“Neither of us’ll be doing it very long,” he said. “I’ve got to close down.” “But I thought it was paying you nice?” I says. “And so it was,” says Bitty, “till Silas Sykes took a hand. He didn’t have a mind to see me run no store down there and take away his trade from the Flats. He begun under-sellin’ me--he’s been runnin’ everything off at cost till I can’t hold out no longer.” “So that’s what Silas Sykes has been slashin’ down everything for, from prunes upwards,” I says. “I might of known. I might of known.” “My interest is comin’ due,” says Bitty, movin’ on; “I’ve come up this mornin’ to see about going back to work in the brick-yard.” “Good land,” I says sorrowful. “Good land. And Silas in the Council--and on the School Board--and an elder thrown in.” Bitty grinned a little then. “It ain’t new,” he says, over his shoulder. And he went on up the street, holding his hands heavy, and kind of letting his feet fall instead of setting them down, like men walk that don’t care, any more. I understood what he meant when he said it wasn’t new. There was Joe Betts that worked three years getting his strawberry bed going, and when he begun selling from the wagon instead of taking to Silas Sykes at the Post-Office store, Silas got the Council that he’s in to put up licenses, clear over Joe’s head. And Ben Dole, he’d got a little machine and begun making cement blocks for folks’s barns, and Timothy Toplady, that’s interested in the cement works over to Red Barns, got Zachariah Roper, that’s to the head of the Red Barns plant, to come over and buy Ben Dole’s house and come up on his rent--two different times he done that. It wasn’t new. But it all kind of baffled me. It seemed so legal that I couldn’t put down my finger on what was the matter. Of course when a thing’s legal, and you’re anyways patriotic, you are some put to it to find a real good term to blame it with. I walked along, thinking about it, and feeling all baffled up as to what to do. But I hadn’t gone ten steps when I thought of one thing I could do, to clear up my own i-dees if for nothing else. I turned around and called out after Bitty. “Oh, Bitty,” I says, “would you mind me letting Silas know I know?” He threw out his hands a little, and let ’em kind of set down side of him. “Why sure not,” he said, “but if you’re thinkin’ of saying anything to him--best spare the breath.” “We’ll see about that,” I thought, and I went on down Daphne Street with a Determination sitting up in the air just ahead of me, beginning to crook its finger at me to come along.