 The passenger, Walter Browning, an upstanding member of the community and seemingly happily married man, dies; while the driver, Mary Ellen Jones, a woman not his wife but also well respected, survives to testify that she was taking him to town on an errand of mercy.The narrator singer describes examining the wreckage and discovering evidence of an extramarital affair between the two (Browning's wedding band hidden in a matchbox behind the dash).He disposes of the evidence and swears himself to silence for the sake of their reputations in the county; because, as he reveals in the last verse, Walter Browning was his father.