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ABNER TEEFTALLOW joined Zed Parrum at the hotel gate and they strolled together down the street to the garage where they fell in with other labourers on their half holiday. These men whiled away the afternoon telling and listening to obscene jokes. Their thoughts played around women, drinking, and gaming, the three easements of their monotonous pointless lives. They smoked, chewed tobacco, spat on the cement floor of the garage, and enjoyed the human warmth of their oaths and verbal nastiness.

The men who supplied the jokes and anecdotes were called "liars." These primitives efforts at fiction always gave their hearers a kind of supercilious disdain for the narrator. He was such a "liar," they would say; for neither teller nor hearer had any conventional fictional frame upon which to stretch the woof of the "liar's" narrative and so maintain their mutual self-respect.

During the afternoon, the garage listened to the "liars" and made plans to shoot craps that night in a skirt of woods to the south of Irontown; a place given over to that sport or passion. Abner went back to the Scovell House and ate supper, full of hesitation about the coming night of craps. He was afraid of losing his money; and then he thought if he could win a few dollars . . . He was not aware that winning or losing was a minor detail of gaming.

When he finished his supper he went up to his room, drew out his week's wages, recounted it, and then stood in the middle of the floor with that drawn feeling in his diaphragm which marks profound hesitation. He did not want to go to the crap woods, nor could he endure to stay in his room. He