'I sure do,' said Alvin. 'I was making your customers happy with you for the first time since you come here, and making an honest man out of you in the meantime.'

'I already was an honest man,' said Rack. 'I never took but what I was entitled to, living in a godforsaken place like this.'

'Begging your pardon, my friend, but God ain't forsaken this place, though now and then a soul around here might have forsaken Him.'

'I'm done with your help,' said Rack icily. 'I think it's time for you to move on.'

'But I haven't even looked at the machinery you use for weighing the corn wagons,' said Alvin. , Rack hadn't been in a hurry for Alvin to check them over - the heavy scales out front was only used at harvest time, when farmers brought in whatever corn they meant to sell. They'd roll the wagons on to the scales, and through a series of levers the scale would be balanced with much lighter weights. Then the wagon would be rolled back on empty and weighed, and the difference between the two weights was the weight of the corn. Later on the buyers would come, roll on their empty wagons and weigh them, then load them up and weigh them again. It was a clever bit of machinery, a scale like that, and it was only natural that Alvin wanted to get his hands on it.

But Rack wasn't having none of it. 'My scales is my business, stranger,' he says to Alvin.

'I've et at your table and slept in your house,' says Alvin. 'How am I a stranger?'

'Man who gives away my geese, he's a stranger here for ever.'

'Well, then, I'll be gone from here.' Still smiling, Alvin turned to his young ward. 'Let's be on our way, Arthur Stuart.'

'No sir,' says Rack Miller. 'You owe me for thirty-six meals these last six days. I didn't notice this Black boy eating one whit less than you. So you owe me in service.'

'I gave you due service,' says Alvin. 'You said yourself that your machinery was working smooth.'