MISQUAH — I have been to three hundred events in this town and I have never heard the sound that came out of Second Avenue at four minutes past two on Saturday, so I am going to try to write it down while I still have it.

First there was the pulling. Jonas Holt pulled at two o'clock and nothing happened, and he pulled again and nothing happened, and I want you to understand that three hundred people had gone completely silent by then, because there is nothing in this world more absorbing than watching a competent man be defeated by a rope in front of his neighbors. Then Walt Sorensen came out of the crowd with a pocketknife, handle first, the way you hand a man a knife, and said something short, and the whole street laughed at once, and I thought: that is the best thing that will happen today. I was wrong.

The canvas came down in one piece. There was a pause — a real one, two full seconds, three hundred people reading two words — and then Dorothy Knutson said "Well" from somewhere behind me in a voice that carried to the corner, and then the noise. I have heard this town cheer at ballgames and I have heard it sing at funerals and this was neither. It was the sound of everybody being surprised in the same direction.

Then we all went inside, sixty-one at a time, and the envelope came out, and when they read the fourth Mud Lake guess it turned out to belong to Rachel Vinh, who is nine, and who was put up on the bar to be looked at, and who took it like a professional. Her grandmother dictated it to her. Her grandmother has not stopped talking about it and should not.

What I keep coming back to is this: I have lived here sixty-eight years, and this town cannot keep a secret. We know who is expecting before they've told their mother. And for twenty-six days, one word sat under a piece of canvas on Second Avenue and nobody found it out. Somebody knew — the sign painter knew, the crew knew, the man at the county who processed the permit knew. Nobody told. I don't have a joke for that one. I think it might be the nicest thing about us. It has been quite a week at the tables, and the tables were, for once, all in the street.