his apology, acknowledging its rectitude by tapping it with her chin as it went by, before taking the percolator off the burner.
'Did you see anything last night, Mrs. Scales?' Hardesty asked.
Ricky saw a similar recognition in Sears's eyes and knew that he had given himself away.
'All I saw was a scared husband,' she said. 'I suppose that's the part he left out.'
Elmer cleared his throat; his Adam's apple bobbed. 'Well. It looked funny.'
'Yes,' Sears said. 'I think we know all we need to know. Now if you'll excuse us, Mr. Hawthorne and I must be getting back to town.'
'You'll drink your coffee first, Mr. James,' said Mrs. Scales, putting a steaming plastic cup down before him on the tabletop. 'If you're going to sue some monster's ass from here to summer you'll need your strength.'
Ricky forced himself to smile, but Walt Hardesty guffawed.
Outside, Hardesty, back in the protective coloration of his Texas Ranger outfit, bent over to speak softly through the three-inch crack Sears had opened in the window. 'Are you two going back into town? Could we meet somewhere to have a word or two?'
'Is it important?'
'Might be, might not. I'd like to talk to you, though.'
'Right We'll go straight to your office.'
Hardesty's gloved hand went to his chin and caressed it. 'I'd rather not talk about this in front of the other boys.'
Ricky sat with his hands on the wheel, his alert face turned to Hardesty, but his mind held only one thought:
'What do you suggest, Walt?' asked Sears.
'I suggest a sub rosa stop someplace where we can have a quiet talk. Ah, do you know Humphrey's Place, just inside the town limits on the Seven Mile Road?'
'I believe I've seen it.'
'I sorta use their back room as an office when I've got confidential business. What say we meet there?'
'If you insist,' Sears said, not bothering to consult Ricky.
They followed Hardesty's car back to town, going a little faster than they had on the way out. The recognition between them-that each knew the frightening thing Elmer Scales had seen-made speech impossible. When Sears finally spoke, it was on an apparently neutral topic. 'Hardesty's an incompetent fool. 'Confidential business.' His only confidential business is with a bottle of Jim Beam.'
'Well, now we know what he does in the afternoons.' Ricky turned off the highway onto the Seven Mile Road. The tavern, the only building in sight, was a gray collection of angles and points two hundred yards down on the right.
'Indeed. He blots up free liquor in Humphrey Stalladge's back room. He'd be better off in a shoe factory in Endicott.'
'What do you think this conversation will be about?'
'We'll know all too soon. Here's our rendezvous.'
Hardesty was already standing beside his car in the big, now nearly empty parking lot. Humphrey's Place, in fact no more than an ordinary roadside tavern, had a long peaked and gabled facade with two large black windows: in one of these neon spelled out its name; in the other Utica Club flashed on and off. Ricky pulled in beside the sheriff's car, and the two lawyers got out into the cold wind.
'Just follow me,' Hardesty said on a rising curve of intonation, his voice inflated with false bonhomie. After looking at one another with shared discomfort, they went up the concrete steps after him. Ricky sneezed twice, hard, the moment he was inside the tavern.
Omar Norris, one of the town's small population of full-time drinkers, was seated on a stool at the bar, looking at them in amazement; plump Humphrey Stalladge moved between the booths, dusting ashtrays. 'Walt!' he called, and then nodded at Ricky and Sears. Hardesty's bearing had changed: within the bar, he was taller, more seigniorial, and his physical attitude to the two older men behind him somehow suggested that they had come to the place for his advice. Then Stalladge glanced more closely at Ricky and said, 'Mr. Hawthorne, isn't it?' and smiled and said, 'Well,' and Ricky knew that Stella had been in here at one time or another.
'Back room okay?' Hardesty asked.
'Always is, for you.' Stalladge waved toward a door marked Private, tucked in a corner beside the long bar, and watched the three men across the dusty floor. Omar Norris, still astonished, watched them, Hardesty striding like a G-man, Ricky conspicuous only in his sober neatness, Sears an imposing presence similar to (it only now came to Ricky) Orson Welles. 'You're in good company today, Walt,' Stalladge called behind their backs, and Sears made one of his disgusted noises deep in his throat-as much at that as at the negligent wave of his gloved hand with which Hardesty acknowledged the remark. Hardesty, princely, opened the door.
But once inside, after indicating that they should go down the dim hallway to the dark room at its end, his shoulders slumped again, his face relaxed, and he said, 'Can I get you anything?' Both men shook their heads.
'I'm a little thirsty, myself,' Hardesty said, grimaced, and went back through the door.
Wordlessly the two lawyers went down the hall and into the dingy back room. A table, scarred by a thousand generations of cigarettes, stood in the center; six camp chairs circled it. Ricky found the light switch and flicked it down. Between the unseen light bulbs and the table stood cases of beer stacked nearly to the ceiling. The entire room smelled of smoke and stale beer; even with the light on, the front portion of the room was nearly as dark as it had been before.
'What are we doing here?' Ricky asked.
Sears sat heavily in one of the camp chairs, sighed, removed his hat and put it carefully on the table. 'If you mean what will come of this fantastic excursion, nothing, Ricky, nothing.'
'Sears,' Ricky began, 'I think we ought to talk about what Elmer saw out there.'
'Not in front of Hardesty.'
'I agree. Now.'
'Not now. Please.'
'My feet are still cold,' Ricky said, and Sears gave him a rare smile.
They heard the door at the end of the hall sliding open. Hardesty came in, a full glass of beer in one hand and a half-empty bottle of Labatt's and his Stetson in the other. His complexion had become slightly reddened, as if by a rough plains wind. 'Beer's the best thing for a dry throat,' he said. Beneath the camouflaging mist of beer which floated out with his words was the sharper, darker tang of sour-mash whiskey. 'Really wets the pipes.' Ricky calculated that Hardesty had managed to swallow one shot of whiskey and half a bottle of beer in the few moments he had been in the bar. 'Have you two ever been here before?'
'No,' Sears said.
'Well, this is a good place. It's real private, Humphrey makes sure you're not disturbed if you got something private you want to say, and it's kind of out of the way, so nobody is likely to see the sheriff and the two most distinguished lawyers in town sneakin' into a tavern.'
'Nobody except Omar Norris.'
'Right, and he's not likely to remember.' Hardesty swung a leg over a chair as if it were a large dog he intended to ride, lowered himself into it and simultaneously tossed his hat onto the table, where it bumped into Sears's. Then the Labatt's bottle went onto the table; Sears moved his own hat a few inches nearer his belly as the sheriff took a long swallow from his glass.
'If I may repeat a question my partner just asked, what are we doing here?'
'Mr. James, I want to tell you something.' The gunfighter eyes had a drunk's shining sincerity. 'You'll understand why we had to get away from Elmer. We're never gonna find who or what killed those sheep.' He swallowed again; stifled a burp with the back of his hand.
'No?' At least Hardesty's awful performance was taking Sears's mind off his own troubles; he was miming surprise and interest.
'No. No way, no how. This ain't the first time something like this happened.'
'It isn't?' Ricky brought out. He too sat down, wondering how much livestock had been slaughtered around Milburn without his hearing of it.
'Not by a long shot. Not here, see, but in other parts of the country.'
