Excerpt

The bread man carried old bread out and brought new bread in. He squatted down and arranged it on the rack. Norwood noticed that he was poking finger holes in the competitors' loaves. Their eyes met, just for a second, and the bread man looked away. He tried to recover by doing peculiar things with his hands, as though he had a funny way of arranging bread. Norwood was not deceived. The bread man had no gift for pantomime and he did not seem to consider that from a range of eight or nine feet it is easy enough to tell whether someone is or is not punching holes in bread.