wouldn’t know one if I saw it. In my case, it wouldn’t do me a lick of good anyway. Heating my brain would cook it but not cure it.
It was getting along to drinkin’ time, so I strolled toward Saloon Row again, just to see what pot was boiling over. There was a few T-Bar men sipping suds in the Last Chance, but things were quiet enough for a weeknight.
“Want something, Sheriff?” Upward asked.
“Sarsaparilla,” I replied.
He rolled his eyes like he was a long-suffering saint, and uncorked one for me. I laid a wooden nickel on the bar, which he snatched up.
“Lot of Anchor men over to the Sampling Room this afternoon,” I said.
“That’s a nutless bunch,” Upward replied.
“I wouldn’t want them busting down the door to my jail.”
“That’s what they were up to?”
“Could be,” I said.
“You know what, pal? You worry too much. Why don’t you just take a siesta and let it all work out? You’ve got good deputies. The jail’s well guarded. The gallows go up in a few days, the kid gets a necktie, and it’s all over. So quit worrying.”
“Maybe it’s the wrong necktie,” I said.
“I give up on you. Don’t come in here no more. I don’t want to hear all your worrying.”
Upward, he was polishing the bar something fierce, so I knew he meant it.
“I’m not quitting,” I said.
Upward stopped polishing and stared at me. “All right. I tried to tell you. You’ve been warned. Now I’m warning you again. A certain person told me to tell you to lay off. You did your duty, and that ended when the kid was sentenced. Now leave it lay. If you don’t, well, you’d be pretty dumb.”
“Who says?”
Upward, he just shook his head, and I wasn’t gonna get more out of him.
“Who?” I snapped.
He just shook his head.
“Who?”
He didn’t say nothing.
“I thought so,” I said.
It had to be Crayfish Ruble.
Upward looked like he was about to reach for his sawed-off scattergun, but I just smiled, and he got aholt of himself.
“You tell Crayfish I’ll keep on looking into this, and if he messes with me, he’ll be in the next cell from the kid.”
I was feeling blue, and got out into the fresh air before I did something I might regret. Upward was a friend, and now I was running out of friends. My pa, he didn’t have any ideas about how to be a lawman, but my ma would have told me stick to what I know. And now Upward was in there polishing that bar and I didn’t want to know what he was thinking.
The town was as quiet as a Quaker prayer meeting, so I took time to say hello to Critter. He sure was getting ornery, boxed all day in a stall, but I didn’t have much choice. When I needed him, I needed him, and usually fast. He was lounging in the Turk livery barn down on Medicine Bow Street, so I hiked in there, enjoying the good smell of sunlight and horse apples. I wandered down the aisle, and there was Critter all right. He snarled at me and he plainly was fixing to commit murder if I stepped in there. A month in a stall for him was like life in the pen for other criminals.
But then I saw something that pretty near stopped me cold. Hangin’ over that stall was a noose. It hung down from a rafter, and swayed softly, the noose a little over Critter’s head. It was a well-done noose, neat and clean and the rope was fresh hemp, straight out of the hardware store. Critter, he snapped and snarled, but I didn’t pay no attention. That noose got my attention real good. It was not just tacked on there on the rafter either, but wrapped around and tied down, like it was getting set to be used.
That made me madder than a stack of hornets, so I climbed the gate, pushed Critter back, and tried to untie the knots. But it was up there solid, and wasn’t just stuck there, and I finally had to pull out my jackknife and whittle through that hemp until I could pull it away. It sure was a professional job, and it sure was there to say something to me, though I didn’t quite know what. I didn’t know anyone around the county could tie a noose like that. It was a real hangman’s noose, so orderly and tight it sent a chill right through me.
Critter bit my arm, which got my attention.
“Cut it out!” I yelled. I was ready to bite him back.
I set the noose aside and curried him, but he was being ornery and kept crowding me into a wall, so I snarled at him and quit the currying. He thanked me by pulling my hat off, but I snatched it away. He was so barn-sour I felt bad.
“We’ll go out tomorrow,” I said. “I got stuff to do.”
He sawed his head up and down and would have taken a piece of my shoulder out, but I dodged, and slammed the gate shut. This sure wasn’t my day to make friends.
