Chinaman. And—and I just went plumb loco, I reckon.”
“Any of it left in your system?”
“Hell, no, chief! I’d give a leg if none of it had never happened!”
“Then suppose you stop this foolishness and sit down and talk sense. Are you and the girl still on the outs?”
They were, most emphatically, most profanely.
“You’re a big boob!” I told him. “She’s a stranger out here, and homesick for her New York. I could talk her language and knew the people she knew. That’s all there was—”
“But that ain’t the big point, chief! Any woman that would pull a—”
“Bunk! It was a shabby trick, right enough. But a woman who’ll pull a trick like that for you when you are in a jam is worth a million an ounce, and you’d know it if you had anything to know anything with. Now you run out and find this Clio person, and bring her back with you, and no nonsense!”
He pretended he was going reluctantly. But I heard her voice when he knocked on her door. And they let me lay there in my bed of pain for one solid hour before they remembered me. They came in walking so close together that they were stumbling over each other’s feet.
“Now let’s talk business,” I grumbled. “What day is this?”
“Monday.”
“Did you get the Jew?”
“I done that thing,” Milk River said, dividing the one chair with the girl. “He’s over to the county seat now—went over with the others. He swallowed that self-defense bait, and told me all about it. How’d you ever figure it out, chief?”
“Figure what out?”
“That the Jew killed poor old Slim. He says Slim come in there that night, woke him up, ate a dollar and ten cents’ worth of grub on him, and then dared him to try and collect. In the argument that follows, Slim goes for his gun, and the Jew gets scared and shoots him—after which Slim obligingly staggers out o’ doors to die. I can see all that clear enough, but how’d you hit on it?”
“I oughtn’t give away my professional secrets, but I will this once. The Jew was cleaning house when I went in to ask him for what he knew about the killing, and he had scrubbed his floor before he started on the ceiling. If that meant anything at all, it meant that he had had to scrub his floor, and was making the cleaning general to cover it up. So maybe Slim had bled some on that floor.
“Starting from that point, the rest came easily enough. Slim leaving the Border Palace in a wicked frame of mind, broke after his earlier winning, humiliated by Nisbet’s triumph in the gun-pulling, soured further by the stuff he had been drinking all day. Red Wheelan had reminded him that afternoon of the time the Jew had followed him to the ranch to collect two bits. What more likely than he’d carry his meanness into the Jew’s shack? That Slim hadn’t been shot with the shotgun didn’t mean anything. I never had any faith in that shotgun from the first. If the Jew had been depending on that for his protection, he wouldn’t have put it in plain sight, and under a shelf, where it wasn’t easy to get out. I figured the shotgun was there for moral effect, and he’d have another one stowed out of sight for use.
“Another point you folks missed was that Nisbet seemed to be telling a straight story—not at all the sort of tale he’d have told if he were guilty. Bardell’s and Chick’s weren’t so good, but the chances are they really thought Nisbet had killed Slim, and were trying to cover him up.”
Milk River grinned at me, pulling the girl closer with the one arm that was around her.
“You ain’t so downright dumb,” he said. “Clio done warned me the first time she seen you that I’d best not try to run no sandies on you.”
A faraway look came into his pale eyes.
“Think of all them folks that were killed and maimed and jailed—all over a dollar and ten cents. It’s a good thing Slim didn’t eat five dollars’ worth of grub. He’d of depopulated the State of Arizona complete!”
Dead Yellow Women
I
She was sitting straight and stiff in one of the Old Man’s chairs when he called me into his office—a tall girl of perhaps twenty-four, broad-shouldered, deep-bosomed, in mannish grey clothes. That she was Oriental showed only in the black shine of her bobbed hair, in the pale yellow of her unpowdered skin, and in the fold of her upper lids at the outer eye-corners, half hidden by the dark rims of her spectacles. But there was no slant to her eyes, her nose was almost aquiline, and she had more chin than Mongolians usually have. She was modern Chinese-American from the flat heels of her tan shoes to the crown of her untrimmed felt hat.
I knew her before the Old Man introduced me. The San Francisco papers had been full of her affairs for a couple of days. They had printed photographs and diagrams, interviews, editorials, and more or less expert opinions from various sources. They had gone back to 1912 to remember the stubborn fight of the local Chinese—mostly from Fokien and Kwangtung, where democratic ideas and hatred of Manchus go together—to have her father kept out of the United States, to which he had scooted when the Manchu rule flopped. The papers had recalled the excitement in Chinatown when Shan Fang was allowed to land—insulting placards had been hung in the streets, an unpleasant reception had been planned.
But Shan Fang had fooled the Cantonese. Chinatown had never seen him. He had taken his daughter and his gold—presumably the accumulated profits of a lifetime of provincial misrule—down to San Mateo County, where he had built what the papers described as a palace on the edge of the Pacific. There he had lived and died in a
