“I reckon not,” was the reply, “when it’s about the only letter I got on hand.” “I could make a mighty good guess who drapped it,” said Sims, with a grin at a one-armed man who had once held the position of book-keeper at a cotton-gin, and who wrote letters and legal documents for half the illiterate community, “but I wouldn’t give ’im away if I was under oath.” “I have an idee who’s goin’ to drap it,” spoke up Sid Wombley from his soda-keg, and his sudden return to his natural condition evoked the first laugh of the morning. At that moment a little boy, the son of the storekeeper, who had been playing on the porch, came in quickly. His words and manner showed that he knew who was in request, if his intellect could not grasp the reason for it. “Mr. Trundle is comin’ acrost the cotton-patch behind the store,” he announced, out of breath. Then silence fell on the group, a silence so complete that Jim Trundle’s strides over the plowed ground outside were distinctly heard. The next moment Trundle had crawled over the low rail fence at the side of the store, and with clattering, untied brogans was coming up the steps. The doorway, as his tall, lank figure passed through it, framed a perfect picture of human poverty. His shirt, deeply dyed with the red of the soil, was full of slits and patches worn threadbare. The hems of his trousers had worn away, revealing triangular glimpses of his ankles, and a frayed piece of a suspender hung from a stout peg in the waistband behind. He greeted no one as he entered. A silent tongue was one of Jim Trundle’s peculiarities. Few people had ever gotten a dozen consecutive words out of him. He strode to the end of the store, thrust his hand into an open cracker-box, bit into a large square cracker, and sent his eyes foraging along both counters for something to eat with it--cheese, butter, a bit of honey, or a pinch of dried beef. He was violating no rule of country store etiquette, for Alf Carden’s customers all understood that those things left on the counters were to be partaken of in moderation. I think the habitués of the place had gradually introduced this custom themselves years before, when Carden was so anxious to draw people from the store across the river that he would willingly have given a customer bed and board for an indefinite time if by so doing he could have deprived his rival of the profit on a bag of salt. Jim Trundle wasn’t going to ask if there was any mail for him, that was plain to the curious onlookers; and their glances began to play back and forth between Carden and the cracker consumer, making demands on the former and condemning the latter for not more readily walking into the trap set for him. Wade Sims winked when he caught the storekeeper’s eye, and nodded toward the gaunt robber, who had squatted at the faucet of a syrup-barrel and was cautiously trailing a golden stream over an immaculate cracker.