“Lay down on the bed if you want to,” Scallen said.
“Why don’t you sleep?” Kidd asked. “I’ll hold the shotgun.”
The deputy moved one of the straight chairs near to the door and the other to the side of the table opposite the bed. Then he sat down, resting the shotgun on the table so that it pointed directly at Jim Kidd sitting on the edge of the bed near the window.
He gazed vacantly outside. A patch of dismal sky showed above the frame buildings across the way, but he was not sitting close enough to look directly down onto the street. He said, indifferently, “I think it’s going to rain.”
There was a silence, and then Scallen said, “Jim, I don’t have anything against you personally... this is what I get paid for, but I just want it understood that if you start across the seven feet between us, I’m going to pull both triggers at once — without first asking you to stop. That clear?”
Kidd looked at the deputy marshal, then his eyes drifted out the window again. “It’s kinda cold, too.” He rubbed his hands together and the three chain links rattled against each other. “The window’s open a crack. Can I close it?”
Scallen’s grip tightened on the shotgun and he brought the barrel up, though he wasn’t aware of it. “If you can reach it from where you’re sitting.”
Kidd looked at the window sill and said without reaching toward it, “Too far.”
“All right,” Scallen said, rising. “Lay back on the bed.” He worked his gun belt around so that now the Colt was on his left hip.
Kidd went back slowly, smiling. “You don’t take any chances, do you? Where’s your sporting blood?”
“Down in Bisbee with my wife and three youngsters,” Scallen told him without smiling, and moved around the table.
There were no grips on the window frame. Standing with his side to the window, facing the man on the bed, he put the heel of his hand on the bottom ledge of the frame and shoved down hard. The window banged shut and with the slam he saw Jim Kidd kicking up off of his back, his body straining to rise without his hands to help. Momentarily, Scallen hesitated and his finger tensed on the triggers. Kidd’s feet were on the floor, his body swinging up and his head down to lunge from the bed. Scallen took one step and brought his knee up hard against Kidd’s face.
The outlaw went back across the bed, his head striking the wall. He lay there with his eyes open looking at Scallen.
“Feel better now, Jim?”
Kidd brought his hands up to his mouth, working the jaw around. “Well, I had to try you out,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d shoot.”
“But you know I will the next time.”
For a few minutes Kidd remained motionless. Then he began to pull himself straight. “I just want to sit up.”
Behind the table, Scallen said, “Help yourself.” He watched Kidd stare out the window.
Then, “How much do you make, Marshal?” Kidd asked the question abruptly.
“I don’t think it’s any of your business.”
“What difference does it make?”
Scallen hesitated. “A hundred and fifty a month,” he said, finally, “some expenses, and a dollar bounty for every arrest against a Bisbee ordinance in the town limits.”
Kidd shook his head sympathetically. “And you got a wife and three kids.”
“Well, it’s more than a cowhand makes.”
“But you’re not a cowhand.”
“I’ve worked my share of beef.”
“Forty a month and keep, huh?” Kidd laughed.
“That’s right, forty a month,” Scallen said. He felt awkward. “How much do you make?”
Kidd grinned. When he smiled he looked very young, hardly out of his teens. “Name a month,” he said. “It varies.”
“But you’ve made a lot of money.”
“Enough. I can buy what I want.”
“What are you going to be wanting the next five years?”
“You’re pretty sure we’re going to Yuma.”
“And you’re pretty sure we’re not,” Scallen said. “Well, I’ve got two train passes and a shotgun that says we are. What’ve you got?”
Kidd smiled. “You’ll see.” Then he said right after it, his tone changing, “What made you join the law?”
“The money,” Scallen answered, and felt foolish as he said it. But he went on, “I was working for a spread over by the Pantano Wash when Old Nana broke loose and raised hell up the Santa Rosa Valley. The army was going around in circles, so the Pima County marshal got up a bunch to help out and we tracked Apaches almost all spring. The marshal and I got along fine, so he offered me a deputy job if I wanted it.” He wanted to say that he had started for seventy-five and worked up to the one hundred and fifty, but he didn’t.
“And then someday you’ll get to be marshal and make two hundred.”
“Maybe.”
“And then one night a drunk cowhand you’ve never seen will be tearing up somebody’s saloon and you’ll go in to arrest him and he’ll drill you with a lucky shot before you get your gun out.”
“So you’re telling me I’m crazy.”
“If you don’t already know it.”
Scallen took his hand off the shotgun and pulled tobacco and paper from his shirt pocket and began rolling a cigarette. “Have you figured out yet what my price is?”
Kidd looked startled, momentarily, but the grin returned. “No, I haven’t. Maybe you come higher than I thought.”
Scallen scratched a match across the table, lighted the cigarette, then threw it to the floor, between Kidd’s boots. “You don’t have enough money, Jim.”
Kidd shrugged, then reached down for the cigarette. “You’ve treated me pretty good. I just wanted to make it easy on you.”
The sun came into the room after a while. Weakly at first, cold and hazy. Then it warmed and brightened and cast an oblong patch of light between the bed and the table. The morning wore on slowly because there was nothing to do and each man sat restlessly thinking about somewhere else, though it was a restlessness within and it showed on neither of them.
The deputy rolled cigarettes for the outlaw and himself and most of the time they smoked in silence. Once Kidd asked him what time the train left. He told him shortly after three, but Kidd made no comment.
Scallen went to the window and looked out at the narrow rutted road that was Commercial Street. He pulled a watch from his vest pocket and looked at it. It was almost noon, yet there were few people about. He wondered about this and asked himself if it was unnaturally quiet for a Saturday noon in Contention... or if it were just his nerves...
He studied the man standing under the wooden awning across the street, leaning idly against a support post with his thumbs hooked in his belt and his flat-crowned hat on the back of his head. There was something familiar about him. And each time Scallen had gone to the window — a few times during the past hour — the man had been there.
He glanced at Jim Kidd lying across the bed, then looked out the window in time to see another man moving up next to the one at the post. They stood together for the space of a minute before the second man turned a horse from the tie rail, swung up and rode off down the street.
The man at the post watched him go and tilted his hat against the sun glare. And then it registered. With the hat low on his forehead Scallen saw him again as he had that morning. The man lying in the arm chair... as if asleep.
He saw his wife, then, and the three youngsters and he could almost feel the little girl sitting on his lap where she had climbed up to kiss him good-bye, and he had promised to bring her something from Tucson. He didn’t know why they had come to him all of a sudden. And after he had put them out of his mind, since there was no room now, there was an upset feeling inside as if he had swallowed something that would not go down all the way. It made his heart beat a little faster.