Chesbro was at it again, he noticed abstractedly. It didn't take him fifty words to get from the flood to Topic A--why the borough of Hebertown should, ought and must give him the old Swanscomb place. But the burgess didn't mind. Chesbro was a saturation-talker; his tactic was to hammer, hammer, hammer away, never giving the other man a chance to get an adverse word in; and it wasn't too hard, after all, to listen to the rain on the car roof instead. He realized vaguely that that rain had been coming down awful hard for an awfully long time. Once, he remembered, they had had a big summer thunderstorm and Bess had read him out of the paper the amazing statement that more than four inches of rain had come out of that one storm. This had to be more than that. Much more. What about Bess, by the way? Their house was high enough up, he calculated, there wasn't much chance of flood water reaching it. But had she stayed home? It wouldn't be like Bess to stay home by herself, especially when he didn't show up and the phones were down. She would have tried to cross the highway into the borough and found out that that was impossible. Then she would have--he checked off the possibilities--probably she would have gone to her sister's house. That was all right; good location. Barring some freak like a falling tree or a collapsing roof. He leaned back, his mind slowly going blank and relaxed, under the soothing drone of the flapping windshield wipers and the pounding rain and Artie Chesbro's ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta. Mrs. Chesbro had let her head slump onto the burgess's shoulders. She was probably used to that maddeningly persistent voice. Maybe asleep. He glanced down at her. She wasn't asleep. Her eyes were squeezed shut with anguish and her mouth was suffering. Not with physical pain. The burgess realized slowly that she was not used to the maddening voice at all and had infinitely more reason to hate its clacking than he. "Cigarette?" Artie Chesbro said again. Now what was the matter with the old son of a bitch? He said more loudly: "Cigarette, Henry?" "Uh, sure." Chesbro grinned wisely; the burgess had just come across Polly in one of her queer moods. He reached over to the glove compartment. "Matches? Here, here's my lighter." The burgess spun the wheel of the lighter and held the flaming wick to his cigarette for a long second while he took three puffs. Mrs. Chesbro moved over a little. The darkness outside and the momentary brightness inside the car turned the windshield into a mirror; he could see her tortured smile. The brightness inside almost wrecked them. As the burgess snapped the lighter shut and you could see through the windshield again, Chesbro gasped and tramped on the brake; fast as he was, the car was already nosing into a surging stream that cut across the road.