table, she flourished it savagely under her aged progenitor's nose.

"What do those Klondikers say? There it is in cold print. Only
the young and robust can stand the Klondike. It's worse than the
north pole. And they've left their dead a-plenty there themselves.
Look at their pictures. You're forty years older 'n the oldest of
them."

John Tarwater did look, but his eyes strayed to other photographs
on the highly sensational front page.

"And look at the photys of them nuggets they brought down," he
said. "I know gold. Didn't I gopher twenty thousand outa the
Merced? And wouldn't it a-ben a hundred thousand if that
cloudburst hadn't busted my wing-dam? Now if I was only in the
Klondike--"

"Crazy as a loon," William sneered in open aside to the rest.

"A nice way to talk to your father," Old Man Tarwater censured
mildly. "My father'd have walloped the tar out of me with a
single-tree if I'd spoke to him that way."

"But you ARE crazy, father--" William began.

"Reckon you're right, son. And that's where my father wasn't
crazy. He'd a-done it."

"The old man's been reading some of them magazine articles about
men who succeeded after forty," Annie jibed.