The man with her was range country—a slim lad in the early twenties, not very tall, with pale blue eyes that were startling in so dark-tanned a face. His features were a bit too perfect in their clean-cut regularity.
“So you’re the new deputy sheriff?” the sallow man questioned the back of my head.
Somebody had kept my secret right out in the open! There was no use trying to cover up.
“Yes.” I hid my annoyance under a grin that took in him and the diners. “But I’ll trade my star right now for that room and water we were talking about.”
He took me through the dining-room and upstairs to a board-walled room in the rear second floor, said, “This is it,” and left me.
I did what I could with the water in a pitcher on the washstand to free myself from the white grime I had accumulated. Then I dug a grey shirt and a suit of whipcords out of my bags, and holstered my gun under my left shoulder, where it wouldn’t be a secret.
In each side pocket of my coat I stowed a new .32 automatic—small, snub-nosed affairs that weren’t much better than toys. Their smallness let me carry them where they’d be close to my hands without advertising the fact that the gun under my shoulder wasn’t all my arsenal.
The dining-room was empty when I went downstairs again. The sallow pessimist who ran the place stuck his head out of a door.
“Any chance of getting something to eat?” I asked.
“Hardly any,” jerking his head toward a sign that said:
Meals 6 to 8 a.m., 12 to 2 and 5 to 7 p.m.
“You can grub up at the Jew’s—if you ain’t particular,” he added sourly.
I went out, across the porch that was too hot for idlers, and into the street that was empty for the same reason. Huddled against the wall of a large one-story adobe building, which had Border Palace painted all across its front, I found the Jew’s.
It was a small shack—three wooden walls stuck against the adobe wall of the Border Palace—jammed with a lunch counter, eight stools, a stove, a handful of cooking implements, half the flies in the world, an iron cot behind a half-drawn burlap curtain, and the proprietor. The interior had once been painted white. It was a smoky grease-color now, except where homemade signs said:
Meals At All Hours. No Credit.
and gave the prices of various foods. These signs were a fly-specked yellow-grey.
The proprietor wasn’t a Jew—an Armenian or something of the sort, I thought. He was a small man, old, scrawny, dark-skinned, wrinkled and cheerful.
“You the new sheriff?” he asked, and when he grinned I saw he had no teeth.
“Deputy,” I admitted, “and hungry. I’ll eat anything you’ve got that won’t bite back, and that won’t take long to get ready.”
“Sure!” He turned to his stove and began banging pans around. “We need sheriffs,” he said over his shoulder. “Sure, we need them!”
“Somebody been picking on you?”
He showed his empty gums in another grin.
“Nobody pick on me—I tell you that!” He flourished a stringy hand at a sugar barrel under the shelves behind his counter. “I fix them decidedly!”
A shotgun butt stuck out of the barrel. I pulled it out: a double-barrel shotgun with the barrels sawed off short: a mean weapon close up.
I slid it back into its resting place as the old man began thumping dishes down in front of me.
II
The food inside me and a cigarette burning, I went out into the crooked street again. From the Border Palace came the clicking of pool balls. I followed the sound through the door.
In a large room, four men were leaning over a couple of pool tables, while five or six more watched them from chairs along the wall. On one side of the room was an oak bar, with nobody behind it. Through an open door in the rear came the sound of shuffling cards.
A big man whose paunch was dressed in a white vest, over a shirt in the bosom of which a diamond sparkled, came toward me; his triple-chinned red face expanding into the professionally jovial smile of a confidence man.
“I’m Bardell,” he greeted me, stretching out a fat and shiny-nailed hand on which more diamonds glittered. “This is my joint. I’m glad to know you, sheriff! By God, we need you, and I hope you can spend a lot of your time here. These waddies”—and he chuckled, nodding at the pool players—“cut up rough on me sometimes, and I’m glad there’s going to be somebody around who can handle them.”
I let him pump my hand up and down.
“Let me make you known to the boys,” he went on, turning with one arm across my shoulders. “These are Circle H.A.R. riders”—waving some of his rings at the pool players—“except this Milk River hombre, who, being a peeler, kind of looks down on ordinary hands.”
The Milk River hombre was the slender youth who had sat beside the girl in the Canyon House dining-room. His companions were young—though not quite so young as he—sun-marked, wind-marked, pigeontoed in high-heeled boots. Buck Small was sandy and pop-eyed; Smith was sandy and short; Dunne was a rangy Irishman.
The men watching the game were mostly laborers from the Orilla Colony, or hands from some of the smaller ranches in the neighborhood. There were two exceptions: Chick Orr, short, thick-bodied, heavy-armed, with the shapeless nose, battered ears, gold front teeth and gnarled hands of a pugilist; and Gyp Rainey, a slack-chinned, ratty individual whose whole front spelled cocaine.
Conducted by Bardell, I went into the back room to meet the poker players. There were only four of them. The other six card tables, the keno outfit, and the dice table were idle.
One of the players was the big-eared drunk who had made the welcoming speech at the hotel. Slim Vogel was the name. He was a
