“How about me?” Tyler Dillon demanded. He was flushing too, but he was eagerly seizing a chance. “You ought to have a lawyer, Del, and if you don’t want Mr. Anson—”
“No. I don’t want a lawyer.” She sounded as if she meant it. “You’re all right, Ty, but I don’t think I’ll ever do anything or say anything that will make me need a lawyer. I realized a lot of things up there in that cell, lying on that cot... when I opened my eyes I could see, through the bars, Mrs. Welch sitting out there, for no reason at all except to be human. I thought about things I never thought about before, and I — what I really mean is, I never thought at all before. At first I was scared and nothing else, but then I began to think. For the first time in my life I realized how silly it is, and it’s even dangerous, for people to go along day after day taking it for granted that they’re not fools. I’m never going to take that for granted again. And no one is in a position to say whether you’re a fool or not except you yourself, because no one else knows enough about it.” She looked at Ed Baker. “You can question me without my having a lawyer, can’t you?”
“I can. I would prefer it that way.”
Lem Sammis put in, “Maybe you’re a fool now, Dellie. Anson got you out of jail, didn’t he? What’s the difference whether he thought this or that? It only shows he was a fool too.”
But one result, apparently, of her mental exercises as she lay on the cot in the cell, was that she was through, at least temporarily, with lawyers. She was firm, and in spite of the protests of Anson and Lem Sammis and Clara and Ty and Uncle Quin, she went out with the county attorney, headed for his office upstairs.
Five minutes later the room was deserted, except for the two sheriffs. They sat in silence. Finally Tuttle sighed.
“Well,” Ken Chambers demanded, “and how do you like it now? What did I tell you?” He flourished a packet of fine cut. “No, you said, don’t go monkeying with Squint Hurley, because the Brand girl did it and he’s my star witness. No, you said, speaking to me, you’ll sit right here and if you try leaving before we get this thing settled I’ll have you tailed—”
“Shut up,” Tuttle told him bitterly. “Not that I didn’t have all the sympathy in the world for Delia Brand, but look at it now! Did you hear what Ed Baker said? Follow the investigation wherever it leads. It’s apt to lead him and me straight out of a job before it’s over. You say it was Squint Hurley that did it. Maybe. What if it turned out to be Lem Sammis himself?”
The phone buzzed. Tuttle reached for it, spoke into it briefly, mostly with grunts, shoved it back and got to his feet. “You seem to have company,” he observed. “Anyhow, that was Ed Baker, and he wants me to haul in Squint Hurley and have him ready for a talk as soon as he gets through with the Brand girl.”
The Sheriff of Silverside County stowed away the packet of fine cut, arose and stretched. “I guess I’ll go along.”
“If you do you’ll keep your mouth shut.”
They went out together.
Chapter 10
Wynne Cowles, with a heavy automatic pistol in her hand, sat on a rock, peering intently around the edge of an enormous boulder which was perched on the rim of a narrow canyon. The pistol, rock, boulder and canyon were all her property, all being within the confines of Broken Circle Ranch which she owned. It had been a dude ranch at the time of her first arrival at Cody two years ago and, taking a fancy to it, she had bought it. The energy, acumen, time and money Wynne Cowles had expended on whims might have built a railroad.
Impatience stirred within her. Leaving her ambush behind the boulder, she crept to the edge of the precipice to see if the sheep’s carcass was in fact there; and saw it, unmistakably, a grayish blur at the bottom of the canyon. The bait was all right; why didn’t they come? She returned to the ambush and resumed her vigil, glancing at her wrist watch and noting that it was nearly five o’clock. She would give them thirty minutes more. But not half that allowance had gone when her keen eyes detected a group of black dots moving far up against the blue sky. She watched them, releasing the safety on the pistol and hugging the boulder. The black dots descended moving in wide graceful circles, then narrowing into spirals of shorter radius, becoming not dots but things with wings — wings that did not flap but only banked and steered. They came lower, centering on a point in the canyon directly beneath her, and now they were huge and she could see the nakedness of their necks and almost the greediness of their sharp glittering eyes. Her own eyes gleamed with distaste; she disliked vultures because they disgusted her. She waited until they got almost to her level, circling into the canyon’s mouth, then drew a deep breath, leveled the pistol with nerveless aim and fired. Nothing stopped the bullet. She fired again and one of the vultures, at least a hundred yards away, keeled over, seemed to hang suspended for an instant and then fluttered into the canyon like an enormous black leaf. The wings of the six or eight others were flapping now and they were moving off. She fired four more shots, but the distance was so great that only luck could have guided the pistol bullet to its moving mark. She stepped to the edge of the canyon and saw that one down there, not twenty feet from the carrion, flopping on the rocks like a decapitated chicken.
A voice sounded behind her. “That’s too bad, boss. Honest it is. Them turkey buzzards keep a place clean.”
She turned and saw a wiry little man with good-humored eyes. “I only got one, Joe. Did you see it go? Riding the air like an eagle and then suddenly losing it, turning loose of its grip on the air. I’m sick of popping gophers because I never miss any more. What are you doing out here?”
“Got a message. Do you know Ed Baker, the county attorney?”
“No. Should I? What about him?”
“He just phoned he wants to see you. At his office in the courthouse any time before midnight, or he says he could drive out here. He said to tell you he’s interviewing everybody who talked with Dan Jackson the day he was killed. I told him I’d call him back.”
“But I thought—” Wynne Cowles frowned. “Oh, hell. I don’t like being interviewed.” She returned the pistol to its holster on her belt. “At that, maybe I can get in a lick for that kid. That Brand girl.”
“You were going into town for dinner anyway.”
“I know it. Come on.”
She found her horse in the shade of the towering brown rocks where she had left it. His was there too, and together they rode the mile to the ranch house, past corrals, outbuildings and irrigated fields. The house was low, painted white, had a patio and was surrounded by trees. A tiled veranda was shaded with a bright green awning, and a similar awning covered the entire expanse of a first-class tennis court, near which was a large enclosure containing a dozen pronghorns. On a low forked limb of a tree near the veranda, startlingly life-like, a cougar crouched in readiness to leap, seemingly onto a table below which held a stack of magazines, a bowl of fruit and a carved bishido cigarette box. Broken Circle Ranch was a picturesque and expensive layout, but it was also an efficient going concern; Joe Paltz was the best sheepman in northern Wyoming. Wynne Cowles turned her horse over to him on the path at the corner of the veranda, went to her suite overlooking the patio, removed her clothes and gave her body an approving glance in a Tronville mirror, and stepped into the shower cubicle.
Lem Sammis, at his mahogany desk in his office on the top floor of the new Sammis Building, was saying irritably, “I tell you, Harvey, that don’t matter. Dellie Brand is out of it and no thanks to you either. What we’ve got to do is shut Ed Baker off!”