Free Girl Out Back by Charles Williams

What she meant was weird gone. You know, not quite right. Oh, he was harmless, and you felt sorry for him, but there just wasn’t any sense trying to talk to him. Yes, he was around a lot. He came down about twice a week after his groceries and his comic books. . . .
    Comic books? I remembered them then. So that was why they were here. Well, you could certainly scratch him. But, God, there must have been somebody else. I went on listening; maybe she would come up with the right one after awhile.
    George called him Two-Gun, but his real name was Cliffords. She thought it was Walter Cliffords, or was it Wilbur Cliffords. Well, it didn’t matter, anyway. Even to him. About half the time he thought he was Sergeant Friday and then for a while he’d be Wyatt Earp. When he was Wyatt Earp he wore a big straw sombrero and a gun-belt and holster with a six-shooter. . . . Yes, a real one. George said it was a .36 or a .38 or something about that size. He shot snakes with it. He’d been up there for years, as far as she knew. Used to work for the Southern Pacific, didn’t he, or something like that—anyway, he had a disability pension and he didn’t do anything but hunt and fish all the time, living alone like a hermit, and it was no wonder he was a little, well, you know. It must be a pretty good pension, too, because it was actually a fact he must buy at least twenty or thirty dollars worth of comic books and true detective magazines from them every month, to say nothing about his groceries and the shotgun shells and bullets for the thirty-six to shoot snakes with, and he always paid for everything with a ten or twenty dollar bill. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that with plenty of money to live on that way he’d want to be in town where he could have a television set and civilized people to talk to. . . .
    If you live out of your hat for a sufficient number of years, you develop another sense. It’s a little like a built-in Geiger counter that can trip itself and start clicking faintly even when the rest of your mind is half asleep, and after a while you learn to heed it. I heard it now.
    . . . and somebody to look after him, the poor old man. He really was nice, even if there was never any sense to the way he talked, and she felt sorry for him. She always tried to get him to drink a glass of fresh milk when he was down here, if they happened to have any, that is, and if George wasn’t around. George called him Two-Gun and made fun of him. But when you thought about it, if he wanted to live up there by himself, it was his business, wasn’t it? She’d live in New Orleans, herself. It had probably changed a lot since she was there when she was a girl, but it was the most wonderful place. She remembered she used to go down along the river and look at the ships from all over the world with flags she didn’t even recognize. Of course, being so young, she hadn’t been in any of the night clubs or the big restaurants, but she had heard about them. . . .
    Mr. Cliffords? Oh, sure; she could understand how a strange case like that could intrigue you if you were interested in people. No, she was sure he’d been up there longer than just a year, or a year and a half. Of course, they’d only been here a little less than a year themselves, but she knew definitely he’d been living there three years at least because it was about that long ago when George had met him for the first time. He had come out here in the swamp to arrest a Negro who’d killed another man for—well, you know, running around with his wife. He’d come across Mr. Cliffords then and he’d told her about it when he got back to town, about the funny character who’d wanted to go along and help him round up the Negro and had used funny words like posse, and police cordon, and apprehend the killer, and so on. It was a real scream, George said. It was three years, all right; she knew because it was just a few months after she and George were married.
    His age? Oh,