk like a snot, Christ, you are a smart guy__.

I had just about made the door, when he said, "I'm dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?"

_Why won't he lay off?__ I thought, but he wouldn't, and that lip lifted up again.

So I said, "Suit yourself, Judge. But if I were you I wouldn't go around advertising this visit to anybody. In case you changed your mind, somebody might figure you had stooped to a low political deal with the Boss. In the dark of night."

And I went out the door and down the hall and out the hall door and left it open but let the screen door slam.

_God damn him, why hadn't he laid off me?__

But he hadn't scared.

We left the bay, and lost the salt, sad, sweet, fishy smell of the tidelands out of our nostrils. We headed north again. It was darker now. The ground mist lay heavier on the fields, and in the dips of the road the mist frayed out over the slab and blunted the headlights. Now and then a pair of eyes would burn at us out of the dark ahead. I knew that they were the eyes of a cow–a poor dear stoic old cow with a cud, standing on the highway shoulder, for there wasn't any stock law–but her eyes burned at us out of the dark as though her skull were full of blazing molten metal like blood and we could see inside the skull into that bloody hot brightness in that moment when the reflection was right before we picked up her shape, which is so perfectly formed to be pelted with clods, and knew what she was and knew that inside that unlovely knotty head there wasn't anything but a handful of coldly coagulated gray mess in which something slow happened as we went by. We were something slow happening inside the cold brain of a cow. That's what the cow would say if she were a brass-bound Idealist like little Jackie Burden.

The Boss said, "Well, Jackie, it looks like you got a job cut out for you."

And I said, "Callahan?"

And he said, "Nope, Irwin."

And I said, "I don't reckon you will find anything on Irwin."

And he said, "You find it."

We bored into the dark for another twenty miles and eighteen minutes. The ectoplasmic fingers of the mist reached out of the swamp, threading out from the blackness of the cypresses, to snag us, but didn't have any luck. A possum came out of the swamp and started across the road and might have made it, too, if Sugar-Boy hadn't been too quick for him. Sugar-Boy just shaded the steering wheel delicately to the left, just a fraction. There wasn't even a jounce or twitch, but something thumped against the underside of the left front fender, and Sugar-Boy said, "The b-b-b-b-bas-tud." Sugar-Boy could thread a needle with that Cadillac.

At about the end of that eighteen minutes and twenty miles, I said: "But suppose I don't find anything before election day?"

  The Boss said, "To hell with election day. I can deliver Masters prepaid, special handling. But if it takes ten years, you find it."

We clocked off five miles more, and I said, "But suppose there isn't anything to find?"

And the Boss said, "There is always something."

And I said, "Maybe not on the Judge."

And he said, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something."

Two miles more, and he said, "And make it stick."

And that was all a good while ago. And masters is dead now, as dead as mackerel, but the Boss was right and he went to the Senate. And Callahan is not dead but he has wished he were, no doubt, for he used up his luck a long time back and being dead was not part of it. And Adam Stanton is dead now, too, who used to go fishing with me and who lay on the sand in the hot sunshine with me and with Anne Stanton. And Judge Irwin is dead, who leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the gray damp wintry dawn, and said, "You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son." And the Boss is dead, who said to me. "And make it stick."

Little Jackie made it stick, all right