VIII
Yancey put his question wherever he came upon a little group of three or four lounging on saloon or store porch or street corner. “How did Pegler come to die?” The effect of the question always was the same. One minute they were standing sociably, gossiping, rolling cigarettes; citizenry at ease in their shirtsleeves. Yancey would stroll up with his light, graceful step, his white sombrero with the two bullet holes in its crown, his Prince Albert, his fine high-heeled boots. He would ask his question. As though by magic the group dispersed, faded, vanished.
He visited Coroner Hefner, of Hefner’s Furniture Store and Undertaking Parlor. That gentleman was seated, idle for the moment, in his combination office and laboratory. “Listen, Louie. How did Pegler come to die?”
Hefner’s sun-kissed and whisky-rouged countenance became noticeably less roseate. His pale blue pop-eyes stared at Yancey in dismay. “Are you going around town askin’ that there question, or just me?”
“Oh—around.”
Hefner leaned forward. He looked about him furtively. He lowered his voice. “Yancey, you and your missus, you bought your furniture and so on here in my place, and what’s more, you paid cash for it. I want you as a customer, see, but not in the other branch of my business. Don’t go round askin’ that there question.”
“Think I’d better not, h’m?”
“I know you better not.”
“Why not?”
The versatile Hefner made a little gesture of despair, rose, vanished by way of his own back door, and did not return.
Yancey strolled out into the glaring sunshine of Pawhuska Avenue. Indians, Mexicans, cowboys, solid citizens lounged in whatever of shade could be found in the hot, dry, dusty street. On the corner stood Pete Pitchlyn talking to the Spaniard, Estevan Miro. They were the gossips of the town, these two. This Yancey knew. News not only of the town, but of the Territory—not alone of the Territory but of the whole brilliant burning Southwest, from Texas through New Mexico into Arizona, sieved through this pair. Miro not only knew; he sold his knowledge. The Spaniard made a gay splash of color in the drab prairie street. He wore a sash of purple wound round his middle in place of a belt and his neckerchief was of scarlet. His face was tiny, like the face of a child, and pointed; his hair was thick, blue-black, and lay in definite strands, coarse and glossy, like fine wire. His two upper incisor teeth were separated by, perhaps, the width of an eighth of an inch. He was very quiet, and his movements appeared slow because of their feline grace. Eternally he rolled cigarettes in the cowboy fashion, with exquisite deftness, manipulating the tobacco and brown paper magically between the thumb and two fingers of his right hand. The smoke of these he inhaled, consuming a cigarette in three voracious pulls. The street corner on which he lounged was ringed with limp butts.
Pete Pitchlyn, famous Indian scout of a bygone day, has grown potbellied and flabby, now that the Indians were rotting on their reservations and there was no more work for him to do. He was a vast fellow, his height of six feet three now balanced by his bulk. His wife, a full-blood Cherokee squaw, squatted on the ground in the shade of a nearby frame shack about ten feet away, as befits a wife whose husband is conversing with another male. On the ground all around her, like a litter of puppies tumbling about a bitch, were their half-breed children. Late in his hazardous career as a scout on the plains Pitchlyn had been shot in the left heel by a poisoned Indian arrow. It was thought he would surely die. This failing, it was then thought he would lose that leg. But a combination of unlimited whisky, a constitution made up of chilled steel, and a determination that those varmints should never kill him, somehow caused him not only to live but to keep the poison-ravaged leg clinging to his carcase. Stubbornly he had refused to have it amputated, and by a miracle it had failed to send its poison through the rest of that iron frame. But the leg had withered and shrunk until now it was fully twelve inches shorter than the sound limb. He refused to use crutches or the clumsy mechanical devices of the day, and got about with astonishing speed and agility. When he stood on the sound leg he was, with his magnificent breadth of shoulders, a giant of six feet three. But occasionally the sound leg tired, and he would rest it by slumping for a moment on the other. He then became a runt five feet high.
The story was told of him that when he first came to Osage in the rush of the Run he, with hundreds of others, sought the refreshment of the Montezuma Saloon, which hospice—a mere tent—had opened its bar and stood ready for business as the earliest homesteader drew his red-eyed sweating horse up before the first town site to which claim was laid in the settlement of Osage (at that time—fully a month before—a piece of prairie as bare and flat as the palm of your hand). The crowd around the rough pine slab of the hastily improvised bar was parched, wild eyed, clamorous. The bartenders, hardened importations though they were, were soon ready to drop with fatigue. Even in this milling mob the towering figure of Pete Pitchlyn was one to command attention. Above the clamor he ordered his drink—three fingers of whisky. It was a long time coming. He had had a hard day. He leaned one elbow on the bar, while shouts emerged as croaks from parched throats, and glasses and bottles whirled all about him. Dead tired, he shifted his weight from the sound right leg to the withered left, and conversed halfheartedly with the thirsty
