"Time we were leaving this dump," Joe told the cat.
A moment now for throwing his clothes and other few belongings into a knapsack, another moment for mussing up his bed as though he had been sleeping there all night, back to the kitchen door again where Temperance Crandall stood in her long white nightgown, a lamp in her hands.
He reached in his pocket for three dollars and put it on the kitchen table beside the door.
"Keep it," she said.
"Ain't that what you wanted?"
"I don't want your money."
He left her standing there looking at the three dollars on the table. He swung off down the dark street with his cat and knapsack, struck out into the country along the back roads which ran among the poor hill farms to the northeast. The farmhouses were dark. The cattle slept in the pastures. Hay was cocked in the fields and the mingled smells of drying alfalfa, timothy, red clover, and sweet clover came to his nostrils.
Like that early morning he had come along the country road and stopped to pump himself a drink at the farmhouse, and the woman had come out. That was before the fight in Rockford.
He swung along the dark roads talking to his cat, watching the sky with its sprinkling of large stars. He did not feel so lost since his fight. He almost remembered what it was he was searching for.