"Not a pal, exactly. But we may have the same enemies."
The barkeep grinned and drew himself a beer. It was clear that any enemy of Olsen's was a friend of the barkeep's. "There's Harry Wompler, over in the corner, but don't be surprised if he won't talk to you. Harry ain't been none too sociable since he lost his deputy's badge. Put great store in that nickel-plated star, Harry did, before Grady Olsen took it away from him."
The former deputy sheriff of Standard County lay facedown across the table, his head on his arms, snoring lustily. Gault put a beer on the table and pulled up a chair. "I want to talk to you, Wompler."
Harry snorted and grunted and went on with his snoring.
"About Grady Olsen." Gault shook him gently. Wompler's head dangled lifelessly on his scrawny neck. He snored on.
"And Wolf Garnett."
Harry didn't budge. Gault shoved the full schooner toward him and said, "I brought you a beer."
A muscle alongside the former deputy's neck began to twitch. He lifted his head and stared blearily at Gault. He pulled the beer to him, with all the tenderness of a new mother holding her first child, and he fumbled it to his mouth and drank steadily until the heavy glass mug was empty.
"Who are you?"
"Frank Gault. An old line rider called Yorty told me to look you up when I got to New Boston. I'm tryin' to find out about Wolf Garnett."
"Find out what?"
Gault couldn't bring himself to talk about Martha in a place like the Day and Night. "It's personal." Then, because Wompler seemed to be drifting back to sleep, he asked, "Can I buy you another beer?"
Harry nodded heavily, as if he were carrying the weight of the world on the back of his neck. "Make it whiskey."
The barkeep knew his customers well. He had already set two glasses and a full bottle on the table. The former deputy forced himself erect, sloshed some whiskey into a glass and downed it. "Nothin' to tell," he said haltingly, like a crippled man learning to walk. "About Wolf Garnett. He's dead."
"About the sheriff then?"
Wompler stared at him for a full minute without making a sound. He was a youngish man, still in his twenties. Once he might have been considered handsome, but a steady diet of the Day and Night's raw corn whiskey had taken care of that. His lower lip protruded curiously, giving him a pouting look. His face bristled with a week's growth of beard, but it was round and strangely youthful. He looked, Gault thought, to himself, like a sixty-year-old baby with pouchy eyes. "Why," he asked, "do you want to know about the sheriff?"
"I think he's mixed up somehow with the Wolf Garnett bunch. What's left of the bunch, anyway."
Wompler stared at him, blinking his watery eyes. Suddenly he began laughing. The sound was eerily hollow coming out of that bearded baby face.
Gault's own voice turned cold. "I didn't know I'd said somethin' funny."
"You did, though. I didn't think there was a man in Standard County—or Texas, for that matter—that didn't know about Grady Olsen and the Garnetts." He poured himself another drink and Gault noticed that his hands were steadier now.
"Tell me about them."
"Simplest thing in the world. For four years Olsen's been makin' moon eyes at Esther Garnett. Him old enough to be her pa. And then some."
Gault stared at the derelict in amazement. Since the night of the thunderstorm he had often tried to explain the sheriff's odd behavior—but this possibility had not occurred to him. "Olsen's in love with Miss Garnett?"
"Like a moon-eyed calf." Harry helped himself to another drink. "It's the reason he fired me."
The story was taking some unexpected turns. Grinning loosely, Wompler wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "Me and Esther—I guess ever'body in the county knowed she took a shine to me. That's why he had to get me out of the way. Took away my badge." The old baby face turned ugly. "I guess that ain't the way you heard it, though."
"I heard that Olsen let you go for bein' too thick with a gang of rustlers."
Wompler's eyes were losing their focus. "Believe anything you please. It's all the same to me."
Gault sat for a moment digesting what he had heard. "Do you know a stock detective named Del Torgason?"
"Torgason?" Wompler's tongue was beginning to thicken. "Torgason and me are the only ones in Standard County that'll talk back to Olsen."
"Why would Torgason want to make an enemy of the sheriff?"
"It ain't that he wants to. He just don't give a damn. The big men in this part of Texas are the cowmen, and they're the ones that pay his salary. Not even Olsen would go out of his way to rile a cowman."
"I was beginning to get the feelin' that everybody in the county kowtowed to Olsen. The cowmen don't?"
"Cowmen," the former lawman smiled slackly, "don't kowtow to anybody."
"Where can I find Torgason?"
Wompler sensed that the period of free liquor was about to end. Quickly, he sloshed himself another drink. "In the Association office, if he's in town. At the far end of the street, over the bath house."
The bath house occupied a space in the broad back alley behind the New Boston Gentlemen's Barber Shop. The county office of the cattlemen's association was a boxlike structure atop the bath house, sitting alongside a metal hot water tank. It was reached by an outside stairway, as were most second story establishments in New Boston.
Gault climbed the stairs and stepped through the open doorway. There was a rolltop desk, a battered oak chair. On the plank wall there was a large calendar for the year 1882, an advertisement for Dr. J. J. Simpson's Electric Bitters. Beside the calendar, dangling from a length of bit chain, was a North Texas Stock Raisers' Brand Book. There was no sign of stock detective Del Torgason.
A handyman from the bath house came up the stairway with an armload of cowchips and dumped them into the firebox beneath the hot water tank. Gault stepped out to the landing and asked, "Can you tell me where to find Torgason?"
The handyman looked him over. "Who's askin'?"
"My name's Frank Gault."
That was all the handyman needed to know. "Nope," he said shortly, and stumped back down the stairs. It was clear that the sheriff had not been pleased by Gault's return to New Boston, and it hadn't taken long for the word to get around. Gault picked up the buckskin and moved on to the wagon yard.
The hostler, Abe Tricer, was waiting for him with a vindictive grin. "Sorry, Gault, I just rented out the last of my camp shacks."
The shacks stood against the livery barn with their doors wide open and obviously vacant. "How about I throw my bed in the loft."
"Town passed an ordinance against that."
"Ordinance?"
"Drifters sleepin' in the loft like to burn the place down."
Gault knew it would be useless to argue the matter. "Do you think you could feed and water the buckskin?"
The hostler shrugged. "Price of oats has gone up since the last time you was through here."
"Somehow," Gault told him, "I figgered it would." He stripped the buckskin and put the animal in a stall. Then he returned to the Day and Night.
Wompler was at the same table, staring into space. Only after Gault set a full bottle in front of him did he begin to look alive. "Torgason ain't in his office," Gault said. "I tried askin' some New Boston citizens about him, but it didn't get me anywhere."
Wompler downed a drink and chuckled. "They know the sheriff wouldn't like it. And what Sheriff Olsen don't like we don't get much of here in Standard County."
"You know where I might find Torgason?"
The former deputy closed his eyes, and for a moment Gault was afraid he'd fallen asleep. At last he said, "This mornin' I was down at the livery corral. Torgason came by to get his horse. There was somethin' said about the Circle-R."
The name had a familiar ring. The oldtime cowhand, Elbert Yorty, rode line for the Circle-R. Also it had been an injured Circle-R hand that Doc Doolie had been tending the night of the thunderstorm—according to Doc Doolie. "Is there anything queer about the Circle-R? Or about Torgason heading that way today?"