“Honey,” I said, “I can’t arrest that man.” She didn’t answer. If I did, the jail would be full of them, men who have come home on foot or men just walking aways from a ranch they never left and that I ain’t happened to have seen before. We had too many in them days anyway. “He ain’t hurt,” I said. “He ain’t drunk. I don’t think he’s got a gun. That’s enough.” But he was something to stare at for an hour or two.
Either he’s a man escaped already from another prison, where he stayed in the fields or worked out on the roads — and that wasn’t likely — or else he comes naturally by his skin to stand the burn marks of such a sun. And that’s good. He had no hat. I can sit or even stand in it myself the whole day without my mind becoming clouded or even getting up a thirst. I could see that he could too. But there is a limit, when it seemed he didn’t want to talk.
I whispered, “Ain’t it time to go?”
“No,” she answered.
“Well, we are,” I said. Maybe he was looking at them little girls, the one hardly hid behind a thorn, the other sitting on her thin legs out there in the sand, maybe not. He must have felt as queer coming across two children that way as they did seeing a grown man perched down like he was on the edge of a river quiet. I don’t know what he thought when he saw me.
I figured that maybe if I stood up he would. He didn’t. I made the girl get up and brush the sand off herself too. When I stretch out, as I did then, I’m tall enough for a man to see me. I looked right at him, at his shirt tails that was as good as pants to another, at the easy way he slouched as if, had there been some driftwood within reach, he might have built a fire. He was young.
“I’ll drive you girls home,” I told them, “you’ll be missed.”
I thought that when we turned and walked away he would stop playing at us and swim across. I would have taken him in my car that day. Men sometimes misjudge a route out here, they’re liable to stray miles. They’re lucky if they get a ride.
He stayed.
He probably had a car himself, I never learned. He might have had it parked back behind a dune where I thought the country was flat as it is most everywhere; he probably found a hollow and hid it there with all the things he carried and everything that made him what he was inside it.