I put them on the counter top and went back and squatted down alongside Stiffy. "I called Doc," I told him. "He'll be here right away." He seemed to hear me. He wheezed and sputtered for a while, then he said in a broken whisper: "I can't help no more. You are all alone." It didn't go as smooth as that. His words were broken up.

"What are you talking about?" I asked him, as gently as I could. "Tell me what it is."

"The bomb," he said. "The bomb. They'll want to use the bomb. You must stop them, boy." I had told Doc that he was babbling and now I knew I had been right.

I headed for the front door to see if Doc might be in sight and when I got there he was coming up the walk.

Doc went ahead of me into the kitchen and stood for a moment, looking down at Stiffy. Then he set down his bag and hunkered down and rolled Stiffy on his back.

"How are you, Stiffy?" he demanded.

Stiffy didn't answer.

"He's out cold," said Doc.

"He talked to me just before you came in."

"Say anything?"

I shook my bead. "Just nonsense." Doc hauled a stethoscope out of his pocket and listened to Stiffy's chest. He rolled Stiffy's eyelids back and beamed a light into his eyes.

Then he got slowly to his feet.

"What's the matter with him?" I asked.

"He's in shock," said Doc. "I don't know what's the matter. We'd better get him into the hospital over at Elmore and have a decent look at him." He turned wearily and headed for the living-room.

"You got a phone in here?" he asked.

"Over in the corner. Right beside the light."

"I'll call Hiram," he said. "He'll drive us into Elmore. We'll put Stiffy in the back seat and I'll ride along and keep an eye on him." He turned in the doorway. "You got a couple of blankets you could let us have?"

"I think I can find some."

He nodded at Stiffy. "We ought to keep him warm."

I went to get the blankets. When I came back with them, Doc was in the kitchen. Between the two of us, we got Stiffy all wrapped up. He was limp as a kitten and his face was streaked with perspiration.

"Damn wonder," said Doc, "how he keeps alive, living the way he does, in that shack stuck out beside the swamp. He drinks anything and everything he can get his hands on and he pays no attention to his food. Eats any kind of slop he can throw together easy. And I doubt he's had an honest bath in the last ten years. It does beat hell," he said with sudden anger, "how little care some people ever think to give their bodies."

"Where did he come from?" I asked. "I always figured he wasn't a native of this place. But he's been here as long as I remember."

"Drifted in," said Doc, "some thirty years ago, maybe more than that. A fairly young man then. Did some odd jobs here and there and just sort of settled down. No one paid attention to him. They figured, I guess, that he had drifted in and would drift out again. But then, all at once, he seemed to have become a fixture in the village. I would imagine that he just liked the place and decided to stay on. Or maybe lacked the gumption to move on." We sat in silence for a while.

"Why do you suppose he came barging in on you?" asked Doc.

"I wouldn't know," I said. "We always got along. We'd go fishing now and then. Maybe he was just walking past when he started to get sick."

"Maybe so," said Doc.

The doorbell rang and I went and let Hiram Martin in. Hiram was a big man. His face was mean and he kept the constable's badge pinned to his coat lapel so polished that it shone.

"Where is he?" he asked.

"Out in the kitchen," I said. "Doc is sitting with him." It was very plain that Hiram did not take to being drafted into the job of driving Stiffy in to Elmore.

He strode into the kitchen and stood looking down at the swathed figure on the floor.

"Drunk?" he asked.

"No," said Doc. "He's sick."

"Well, OK," said Hiram, "the car is out in front and I left the engine running. Let's heave him in and be on our way." The three of us carried Stiffy out to the car and propped him in the back seat.

I stood on the walk and watched the car go down the street and I wondered how Stiffy would feel about it when he woke up and found that he was in a hospital. I rather imagined that he might not care for it.

I felt bad about Doc. He wasn't a young man any longer and more than likely he'd had a busy day, and yet he took it for granted that he should ride with Stiffy.

Once in the house again, I went into the kitchen and got out the coffee and went to the sink to fill the coffee pot, and there, lying on the counter top, was the bunch of keys I had picked up off the floor. I picked them up again and had a closer look at them. There were two of them that looked like padlock keys and there was a car key and what looked like a key to a safety deposit box and two others that might have been any kind of keys. I shuffled them around, scarcely seeing them, wondering about that car key and that other one which might have been for a safety box. Stiffy didn't have a car and it was a good, safe bet that be had nothing for which he'd ever need a safety deposit box.

The time is getting close, he'd told me, and they'll want to use the bomb. I had told Doc that it was babbling, but now, remembering back, I was not so sure it was. He had wheezed out the words and he'd worked to get them out. They had been conscious words, words he had managed with some difficulty. They were words that he had meant to say and had laboured to get said. They had not been the easy flow of words that one mouths when babbling. But they had not been enough. He had not had the strength or time.

The few words that he'd managed made no particular sense.

There was a place where I might be able to get some further information that might piece out the words, but I shrank from going there. Stiffy Grant had been a friend of mine for many years, ever since that day he'd gone fishing with a boy often and had sat beside him on the river bank all the afternoon, spinning wondrous tales. As I recalled it, standing in the kitchen, we had caught some fish, but the fish were not important. What had been important then, what was still important, was that a grown man had the sort of understanding to treat a ten-year-old as an equal human being. On that day, in those few hours of an afternoon, I had grown a lot. While we sat on that river bank I had been as big as he was, and that was the first time such a thing had ever happened to me.

There was something that I had to do and yet I shrank from doing it — and still, I told myself, Stiffy might not mind. He had tried to tell me something and he had failed because he didn't have the strength. Certainly he would understand that if I used these keys to get into his shack, that I had not done it in a spirit of maliciousness, or of idle curiosity, but to try to attain that knowledge he had tried to share with me.

No one had ever been in Stiffy's shack. He had built it through the years, out at the edge of town, beside a swamp in the corner of Jack Dickson's pasture, and he had built it out of lumber he had picked up and out of flattened tin cans and all manner of odd junk he had run across. At first it had been little more than a lean-to, a shelter from the wind and rain. But bit by bit, year by year, he had added to it until it was a structure of wondrous shape and angles, but it was a home.

I made up my mind and gave the keys a final toss and caught them and put them in my pocket. Then I went out of the house and got into the car.