gaping rubber collar, the shiny bald head with its fringe of graying
hair about the edge, the white shirt sleeves with the frayed cuffs and
the skinny brown hands--a most incongruous disguise for Nemesis to
take in passing a pronunciamento.

"Why?" Joe repeated after him softly. "Wasn't he doing his work?"

Another flash-like glance up through the steel-rimmed spectacles. Mr.
Burrus appeared to be weighing his words. "No," he considered, "it
weren't that." He drummed with his fingers on the glass counter. "He
was drunk," he snapped out, and stared sternly off into space. And
then as if he felt it becoming of him, he frowned and his adam's-apple
moved up and down with quick, spasmodic jerks. But he would not look
at Joe.

A moment's silence descended on the shop and the odours of the place,
as though set free by that silence, came drifting to Joe's nostrils as
he stood there waiting--waiting for the story. There was a blending of
the smells of coal oil and fresh cloth on bolts and the indefinable
metallic smell of tinware, and behind it all an overtone of odour, as
it were, of sweet growing things--hay and grain--and the
fields--Someone dropped a pan in the rear of the shop and Mr. Burrus
looked around fiercely. When he again faced Joe, the harassed look was
gone.

Joe had been gradually making up his mind. "You'd seen him drunk
before?--That wasn't the first time?"

Mr. Burrus looked up. "Well!" he began tartly. "So much the worse,
isn't it?"

"No," said Joe, "it's not. If you'd fired him the first time there'd
have been some reason for it. It was because he wasn't the kind of man
you wanted in your office, wasn't it?"

"That was it, exactly," agreed Mr. Burrus.

"It was because he didn't see things as he should, didn't do things as
he should--in a general way--that he wasn't fit for the job, Mr.
Burrus?" Joe went on.

"Exactly."

"And if he had--had been of a piece with yourself--so that you could
have jiggled him around in your fingers like a hunk of putty, it would
have been all right. It was not his drinking--it was his drinking in
spite of your wanting him not to--that got him in bad, wasn't it, Mr.
Burrus?"

Mr. Burrus fidgeted and then turned sharply on Joe. "This ain't no
third degree."

"And you think he's gone away?" Joe continued as though not hearing
him.

"Of course he's gone away. What else was there for him to do?"

There was no obvious alternative.

Joe took his leave and went to se