local dances and sat on their front porches of a Sunday evening in vain.
“Pretty soon he could outswim the old sheep, and having to dive so much after the young ones, he got to where he could stay under water longer and longer at a time. Sometimes he’d stay under for a half an hour or more. And pretty soon he got to where he’d stay in the water all day, only coming out to eat and sleep; and then they noticed that Claude’s skin was beginning to look funny and that he walked kind of peculiar, like his knees were stiff or something. Soon after that he quit coming out of the water at all, even to eat, so they’d bring his dinner down to the water and leave it, and after a while he’d swim up and get it. Sometimes they wouldn’t see Claude for days. But he was still catching those sheep, herding ’em into a pen old man Jackson had built in a shallow bayou and fenced off with hog wire, and his half of the money was growing in the bank. Occasionally half eaten pieces of sheep would float ashore, and old man Jackson decided alligators were getting ’em again. But he couldn’t put horns on ’em now because no one but Claude could catch ’em, and he hadn’t seen Claude in some time.
“It had been a couple of weeks since anybody had seen Claude, when one day there was a big commotion in the sheep pen. Old man Jackson and a couple of his other boys ran down there, and when they got there they could see the sheep jumping out of the water every which way, trying to get on land again; and after a while a big alligator rushed out from among ’em, and old man Jackson knew what had scared the sheep.
“And then, right behind the alligator he saw Claude. Claude’s eyes had kind of shifted around to the side of his head and his mouth had spread back a good way, and his teeth had got longer. And then old man Jackson knew what
