"Burden," he said. "Yes. That's the name. Somebody in town said the sheriff went out there."

"I reckon Watt likes to watch a fire, too," one said.

"From the way the square looks," the truck driver said, "if he [wants any?] man, he'll find him out there."

The noon whistle blew. The others departed. Byron ate his lunch. Then when his watch said it was 1:00, he went back to work. He was alone in the
loading shed, making his steady and interminable journeys between the shed and the freight car, with a piece of folded sack upon his shoulder for a
pad and [bearing?] upon the pad stacked burdens of staves which another would have said he could not carry, when he fell in love. Lena Grove walked
into the door of the shed behind him. Her face was already fixed with serene <[smil?]> anticipatory smiling, her mouth already fixed to speak a name.
He hears her and <[turns?]> turns and sees her face fade like the dying agitation of a dropped pebble in a spring.

"You aint him," she says behind her fading smile, the gravely astonished eyes of a child.

"No, ma'am," Bryon says. He pauses, half turning with the balanced staves. "I dont reckon so. Who is it I aint?"

"Lucas Burch. They told me — "

"Lucas Burch?"

"They told me I would find him out here." She <said> says it quietly, but with a kind of placid suspicion, watching him
without blinking, as if she belive<d>s that he <was> is [tricking?] her. "<They [illegible]> When I got close to town, the kept on calling it Bunch
instead of Burch. But I just thought that they had said it wrong. Or that maybe I just heard it wrong."