* * * * * Then old Jeff went crazy, saw red. You see, it was all so sudden. For twenty years he had been loafing in here--ever since his wife died. This had been his place when Sam Blainey, father of Frank, was alive and ran the store. Here, with a twinkle in his eyes, he had slipped, secretly, many a stick of candy, yellow candy with red stripes, to the youngsters who stood about while parents shopped. Here, out of the soft pine of dry-goods boxes, he had carved many an Indian, while the children crowded about, then gone out in the woods, children following, and colored the Indians red with pokeberry juice. Here, at nights, he had told those bigger children, the fathers, about where fish were biting now in the river, about how wild turkeys were moving from one section of the swamp to another, about the best kind of caller to get them in range. For that was the only kind of thing old Jeff knew, except that children loved candy and carved Indians, and that in a general way folks ought to tote fair with one another. But to come back--it was all sudden and Jeff saw red. Bill Carson, a farmer, burly and powerful, grabbed him and shoved him back. He wouldn’t have had any show, anyway, with Frank Blainey. His old heart was far stouter than his biceps. All this Bill Carson knew. “Come on, Jeff,” he was saying. “Yes, that’s all right now, you come with me. We’ll talk about it out here in the road.” And so it was that Jeff found himself out in the road, with the rain beating in his face, and Bill Carson towering above him. “Let me go, Bill,” he was pleading. “Let me go back an’ smash his face. Just once, Bill, just once. That wife of hisn is the ‘women’ he’s talkin’ about. I know, Bill. Once in the ol’ days, when Sam Blainey was livin’ an’ runnin’ the sto’, befo’ her an’ Frank married, she come in. I didn’t know there was any lady aroun’, an’ I said ‘damn’ or somethin’. She heerd me an’ went out, head high, an’ said she never would come back agin. She tol’ all the women about what I had said. She’s pizen pious, Bill; you know her. She brought hit up in the ladies’ missionary society--said there was heathens livin’ right around ’em. Meanin’ me. Bill, listen, let me go back!” “No,” said Carson, “you better go home now, Jeff. He’ll be sorry he done it.”