John Cartwright is a salesman of farm tools. He makes it to the town of Anthem, where Sherman McBride lives with his twin sons. He attempts to sell McBride a new McCrory Reaper and stays over night. Sherman and the twins are hesitant to accept him at first, but eventually warm up to him that evening after they share supper. The boys share tobacco with John, and they listen on as a fox cries farther up in the mountain, and discuss the possibility of shooting it themselves and gaining enough money to help pay for the plow. Cartwright encourages them to shoot the fox and sell it for its hide. The following morning, Cartwright prepares to sell McBride the plow, but McBride does not have enough money. He offers Cartwright something other than money to cover the costs of the plow. Cartwright declines, saying he can only take cash money, until McBride pulls out a newspaper, showing an article about an ancient, and very valuable, sloth fossil hidden in the mountain. He promises he can lead Cartwright to the specimen, and the salesman agrees to take it as payment, splitting it 60-40. One of the twins, the one with nine fingers, leads Cartwright to the place where the fossil is. He knows it well because they often harvest flint there, at the mountain cave called the Sink fo Gandy. After climbing two miles into the mountain to reach the fossil, Cartwright realizes that the fossil is no good, crumbling into dozens of pieces so that it cannot be broken out from the rock in one piece that can be sold. When he gets back out of the mountain with the nine-fingered twin, Sherman McBride and the other twin meet him. Cartwright is upset because he feels as if the old man as swindled him, and begins a verbal argument. During the fight, a piece of paper slips from Cartwright’s hand, showing the McBrides listed as a “sucker”— a person easy to trick into buying tools. They are grouped in with the town drunks and idiots on this "sucker" list. The McBride’s are deeply offended by this, and shoot the salesman. He is left for dead, and is torn apart by wild animals. The McBride’s keep the salesman’s wagon, as well as the plow he set out to sell them. They use it to till their fields, and are disappointed to discover that it did not increase their harvest by multitudes the way the salesman had promised. The twins look out over the land they have worked so hard to try to claim dominion over, and set out with their guns to shoot a fox and tan its hide in order to get more money for it than selling it right away, a lesson they learned from Cartwright himself in his short, and final, stay on their land.