"What do you call it, then, when a man carves his own future out by his own efforts?"

"I simply think," Vic said, "that Ragle has an ability to make one good guess after another."

"Guess!" Ragle said, feeling insulted. "You can say that, after watching me doing research? Going over previous entries?" As far as he was concerned, the last thing to call it was "guessing." If it were a guess he would merely seat himself at the entry form, close his eyes, wave his hand around, bring it down to cover one square out of all the squares. Then mark it and mail it. And wait for the results. "Do you guess when you fill out your income tax return?" That was his favorite analogy for his work on the contest. "You only have to do it once a year; I do it every day." To Bill Black he said, "Imagine you had to make out a new return every day. It's the same thing. You go over all your old forms; you keep records, tons of them -- every day. And no guessing. It's exact. Figures. Addition and subtraction. Graphs."

There was silence.

"But you enjoy it, don't you?" Black said finally.

"I guess so," he said.

"How about teaching me?" Black said, with tension.

"No," he said. Black had brought it up before, a number of times.

"I don't mean so I can compete with you," Black said.

Ragle laughed.

"I mean just so I can pick up a few bucks now and then. For instance, I'd like to build a retaining wall in the back, so in the winter that wet dirt doesn't keep slopping down into our yard. It would cost me about sixty dollars for the materials. Suppose I won -- how many times? Four times?"

"Four times," Ragle said. "You'd get a flat twenty bucks. And your name would go on the board. You'd be competing."

Vic spoke up. "Competing with the Charles Van Doren of the newspaper contests."

"I consider that a compliment," Ragle said. But the enmity made him uncomfortable.