Some Buried Caesar

The Methodist bustled off. Lily looked at me with a comer of her mouth curled up and remarked as if it didn't matter much, "The chief reason I came was to see how surprised you would look when you found me here, and you don't look surprised at all and you begin by telling me I have legs like an antelope."

I shrugged. "Go ahead and nag. I admit I'm glad you came, because if you hadn't I wouldn't have known about the fricassee. Your harping on legs is childish. Your legs are unusually good and you know it and so do I. Legs are made to be walked with or looked at, not talked about, especially not in a Methodist stronghold. Are you a Catholic? What's the difference between a Catholic and a river that runs up- hill?"

She didn't know and I told her, and we babbled on. The fricassee came, and the first bite, together with dumpling and gravy, made me marvel at the hellishness of Mrs. Miller's disposition, to drive a man away from that. It gave me an idea, and a few minutes later, when I saw Wolfe and Charles E. Shanks enter the tent and get settled at a table on the other side, I excused myself and went over and told him about the fricassee, and he nodded gravely.

I was corralling the last of my rice when Lily asked me when I was going back to New York. I told her it depended on what time the orchids were judged on Wednesday; we would leave either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morn- ing.

"Of course," she said, "we'll see each other in New York."

"Yeah?" I swallowed the rice. "What for?"

"Nothing in particular. Only I'm sure we'll see each other, because if you weren't curious about me you wouldn't be so rude, and I was curious about you before I ever saw your face, when I saw you walking across that pasture. You have a distinctive way of walking. You move very… I don't know…"

"Distinctive will do. Maybe you noticed I have a dis- tinctive way of getting over a fence too, in case of a bull. Speaking of bulls, I understand the barbecue is off."

"Yes." She shivered a little. "Naturally. I'm thinking of leaving this afternoon. When I came away at noon there was a string of people gawking along the fence, there where your car had been..,. where we were last night. They would have crossed the pasture and swarmed all over the place if there hadn't been a state trooper there."

"With the bull in it?"