After Doc and Obe Spencer stripped the body, Boze and I went through the dead man’s clothing. There was no identification of any kind; if he’d been carrying any before he died, somebody had filched it. No wallet or purse, either. All he had in his pockets was the stub of a lead pencil, a half-used book of matches, a short-six seegar, a nearly empty Bull Durham sack, three wheatstraw papers, a two-bit piece, an old Spanish real coin, and a dog-eared and stained copy of a Beadle dime novel called Captain Dick Talbot, King of the Road; Or, The Black-Hoods of Shasta.
“Drifter, all right,” Boze said when we were done. “Wouldn’t you say, Carl?”
“Sure seems that way.”
“But even drifters have more belongings than this. Shaving gear, extra clothes — at least that much.”
“You’d think so,” I said. “Might be he had a carpetbag or the like and it’s hidden somewhere along the river bank.”
“Either that or it was stolen. But we can go take a look when Doc gets through studying on the body.”
I fished out the bronze medal I’d found in the grass earlier and showed it to him. “Picked this up while you and Sam were getting the ladder,” I said.
“Belonged to the hanging man, maybe.”
“Maybe. But it seems familiar, somehow. I can’t quite place where I’ve seen one like it.”
Boze turned the medal over in his hand. “Doesn’t ring any bells for me,” he said.
“Well, you don’t see many around here, and the one I recollect was also a Benjamin Harrison. Could be coincidence, I suppose. Must be if that fella died by his own hand.”
“If he did.”
“Boze, you think it was suicide?”
“I’m hoping it was,” he said, but he didn’t sound any more convinced than I was. “I don’t like the thought of a murderer running around loose in Tule River.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
Doc didn’t have much to tell us when he came out. The hanging man had been shot once a long time ago — he had bullet scars on his right shoulder and back — and one foot was missing a pair of toes. There was also a fresh bruise on the left side of his head, above the ear.
Boze asked, “Is it a big bruise, Doc?”
“Big enough.”
“Could somebody have hit him hard enough to knock him out?”
“And then hung him afterward? Well, it could’ve happened that way. His neck’s full of rope burns and lacerations, the way it would be if somebody hauled him up over that tree limb.”
“Can you reckon how long he’s been dead?”
“Last night some time. Best I can do.”
Boze and I headed back to the livery stable. The town had come awake by this time. There were plenty of people on the boardwalks and Main Street was crowded with horses and farm wagons; any day now I expected to see somebody with one of those newfangled motor cars. The hanging man was getting plenty of lip service, on Main Street and among the crowd that had gathered back of the stable to gawk at the black oak and trample the grass.
Nothing much goes on in a small town like Tule River, and such as a hanging was bound to stir up folks’ imaginations. There hadn’t been a killing in the area in four or five years. And damned little mystery since the town was founded back in the days when General Vallejo owned most of the land hereabouts and it was the Mexican flag, not the Stars and Stripes, that flew over California.
None of the crowd had found anything in the way of evidence on the river bank; they would have told us if they had. None of them knew anything about the hanging man, either. That included Joel Pennywell, who had come over from his fixit shop next door. He’d closed up around 6:30 last night, he said, and gone straight on home.
After a time Boze and I moved down to the river’s edge and commenced a search among the tule grass and trees that grew along there. The day had warmed some; the wind was down and the sun had melted off the last of the frost. A few of the others joined in with us, eager and boisterous, like it was an Easter egg hunt. It was too soon for the full impact of what had happened to settle in on most folks; it hadn’t occurred to them yet that maybe they ought to be concerned.
A few minutes before ten o’clock, while we were combing the west-side bank up near the Main Street Basin, and still not finding anything, the Whipple youngster came running to tell us that Roberto Ortega and Sam McCullough wanted to see us at the livery stable. Roberto owned a dairy ranch just south of town and claimed to be a descendant of a Spanish conquistador. He was also an honest man, which was why he was in town that morning. He’d found a saddled horse grazing on his pastureland and figured it for a runaway from Sam’s livery, so he’d brought it in. But Sam had never seen the animal, an old swaybacked roan, until Roberto showed up with it. Nor had he ever seen the battered carpetbag that was tied behind the cantle of the cheap Mexican saddle.
It figured to be the drifter’s horse and carpetbag, sure enough. But whether the drifter had turned the animal loose himself, or somebody else had, we had no way of knowing. As for the carpetbag, it didn’t tell us any more about the hanging man than the contents of his pockets. Inside it were some extra clothes, an old Colt Dragoon revolver, shaving tackle, a woman’s garter, and nothing at all that might identify the owner.
Sam took the horse, and Boze and I took the carpetbag over to Obe Spencer’s to put with the rest of the hanging man’s belongings. On the way we held a conference. Fact was, a pair of grain barges were due upriver from San Francisco at eleven, for loading and return. I had three men working for me, but none of them handled the paperwork; I was going to have to spend some time at the feed mill that day, whether I wanted to or not. Which is how it is when you have part-time deputies who are also full-time businessmen. It was a fact of small-town life we’d had to learn to live with.
We worked it out so that Boze would continue making inquiries while I went to work at the mill. Then we’d switch off at one o’clock so he could give his wife Ellie, who was minding the mercantile, some help with customers and with the drummers who always flocked around with Christmas wares right after Thanksgiving.
We also decided that if neither of us turned up any new information by five o’clock — or even if we did — we would ring up the country seat and make a full report to the sheriff. Not that Joe Perkins would be able to find out anything we couldn’t. He was a fat-cat political appointee, and about all he knew how to find was pig’s knuckles and beer. But we were bound to do it by the oath of office we’d taken.
We split up at the funeral parlor and I went straight to the mill. My foreman, Gene Kleinschmidt, had opened up; I’d given him a set of keys and he knew to go ahead and unlock the place if I wasn’t around. The barges came in twenty minutes after I did, and I had to hustle to get the paperwork ready that they would be carrying back down to San Francisco — bills of lading, requisitions for goods from three different companies.
I finished up a little past noon and went out onto the dock to watch the loading. One of the bargemen was talking to Gene. And while he was doing it, he kept flipping something up and down in his hand — a small gold nugget. It was the kind of things folks made into a watch fob, or kept as a good-luck charm.
And that was how I remembered where I’d seen the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Medal. Eight months or so back a newcomer to the area, a man named Jubal Parsons, had come in to buy some sacks of chicken feed. When he’d reached into his pocket to pay the bill he had accidentally come out with the medal. “Good-luck charm,” he said, and let me glance at it before putting it away again.
Back inside my office I sat down and thought about Jubal Parsons. He was a tenant farmer — had taken over a small farm owned by the Siler brothers out near Willow Creek about nine months ago. Big fellow, over six feet tall, and upwards of 220 pounds. Married to a blonde woman named Greta, a few years younger than him and pretty as they come. Too pretty, some said; a few of the womenfolk, Ellie Bozeman included, thought she had the look and mannerisms of a tramp.