Sometimes, it is true, Mr.Shrimplin told of the salutation, but the man was always a stranger to him, and that he should have spoken, calling him by name, he and Custer agreed only added to the sinister mystery of the encounter.
It was midday on that twenty-seventh of November when Mr.Shrimplin killed Murphy of the solitary eye, and he reached the climax of the story just as Mrs.Shrimplin began to prepare the dressing for the small turkey that was to be the principal feature of their four-o'clock dinner.

The morning's scanty fall of snow had been so added to as time passed that now it completely whitened the strip of brown turf in the little side yard beyond the kitchen windows.
"I think," said Mr.Shrimplin, "we are going to see some weather.

Well, snow ain't a bad thing." His dreamy eyes rested on Custer for an instant; they seemed to invite a question.
"No ?" said Custer interrogatively.
"If I was going to murder a man, I don't reckon I'd care to do it when there was snow on the ground." Mrs.Shrimplin here suggested cynically that perhaps he dreaded cold feet, but her husband ignored this.

To what he felt to be the commonplaceness of her outlook he had long since accustomed himself.

He merely said: "I suppose more criminals has been caught because they done their crimes when it was snowing than any other way.