The story begins with a group of men gathered at a village general store watching Spunk and Lena walk down the street and into the palmetto thicket at the edge of town. As the men discuss the boldness of the couple and Spunk’s bravery in general, Lena’s husband, Joe Kanty, enters the store visibly nervous and orders a soda at the counter.  Elijah Mosley asks him pointedly about Lena, and Joe says he intends to confront Spunk about their relationship, showing the group the large razor he has brought as a weapon.  Elijah encourages him to stand up to Spunk, and Joe leaves the store for the woods as night falls. The men at the store laugh at him after he leaves. Walter Thomas chides Elijah for pushing Joe to confront Spunk, saying Spunk will kill him, but Elijah dismisses his worries. Although Spunk carries a gun, Elijah claims he would never shoot an unarmed man and that Joe’s razor is too small for Spunk to consider it a serious weapon. 

The men continue to discuss the couple. Walter disapproves of Spunk seeing Lena, saying he is only doing it because Joe is so timid, but Elijah disagrees again, arguing that Spunk would pursue Lena no matter what simply because he wants her, and he always goes after what he wants. In addition, from his description of seeing Joe meekly confront the couple on another occasion, it is clear that Lena wants to be with Spunk, not Joe. When Spunk challenged Joe to call Lena to his side to see if she would come to him, Lena only looked at Joe with disgust. Spunk declared to Lena that she belonged to him now and that he would take care of her. He offered to build her a house, but she pointed out that the house where she and Joe live belongs to her and was a gift from her father. Spunk said that she should stay there but also told her to remember that she is now his, not Joe’s.  

A gunshot sounds. Spunk and Lena walk out of the palmettos. Lena is clinging to Spunk and crying. Spunk tells the loungers that he has shot Joe in self-defense after Joe attacked him with the razor. Although the loungers stare at Elijah, indicating their belief in his responsibility for the shooting, no one says anything. Spunk says to bury Joe in “Stony Lonesome,” and nonchalantly leaves to go to Lena. The men talk about getting a sheriff in from Orlando but do nothing. There is a trial, and Spunk is found not guilty because the shooting was in self-defense. He goes free and returns to Lena and to his work at the sawmill. 

The night after the trial, Elijah announces to Walt that Spunk plans to marry Lena. He has bought a house and moved Lena and her things there already. Elijah tells Walt that two nights previously, a large, black bobcat walked around the house howling. Spunk got his gun to shoot the animal, but it stared into his eyes and Spunk became afraid, believing the bobcat to be Joe’s ghost. Walter agrees, arguing that bobcats are never black, and that it would be like Joe to come back and challenge Spunk to marry Lena or fight him. Walter believes Joe, who went to fight a much larger man known to be carrying a gun, was always a braver man than Spunk, and that it makes sense that he would come back to defend the honor of the woman he loved. Other men agree and note that Spunk has also been acting strangely at the sawmill, including claiming that someone pushed him towards the saw blade when no one was near him.  

The next night, Spunk is dead. As they walk to Lena’s house for the wake, Elijah describes his death at the sawmill to Walter. Elijah saw him fall on the carriage mechanism that moves logs into the path of the saw blade. It was moving too fast for them to pull Spunk away from the blade. His injuries were clearly fatal, but he lived long enough to declare to Elijah that he was pushed onto the carriage by the ghost of Joe. As he dies, Spunk furiously swears he will find Joe in the afterlife and fight him. At Lena’s house, the wake is underway. The whole town is there. Lena is crying loudly. Joe’s father has come to gloat over the fallen body of Spunk. The women of the town eat funeral meats and the men drink whiskey while both groups speculate on who Lena will take up with next.  

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