Lee’s teeth flashed up in appreciation of an approach so different from any he had ever heard. He nodded gravely, but he waited for the trick to develop.

Horace wet his lips with his tongue, a good job from corner to corner. “I hate to have my kids with that hanging over them,” he said. “Why, I bet you wouldn’t let them have a pack of spearmint now.”

Lee Chong’s face agreed with this conclusion. “Plenty dough,” he said.

Horace continued. “You know that place of mine across the track up there where the fish meal is.”

Lee Chong nodded. It was his fish meal.

Horace said earnestly, “If I was to give you that place— would it clear me up with you?”

Lee Chong tilted his head back and stared at Horace through his half-glasses while his mind flicked among accounts and his right hand moved restlessly to the abacus. He considered the construction which was flimsy and the lot which might be valuable if a cannery ever wanted to expand. “Shu,” said Lee Chong.

“Well, get out the accounts and I’ll make you a bill of sale on that place.” Horace seemed in a hurry.

“No need papers,” said Lee. “I make paid-in-full paper.”

They finished the deal with dignity and Lee Chong threw in a quarter pint of Old Tennis Shoes. And then Horace Abbeville walking very straight went across the lot and past the cypress tree and across the track and up the chicken walk and into the building that had been his, and he shot himself on a heap of fish meal. And although it has nothing to do with this story, no Abbeville child, no matter who its mother was, knew the lack of a stick of spearmint ever afterward.