Gyp went gingerly through the cowboys grouped at the door and vanished.
I didn’t like this public stuff. I’d rather do my questioning on the side. But to try that here would probably call for a showdown with Peery and his men, and I wasn’t quite ready for that.
“What do you know about the killing, Bardell?” I began.
“Nothing,” he said emphatically, and then went on to tell me what he knew. “Nisbet and I were in the back room, counting the day’s receipts. Chick was straightening the bar up. Nobody else was in here. It was about half-past one this morning, maybe.
“We heard the shot—right out front, and all run out there, of course. Chick was closest, so he got there first. Slim was laying in the street—dead.”
“And what happened after that?”
“Nothing. We brought him in here. Adderly and Doc Haley—who lives right across the street—and the Jew next door had heard the shot, too, and they came out and—and that’s all there was to it.”
I turned to Gyp.
He spit in a cuspidor and hunched his shoulders.
“Bardell’s give it all to you.”
“Didn’t see anything before or after except what Bardell has said?”
“Nothin’.”
“Don’t know who shot him?”
“Nope.”
I saw Adderly’s white mustache near the front of the room, and I put him on the stand next. He couldn’t contribute anything. He had heard the shot, had jumped out of bed, put on pants and shoes, and had arrived in time to see Chick kneeling beside the dead man. He hadn’t seen anything Bardell hadn’t mentioned.
Dr. Haley had not arrived by the time I was through with Adderly, and I wasn’t ready to open on Nisbet yet. Nobody else there seemed to know anything.
“Be back in a minute,” I said, and went through the cowboys at the door to the street.
The Jew was giving his joint a much-needed cleaning.
“Good work,” I praised him; “it needed it.”
He climbed down from the counter on which he had been standing to reach the ceiling. The walls and floor were already comparatively clean.
“I not think it was so dirty,” he grinned, showing his empty gums, “but when the sheriff come in to eat and make faces at my place, what am I going to do but clean him up?”
“Know anything about the killing last night?”
“Sure, I know. I am in my bed, and I hear that shot. I jump out of my bed, grab that shotgun, and run to the door. There is that Slim Vogel in the street, and that Chick Orr on his knees alongside him. I stick my head out. There is Mr. Bardell and that Nisbet standing in their door.
“Mr. Bardell say, ‘How is he, Chick?’
“That Chick Orr, he say, ‘He’s dead enough.’
“That Nisbet, he does not say anything, but he turn around and go back into the place. And then comes the doctor and Mr. Adderly, and I go out, and after the doctor looks at him and says he is dead, we carry him into Mr. Bardell’s place and put him on those tables.”
That was all the Jew knew. I returned to the Border Palace. Dr. Haley—a fussy little man whose nervous fingers played with his lips—was there.
The sound of the shot had awakened him, he said, but he had seen nothing beyond what the others had already told me. The bullet was a .38. Death had been instantaneous.
So much for that.
I sat on a corner of a pool table, facing Mark Nisbet. Feet shuffled on the floor behind me and I could feel tension making.
“What can you tell me, Nisbet?” I asked.
He didn’t look up from the floor. No muscle moved in his face except those that shaped his mouth to his words.
“Nothing that is likely to help,” he said, picking his words slowly and carefully. “You were in in the afternoon and saw Slim, Wheelan, Keefe and I playing. Well, the game went on like that. He won a lot of money—or he seemed to think it was a lot—as long as we played poker. But Keefe left before midnight, and Wheelan shortly after. Nobody else came in the game, so we were kind of short-handed for poker. We quit it and played some high-card. I cleaned Vogel—got his last nickel. It was about one o’clock when he left, say half an hour before he was shot.”
“You and Vogel get along pretty well?”
The gambler’s eyes switched up to mine, turned to the floor again.
“You know better than that. You heard him riding me ragged. Well, he kept that up—maybe was a little rawer toward the last.”
“And you let him ride?”
“I did just that. I make my living out of cards, not out of picking fights.”
“There was no trouble over the table, then?”
“I didn’t say that. There was trouble. He made a break for his gun after I cleaned him.”
“And you?”
“I shaded him on the draw—took his gun—unloaded it—gave it back to him—told him to beat it. He went.”
“No shooting in here?”
“Not a shot.”
“And you didn’t see him again until after he had been killed?”
“That’s right.”
I got down from my perch on the table and walked over to Nisbet, holding out one hand.
“Let me look at your gun.”
He slid it swiftly out of his clothes—butt-first—into my hand. A .38 S. & W., loaded in all six chambers.
“Don’t lose it,” I said as I handed it back to him, “I may want it later.”
A roar from Peery turned me around. As I turned I let my hands go into my coat pockets to rest on the .32 toys.
Peery’s right hand was near his neck, within striking distance of the gun I knew he had under his vest. Spread out behind him, his men were as ready for action as he. Their hands hovered close to the bulges that showed where their weapons were packed.
“Maybe that’s a deputy sheriff’s idea of what had ought to be done,” Peery was bellowing, “but it ain’t
