A curious storekeeper stepped out to the sidewalk to see what the running was about. He took one look at Gault and the burdened black and called to someone in the store. By the time Gault reached the general store where the sheriff had his office, there were several little clusters of men gathered on the sidewalk. They did not venture away from the storefronts but stood quietly, watching.
The sheriff and the little hostler appeared in the doorway of Olsen's office as Gault tied up in front of the store. The big lawman stepped out on the second-floor gallery and looked down at them with thunder in his face. He came down the stairway two steps at a time.
'What's goin' on here?' he snarled.
'Your posseman's dead. I brought him home,' Gault said with a flatness of tone that caused the sheriff to blink. Then Olsen strode to the black, lifted the dead man's head and studied the dead face. 'He's not my posseman.'
'Your deputy's, then. It comes to the same thing.'
The little hostler was fairly dancing with excitement. 'I was the first one seen him, Sheriff. Come ridin' into town, just like he owned it. I recognized Colly's black geldin' right off. Recognized Colly too. Dead as a fencepost. I'd figgered you'd want to know about it right off.'
'See if you can find Doc Doolie,' Olsen said.
'What you want with the doc? Colly's done for. Don't take a doc to see that.'
'Get him.' This time there was no nonsense in Olsen's voice. 'The rest of you…' He raked the gathering of loafers and storekeepers and a scattering of cowhands. 'Get back to whatever you was doin'.'
The hostler made for the upper end of the street in a rolling, lurching lope of the oldtime horseman. The rest of the crowd began backing up, reluctantly. They were curious to see what was going to develop, but none of them was anxious to tangle with Grady Olsen.
'You,' the sheriff said harshly to Gault. 'Give me a hand here.'
Together they slipped the dead posseman off the saddle and laid him out beside Rucker's store. 'Have you got a tarp or somethin' to cover him with?' the sheriff asked.
'No.'
Glaring, Olsen returned to the gelding, unsaddled the animal and covered the dead man with the saddle blanket.
Then he pointed toward the stairway. 'Up to my office. I'll talk to you there.'
Inside the combination office-living quarters the sheriff slumped behind the oilcloth-covered table and motioned Gault to a chair. As Gault sat down somewhat cautiously, Olsen noticed for the first time that his face was pale and drawn beneath the stubble of trail beard. 'You ailin' with somethin', Gault?'
'I'm fine,' Gault said gratingly, 'except for a busted rib, that comes from bein' shot by another one of your possemen. But I guess you got the whole story about that— when you rode out to the Garnett farm the night of the storm.'
Gault watched him closely, wondering what his reaction would be. But Olsen only sat looking at him, his expression unchanging.
The lawman picked up a stub of a pencil and began turning it over and over in his blunt fingers. 'My deputy told me about the shootin',' he said coldly. 'Accident. Too bad it happened, but that's the way it goes when you mess with things that's none of your business. Anyway…' He made a motion with one hand, waving the subject away. 'Anyway, that ain't the thing we're concerned with right now. You just brought me a dead man.' His eyes narrowed. 'Did you kill him?'
Gault breathed as deeply as he could against the tight bandaging. 'Yes.'
The sheriff blinked owlishly. 'Why?'
The question was not as simple as it might first appear, and Gault was aware of it. 'For one thing, he was about to kill me.'
'Why would Colly Fay want to kill you?'
'He thought I wanted to trick him—and Colly couldn't stand the notion of somebody trying to make him look foolish. Anyway, he had orders to see that I returned to the Territory. When I came back across the river, that's when he tried to kill me.'
The big sheriff shot him a bleak look. 'I don't guess there was any witnesses that could testify it was an accident?'
'No. But there was this.' Gault dug the flannel-wrapped parcel from the pocket of his windbreaker. He put it on the table. 'When it was over, I went lookin' for Colly's horse. This is what I found in the saddle pocket.'
Olsen looked at the package but did not touch it. Gault went on. 'I'm not such a fool that I didn't realize it would be a dangerous proposition, me comin' back to New Boston with a dead posseman across his saddle. Common sense told me to roll him in a gully and pile rocks on top of him and put him out of my mind. That package he was carryin' made the difference. It's the reason I brought him back.'
Olsen touched the parcel as he might have touched the clothing of a cholera patient. With thumb and forefinger he unfolded the flannel envelope. For some time he sat gazing at the gold watch and the string of milky pearls. His attention returned to the watch and he sat gazing bleakly at the curious inscription on the face cover.
At last the sheriff opened the buckskin pouch and emptied the contents on the table. He nudged the earrings with their glittering little diamonds over toward the pearls. The gold coins he counted and stacked neatly beside the greenbacks. When he had thoroughly memorized every detail of every article, he picked up the watch and studied it some more. 'Is this all?'
'Except for this.' Gault showed him the small band of gold. 'I didn't think you'd mind if I kept it. It belonged to my wife.'
The sheriff's mouth came open, but for the moment he did not speak. He slowly digested the meaning of the ring as a silent wall of hostility built up between them.
Doc Doolie appeared in the doorway, and the sheriff asked, 'Did you look at Colly?'
'I looked at him. Been dead about a day, best I could tell. Skull busted in—looks like a horse kicked him.' The little doc came into the room, took a kitchen chair and sat at the end of the sheriff's table. Gault stared at him so steadily and so hard that Doolie began to frown.
For a moment Gault had been startled to see the doc standing there. A small, slightly stooped figure. There was a shadow of such a figure still lodged in a back chamber of his mind. For the best part of three days he had been wondering about the man who had come to the Garnett farm with the sheriff on the night of the storm. That man had been Dr. Marvin Doolie.
The doc was beginning to be irritated by Gault's unblinking staring. 'If you got somethin' in your craw, mister,' he snapped, 'spit it out.'
'I was wonderin',' Gault said bluntly, 'what you and the sheriff was doin' at the Garnett place in the middle of the night.' Gault had to count back in his mind. How long had it been? 'Three nights ago.'
Doolie came stiffly erect and glanced at Olsen. But the sheriff folded his hands placidly and said, 'Mr. Gault has got a suspicious mind, Doc. And I guess we can't blame him too much. For nearly a year he's been runnin' in hard luck, and then, to set things off, he went and got hisself shot by Shorty Pike. Accident, of course.'
Doolie nodded. 'Shorty told us about that. Misunderstandin' about some Garnett cows, wasn't it? Hard luck —but that's the kind of thing that happens when you stray on the other fellow's range.'
'Maybe,' Gault said dryly. 'Whatever the reason, I did get myself shot. Now I'm wonderin' why you didn't bother to come and have a look at me, long as you was on the place anyway. You
Doolie flushed pink and glanced at the sheriff for guidance. 'And a first-class doc at that,' Olsen said blandly. If you'd needed lookin' at, he would of looked at you. But Miss Esther said you was doin' fine and there wasn't no use botherin' you.'
Gault smiled at them. 'I see. But you still haven't said what you were doin' on the prairie in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm.'
Doolie smiled as though the effort pained him. 'Maybe that's because it's none of your business, Mr. Gault. However…' He glanced at the sheriff, and Olsen nodded ever so slightly. 'However, I don't mind tellin' you. A hand over at Circle-R headquarters got hisself busted up when a horse fell on him, and I was tendin' him. On the way back to town there was the thunderstorm, so we stopped by the Garnett place to dry out.'
