Mr. Burrus had been thoughtfully eyeing his stock of knives through the case and as Joe finished he cast a quick, sidewise glance up at him. Joe caught the flicker of it through the spectacles. "Well," he began, and hesitated a little, "it's what I woulda done—under the circumstances." Mr. Burrus' manner, usually so brisk and business-like, seemed suddenly to have changed. He scratched his head with a long and bony finger and looked up again at Joe. What he saw seemed not to reassure him, for Joe had all of a sudden grown beyond Bloomfield's conception of him. He towered above the cutlery case—seemed to fill out his clothes. There was a set look about his mouth and a steadiness about his eyes. Mr. Burrus paused again.
"Circumstances?" said Joe. "Under what circumstances?"
Mr. Burrus gazed off into the clear blue of the sky patch outlined by his front door. "Well," he began cautiously, "I weren't callatin' to say anything about this to anybody, but—I had to let Bushrod go." The little weazened body with its scrawny neck rising out of the 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.