killed that fella Mayo.”
“I expect you’re right,” Bo admitted. “As long as Ashton backs their story, though—”
The sound of someone hissing at them caught the Texans’ attention. They turned to see the old swamper standing at the corner of the building. He beckoned to them with a palsied hand.
Bo and Scratch looked at each other and frowned. Then Bo shrugged, and they went over to see what the swamper wanted.
“What can we do for you, mister?” Scratch asked.
The old man licked his lips nervously. “Are…you boys really lawmen?”
“Yeah, but I ain’t sure you could call us boys,” Scratch said. “Hell, I’ll bet you ain’t that much older than us.”
The swamper shook his head. “It ain’t the years so much as it is the miles.”
“We’ve put plenty of those behind us, too,” Bo said. “Now, what was it you wanted to tell us?”
The old man’s fingertips rasped on the white beard stubble that poked from his chin. “I heard you askin’ about Duke Mayo. I was in there when he cashed in from that game and left. It was just a couple o’ minutes after that when them other two, Stansbridge and Keegan, left, too. They lied to you about that, and so did Ashton.”
Bo felt his heart beat a little faster in anticipation. “You’d swear to that in court?” he asked.
The swamper hesitated. “I dunno…I knocked that bucket over a’purpose so’s I could come tell you about it, but I don’t like the idea of standin’ up in court and sayin’ the same thing.”
“You don’t have to worry about Ashton and those gamblers,” Scratch told him. “They’d be arrested by then. They couldn’t hurt you.”
“Yeah, but what if they was to get loose for some reason? A jury might set ’em free, even though ever’body would know they was guilty.”
Bo couldn’t dispute that. It wasn’t uncommon for the members of a frontier jury to ignore the facts of a case and just do what they wanted to do, whether it was convicting an innocent man or acquitting a guilty one. He didn’t want to let Stansbridge and Keegan get away with murdering Duke Mayo, though, and he was certain that was what had happened.
“Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll arrest the three of them and tell them we have a witness, but we won’t say anything about who it is. Maybe once they’re behind bars, they’ll go ahead and confess.”
“Maybe…” the swamper said, but he sounded doubtful.
“We’ll do everything we can to protect you,” Bo promised. “Sooner or later, somebody’s got to stand up for what’s right. That’s the only way we can bring law and order to Mankiller.”
The swamper took a deep breath, then nodded his head. “All right. Lemme get back in there before you come in, though, so’s they won’t have as much reason to think it was me you been talkin’ to.”
Bo nodded and said, “Sure, we can do that.”
Scratch added, “How come you want to see them get what’s comin’ to them? They treat you bad?”
“Ashton’s a jackass, and pizen-mean. The other two ain’t much better. But Duke, he always had a kind word for me and slipped me a little dinero now and then. For a tinhorn gambler, he weren’t a bad sort. He had a wife, too, a gal named Janey, and she was pretty nice for a whore.” The swamper shook his head. “Folks go down some wrong trails sometimes—I done it myself, more often than I like to think about—but that don’t mean they’re bad sorts.”
Bo put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “You’re right about that, amigo. Now get back in there with your bucket, and we’ll wait a few minutes before we arrest those varmints.”
The swamper nodded and turned to hurry toward the back of the building. He disappeared behind the Fan- Tan.
“I just thought of somethin’,” Scratch said. “We’ve only got two cells in the jail, and they got prisoners in ’em already. If we arrest Ashton, Stansbridge, and Keegan, where’re we gonna put ’em?”
Bo frowned. “That’s a problem, all right. If we’re going to clean up this town, we’ll need more space for prisoners. I’ll have to talk to Lucinda and some of the others about that. For now, though, I think I saw a smokehouse with a pretty sturdy door on it. We can put them in there and lock it up.”
Scratch nodded and hitched up his gun belt. “Sounds good to me. Let’s go educate those hombres about how they hadn’t ought to go around cuttin’ people’s throats.”
CHAPTER 23
Three out of the four men in the Fan-Tan looked surprised when Bo and Scratch came back into the gambling den. The swamper kept his eyes downcast and watched his mop making damp circles on the floor, but there was nothing unusual in that.
“Forget something?” Ashton asked from behind the bar. He didn’t look the least bit happy to see the Texans again.
“Yeah, we did,” Bo said as he came to a stop beside the table where Stansbridge and Keegan sat. “We forgot to arrest these two four-flushers for murdering and robbing Duke Mayo.”
Stansbridge’s face flushed with anger. “Damn it, we told you we haven’t been out of here for hours.”
“And Mike backed us up on that,” Keegan added.
“Yeah, but we got a witness who says that all three of you are lyin’,” Scratch said.
“Witness!” Ashton repeated. “What witness?”
