Gault did not look at the rifles. He did his best to act and talk as if they were not there at all. "You boys strayed pretty far from bedground, looks like. Sheriff Olsen seemed to figger you'd gone back to drivin' cattle, after you took it on yourselves to ride over to New Boston and identify Wolf Garnett's body."
Colly Fay continued to smile abstractedly. Shorty Pike shrugged his shoulders and casually slipped his saddle gun back in its boot. "We won't go into that now. Just say we changed our mind."
All right, Gault thought, let's see what kind of cards you're holding! He glanced toward the field of green corn and asked, "Is that the Garnett place?"
Shorty took a deep breath and made a quiet decision of his own. "That what you been lookin' for? The Garnett place?"
Gault made himself smile. "Just wonderin'. Curiosity, you might say."
The muzzle of Colly's rifle moved a fraction of an inch, as if hunting the exact center of Gault's chest. Shorty folded his hands on the saddle horn and looked at Gault and said nothing. Apparently the next move would come from another direction.
"Look," Gault said in a tone of extreme reasonableness, "I don't know why folks are so dead set against lettin' me talk to Wolf Garnett's sister. I don't aim to pester her or give her any more grief than she's already come in for. All I want is to talk to her about her brother."
"Why?"
"I want to satisfy myself that Wolf Garnett is dead."
Shorty glanced at his partner and smiled. He touched his forehead with his finger to suggest that Gault was more than a little loco. Colly Fay chuckled absently and nodded.
A third rider approached silently along Gault's backtrail. He swung down toward the river and came toward them through a grove of cottonwoods. Gault turned cautiously to look at him—and somehow he was not surprised when he saw that it was Standard County's only full-time deputy sheriff, Dub Finley.
Gault leaned forward on the saddle horn and said dryly, "I don't guess you boys rode all this way just to give me back my .45, did you?"
Finley shot a look at Shorty Pike, and the squarest little man said, "We never stopped him until we seen he was makin' straight for the farm."
The deputy frowned and his hairline pointed down the center of his forehead. "What are you after, Gault?"
What was he after? Gault had asked himself the question many times, and he still wasn't sure of the answer. Revenge? Satisfaction? Justice? He didn't know. He only knew that there was a wild thing inside that would not let him rest—and maybe, if he could be sure that Wolf Garnett was dead, the thing could be tamed and lived with. But all he said to the deputy was, "I want to ask Wolf's sister some questions."
"All the folks that count," the deputy said bluntly, "have already asked their questions. Representatives of the express company and the cattlemen's association, that had bounties on Wolf's head. County lawmen and U.S. marshals that had warrants for his arrest. Newspaper writers from all over. For almost three days Esther had questions throwed at her from ever' which way—almost more'n a woman could stand. It got her so upset she couldn't even come to New Boston for the funeral." Dub Finley wanted to be the cool, efficient and responsible lawman that he imagined himself to be, but he was by nature hotheaded and impulsive. In spite of himself, his voice was slowly rising up the scale of anger. "What I'm sayin', Gault, is she's had enough. She ain't goin' to be plagued with any more questions. Not while I'm deputy here."
"What does Sheriff Olsen say about it?"
Finley smiled unpleasantly. "Me and the sheriff see alike on this." Again he made an effort to rein himself in. "I'm sorry about what happened to your wife. But that was almost a year ago. And Wolf Garnett's dead. My advice is forget it, Gault."
Forget it. Pretend the sweaty nightmares weren't there. Pretend that Martha was still radiant and warm and that her murder had never happened. "Forgettin'," he said with a curious flatness, "ain't an easy thing to do."
"I guess," the young deputy said unfeelingly, "it's somethin' you'll have to learn." He brushed some trail dust from his pony hide vest. This reminded him how long he had been out trailing Gault, and how long it had been since he had had hot food or proper rest, and this realization whetted his pugnaciousness to a fine edge. "I don't aim to keep on tellin' you, Gault. This is the last time. Go on back to where you came from."
Somewhere in the back of Gault's mind the quiet voice of reasonableness said, "He's probably right. I'm not doing myself any good, carryin' on this way. It won't bring Martha back. And you can't go on hating a dead man all your life. If he is dead. And the experts claim he is. So it doesn't really make any difference whether or not you talk to Wolf Garnett's sister…"
But when he looked at the smug arrogance in the deputy's face, he said "Tell your gunhands to get out of my way. I aim to talk to Miss Garnett—unless you're willin' to go as far as to shoot me."
"I'll go as far as I need to," Dub Finley said, and Gault had no doubt that he meant it.
Even now the young deputy was quietly taking his measure. Gault could see it in those remote eyes. He was making up his mind whether he ought to kill him here and now, stopping all argument and saving himself a lot of trouble. Gault, in spite of the thing that drove him, was chilled at what he saw in Deputy Finley's eyes.
Colly Fay was gazing at Gault and grinning vacantly. Shorty Pike sat like a square stump, apparently waiting for some signal from Finley. Gault discovered that his mouth was suddenly dry. His tongue felt thick and furry. No one had bothered to remove his rifle from its saddle boot— they were confident that the weapon was useless and that he was helpless. The only problem of the moment seemed to be whether or not he was worth shooting.
A fine bead of sweat began to form on Gault's forehead. Somehow he had never expected things to go this far. But then, he reminded himself, a man used to living within the law is always surprised at the prospect of murder. It had surprised him once before.
He forced himself to sit quietly and tried not to stare at Colly Fay's saddle gun. Dub Finley looked at him with a cool little smile and shrugged his shoulders. The gesture said louder than words, "There's nothing for it, Gault. If I let you go, you'd only come back and cause trouble later. I might as well get it over with now."
Gault suddenly stared at an invisible point just beyond Colly Fay's shoulder. He stared with all the surprise and fascination that he could muster. Colly blinked, as Gault had hoped he would. The simple-minded rifleman scowled and half-turned in his saddle to see what it was behind him that was so completely fascinating. For an instant the muzzle of the rifle was pulled off line with Gault's chest. Gault struck at it savagely. The weapon fell from Colly's surprised hands, and Gault heard it thud quietly to the soft turf.
By that time Gault had jerked the startled buckskin around and was spurring toward the covering timber along the river. Even while he was doing it he was thinking, there's no use. Finley's already made up his mind and he will never let me get as far as the river.
He was right. Almost immediately a second rifle, this one belonging to Shorty Pike, spoke bitingly in the clean morning air. Gault felt the bee sting on his left side. Almost instantly the bee sting was a rapidly spreading numbness— and, in dizzying sequence, the numbness became a dazzling center of pain.
He thought angrily to himself: It's nothing. No more than a glancing hit at worse. Maybe a cracked rib. Nothing more than that.
But already he was falling. There was no more shooting. That was a bad sign, for it meant that Shorty himself must be convinced that he was done for. Gault grabbed for the saddle horn and missed. He continued to fall with nightmarish slowness. He remembered trying, without success, to shake his foot free of the stirrup. Then the ground loomed up and struck him with hammerlike force. The buckskin dragged him for another hundred yards before his foot came free—but Gault did not remember that.