Archie felt so good he had to push down the guilt. It was his nature, as a God-fearing son of the prairies, not to take pleasure in the misfortune of others. But this time he couldn’t help himself. It was too delicious. He was gleefully, ecstatically happy.

Not that he’d had a hand in the thing, although the struggle for restaurant supremacy in South Sioux City had been waged for years, bitter as any blood feud. He hadn’t even wished for it, at least not in any but the oblique, diffuse way that one daydreams of a future in which one’s rivals fall victim to calamity.

“Here, Goofus. Hey, Goofus, come on. Let’s go, Goofus.”

The man doing the calling was Jack Carlson. After meeting Jack at his cabin in the Sand Country of central Wisconsin—not far, as the crow flies, from a certain spring pond where I’ve done some business with brookies over the years—I climbed on the back of Jack’s ATV. We skirted a marshy pond, then rumbled part way up a slope stippled with pines and oaks. There, Jack cut the engine.