“Can you send for Haley?”

  “I reckon I can.” Bardell called to Gyp Rainey. “Run across the street and tell Doc Haley that the deputy sheriff wants to talk to him.”

  Gyp went gingerly through the cowboys grouped at the door and vanished.

  “What do you know about the killing, Bardell?” I began.

  “Nothing,” he said emphatically, and went on to tell me what he knew. “Nisbet and I were in the back room, counting the day’s receipts. Chick was straightening the bar up. Nobody else was in here. It was about half-past one this morning, maybe.

  “We heard the shot—right out front, and all run out there, of course. Chick was closest, so he got there first. Slim was laying in the street—dead.”

  “And what happened after that?”

  “Nothing. We brought him in here. Adderly and Doc Haley—who lives right across the street—and the Toad next door had heard the shot, too, and they came out and—and that’s all there was to it.”

  I turned to Gyp.

  “Bardell’s give it all to you,” he said.

  “Don’t know who shot him?”

  “Nope.”

  I saw Adderly’s white mustache near the front of the room and put him on the stand next. He couldn’t contribute anything. He had heard the shot, had jumped out of bed, put on pants and shoes, and had arrived in time to see Chick kneeling beside the dead man. He hadn’t seen anything Bardell hadn’t mentioned.

  Dr. Haley had not arrived by the time I was through with Adderly, and I wasn’t ready to open on Nisbet yet. Nobody else there seemed to know anything.

  “Be back in a minute,” I said, and went through the cowboys at the door to the street.

  The Toad was giving his joint a much-needed cleaning.

  “Good work,” I praised him. “It needed it.”

  He climbed down from the counter on which he had been standing to reach the ceiling. The walls and floor were already comparatively clean.

  “I not think it was so dirty,” he grinned, showing his empty gums, “but when the sheriff come in to eat and make faces at my place, what am I going to do but clean him up?”

  “Know anything about the killing?”

  “Sure, I know. I am in my bed, and I hear that shot. I jump out of my bed, grab that shotgun and run to the door. There is that Slim Vogel in the street, and that Chick Orr on his knees alongside him. I stick my head out. There is Mr. Bardell and that Nisbet standing in their door.

  “Mr. Bardell says, ‘How is he?’

  “That Chick Orr, he say, ‘He’s dead enough.’

  “That Nisbet, he does not say anything, but he turn around and go back into the place. And then comes the doctor and Mr. Adderly, and I go out, and after the doctor looks at him and says he is dead, we carry him into Mr. Bardell’s place.”

  That was all the Toad knew. I returned to the Border Palace. Dr. Haley—a fussy little man—was there.

  The sound of the shot had awakened him, he said, but he had seen nothing beyond what the others had already told me. The bullet was a .38. Death had been instantaneous. So much for that.

  I sat on a corner of a pool table, facing Nisbet. Feet shuffled on the floor behind me and I could feel tension. “What can you tell me, Nisbet?” I asked.

  “Nothing that is likely to help,” he said, picking his words slowly and carefully. “You were in in the afternoon and saw Slim, Wheelan, Keefe, and me playing. Well, the game went on like that. He won a lot of money—or he seemed to think it was a lot—as long as we played poker. But Keefe left before midnight, and Wheelan shortly after. Nobody else came in the game, so we were kind of short-handed for poker. We quit and played some highcard. I cleaned Vogel—got his last nickel. It was about one o’clock when he left, say half an hour before he was shot.”

  “You and Vogel get along pretty well?”

  The gambler’s eyes switched up to mine, turned to the floor again. “You know better than that. You heard him riding me ragged. Well, he kept that up—maybe was a little rawer toward the last.”

  “And you let him ride?”

  “I did just that. I make my living out of cards, not out of fights.”

  “There was no trouble over the table, then?”

  “I didn’t say that. There was trouble. He made a break for his gun after I cleaned him.”

  “And you?”

  “I shaded him on the draw—took his gun—unloaded it—gave it back to him—told him to beat it.”

  “And you didn’t see him again until after he had been killed?”

  “That’s right.”

  I walked over to Nisbet, holding out one hand.

  “Let me look at your gun.”

  He slid it swiftly out of his clothes—butt first—into my hand. A .38 S.&W., loaded in all six chambers.

  “Don’t lose it,” I said as I handed it back to him, “I may want it later.”

  A roar from Peery turned me around. As I turned I let my hands go into my coat pockets to rest on the .32 toys.

  Peery’s right hand was near his neck, within striking distance of the gun I knew he had under his vest. Spread out behind him, his men were as ready for action as he.

  “Maybe that’s a deputy sheriff’s idea of what had ought to be done,” Peery was bellowing, “but it ain’t mine! That skunk killed Slim. Slim went out of here toting too much money. That skunk shot him down without even giving him a chance to go for his iron, and took his dirty money back. If you think we’re going to stand for—”

  “Maybe somebody’s got some evidence I haven’t heard,” I cut in. “The way it stands, I haven’t got enough to convict Nisbet.”

  “Evidence be damned! Facts are facts, and you know this—”

  “The first fact for you to study,” I interrupted him again, “is that I’m running this show—running it my own way. Got anything against that?”

  “Plenty!” A worn .45 appeared in his fist. Guns blossomed in the hands of all the men behind him.

  I got between Peery’s gun and Nisbet, feeling ashamed of the little popping noise my .32’s were going to make compared with the roar of the guns facing me.

  “What I’d like”—Milk River had stepped away from his fellows, and was leaning his elbows on the bar, facing them, a gun in each hand, a purring quality in his drawling voice—“would be for whosoever wants to swap lead with our high-diving deputy to wait his turn. One at a time is my idea. I don’t like this idea of crowding him.”

  Peery’s face went purple.

  “What I don’t like,” he bellowed at the boy, “is a yellow puppy that’ll throw down the men he rides with!”

  Milk River’s face flushed, but his voice was still a purring drawl.

  “Mister jigger, what you don’t like and what you do like are so damned similar to me that I can’t tell ’em apart. And you don’t want to forget that I ain’t one of your rannies. I got a contract to gentle some horses for you at ten dollars per gentle. Outside of that, you and yours are strangers to me.”

  The excitement was over. The action that had been brewing had been talked to death by now.

  “Your contract expired just about a minute and a half ago,” Peery was telling Milk River. “You can show up at the Circle H.A.R. just once more—that’s when you come for whatever stuff you left behind you. You’re through!”

  He pushed his square-jawed face at me. “And you needn’t think all the bets are in!”

  He spun on his heel, and his hands trailed him out to their horses.

  Milk River and I were sitting in my room at the Cañon House an hour later, talking. I had sent word to the county seat that the coroner had a job down here, and had found a place to stow Vogel’s body until he came.

  “Can you tell me who spread the grand news that I was a deputy sheriff?” I asked Milk River. “It was supposed to be a secret.”

  “Was it? Nobody would of thought of it. Our Mr. Turney didn’t do nothing else for two days but run around telling folks what was going to happen when the new deputy come.”

  “Who is this Turney?”

  “He’s the gent that bosses the Orilla Colony Company outfit.”

  So my client’s local manager was the boy who had tipped my mitt!

  “Got anything special to do the next few days?” I asked.

  “Nothing downright special.”

  “I’ve got a place on the payroll for a man who knows this country and can chaperon me around it.”

  “I’d have to know what the play was before I’d set in,” he said slowly. “You ain’t a regular deputy, and you don’t belong in this country. It ain’t none of my business, but I wouldn’t want to tie in with a blind game.”

  That was sensible enough.

  “I’ll spread it out for you,” I offered. “I’m a private detective—the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency. The stockholders of the Orilla Colony Company sent me down here. They’ve spent a lot of money irrigating and developing their land, and now they’re ready to sell it.

  “According to them, the combination of heat and water makes it ideal farm land—as good as the Imperial Valley. Nevertheless, there doesn’t seem to be any great rush of customers. What’s the matter, so the stockholders figure, is that you original inhabitants of this end of the state are such a hard lot that peaceful farmers don’t want to come among you.

  “It’s no secret from anybody that both borders of this United States are sprinkled with sections that are as lawless now as they ever were in the old days. There’s too much money in running immigrants over the line, and it’s too easy, not to have attracted a lot of gentlemen who don’t care how they get their money. With only 450 immigration inspectors divided between the two borders, the government hasn’t been able to do much. The official guess is that some 135,000 foreigners were run into the country last year through back and side doors.

  “Because this end of Orilla County isn’t railroaded or telephoned up, it has got to be one of the chief smuggling sections, and therefore, according to these men who hired me, full of assorted thugs. On another job a couple of months ago, I happened to run into a smuggling game and knocked it over. The Orilla Colony people thought I could do the same thing for them down here. So hither I come to make this part of Arizona ladylike.

  “I stopped over at the county seat and got myself sworn in as deputy sheriff, in case the official standing came in handy. The sheriff said he didn’t have a deputy down here and hadn’t the money to hire one, so he was glad to sign me on. But we thought it was supposed to be a secret.”

  “I think you’re going to have one hell of a lot of fun,” Milk River grinned at me, “so I reckon I’ll take that job you was offering. But I ain’t going to be no deputy myself. I’ll play around with you, but I don’t want to tie myself up, so I’ll have to enforce no laws I don’t like.”

  “It’s a bargain. Now what can you tell me that I ought to know?”

  “Well, you needn’t bother none about the Circle H.A.R. They’re plenty tough, but they ain’t running nothing over the line.”

  “That’s all right as far as it goes,” I agreed, but my job is to clean out troublemakers, and from what I’ve seen of them they come under that heading.”

  “You’re going to have one hell of a lot of fun,” Milk River repeated. “Of course they’re troublesome! But how could Peery raise cows down here if he didn’t get hisself a crew that’s a match for the gunmen your Orilla Colony people don’t like? And you know how cowhands are. Set ’em down in a hard neighborhood and they’re hellbent on proving to everybody that they’re just as tough as the next one.”

  “I’ve nothing against them—if they behave. Now about these border-running folks?”

  “I reckon Bardell’s your big meat. Next to him—Big ’Nacio. You ain’t seen him yet? A big, black-whiskered Mex that’s got a rancho down the cañon—four-five mile this side of the line. Anything that comes over the line comes through that rancho. But, proving that’s another item for you to beat your head about.”

  “He and Bardell work together?”

  “Uh-huh—I reckon he works for Bardell. Another thing you got to include in your tally is that these foreign gents who buy their way across the line don’t always—nor even mostly—wind up where they want to. It ain’t nothing unusual these days to find some bones out in the desert beside what was a grave until the coyotes opened it. And the buzzards are getting fat! If the immigrant’s got anything worth taking on him, or if a couple of government men happen to be nosing around, or if anything happens to make the smuggling gents nervous, they usually drop their customer and dig him in where he falls.”

  The racket of the dinner-bell downstairs cut off our conference at this point.

  There were only eight or ten diners in the dining room. None of Peery’s men was there. Milk River and I sat at a table back in one corner of the room. Our meal was about half-eaten when the dark-eyed girl I had seen the previous day came in.

  She came straight to our table. I stood up to learn her name was Clio Landes. She was the girl the better element wanted floated. She gave me a flashing smile, a strong, thin hand, and sat down.

  “I hear you’ve lost your job again, you big bum,” she laughed at Milk River.

  I had known she didn’t belong to Arizona. Her voice was New York.

  “If that’s all you heard, I’m still ’way ahead of you,” Milk River grinned back at her. “I gone and got me another job—riding herd on law and order.”

  From the distance came the sound of a shot.

  I went on eating.

  Clio Landes said, “Don’t you coppers get excited over things like that?”

  “The first rule,” I told her, “is never to let anything interfere with your meals, if you can help it.”

  An overalled man came in from the street.

  “Nisbet’s been killed down in Bardell’s!” he yelled.

  To Bardell’s Border Palace Milk River and I went, half the diners running ahead of us, with half the town.

  We found Nisbet in the back room, stretched out on the floor, dead. A hole that a .45 could have made was in his chest, which the men around him had bared.

  Bardell’s fingers gripped my arm. “Never give him a chance, the dogs!” he cried. “Cold murder!”

  “Who shot him?”

  “One of the Circle H.A.R., you can bet your neck on that!”

  “Didn’t anybody see it?”

  “Nobody here admits they saw it.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Mark was out front. Me and Chick and five or six of these men were there. Mark came back here. Just as he stepped through the door—bang!”

  Bardell shook his fist at the open window.

  I crossed to the window and looked out. A five-foot strip of rocky ground lay between the building and the sharp edge of the Tirabuzon Cañon. A close-twisted rope was tight around a small knob of rock at the cañon’s edge.

  I pointed at the rope.

  Bardell swore savagely. “If I’d of seen that we’d of got him! We didn’t think anybody could get down there and didn’t look very close. We ran up and down the ledge, looking between buildings.”

  We went outside, where I lay on my belly and looked down into the cañon. The rope—one end fastened to the knob—ran straight down the rock wall for twenty feet, and disappeared among the trees and bushes of a narrow shelf that ran along the wall there. Once on that shelf, a man could find ample cover to shield his retreat.

  “What do you think?” I asked Milk River, who lay beside me.

  “A clean getaway.”

  I stood up, pulling the rope and handing it to Milk River.

  “It don’t mean nothing to me. Might be anybody’s,” he said.

  “The ground tell you anything?”

  He shook his head again.

  “You go down into the cañon and see what you can pick up,” I told him. “I’ll ride out to the Circle H.A.R. If you don’t find anything, ride out that way.”

  I went back indoors for further questioning. Of the seven men who had been in Bardell’s place at the time of the shooting, three seemed to be fairly trustworthy. The testimony of those three agreed with Bardell’s in every detail.

  “Didn’t you say you were going out to see Peery?” Bardell asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Chick, get horses! Me and you’ll ride out there with the deputy, and as many of you other men as want to go. He’ll need guns behind him!”

  “Nothing doing!” I stopped Chick. “I’m going by myself. This posse stuff is out of my line.”

  Bardell scowled, but he nodded his head in agreement. “You’re running it,” he said. “I’d like to go out there with you, but if you want to play it different, I’m gambling you’re right.”

  In the livery stable where we had put our horses I found Milk River saddling them, and we rode out of town together.

  Half a mile out, we split. He turned to the left, down a trail that led into the cañon, calling over his shoulder to me, “If you get through out there sooner than you think, you can maybe pick me up by following the draw the ranch house is in down to the cañon.”

  I turned into the draw that led toward the Circle H.A.R., the long-legged, long-bodied horse Milk River had sold me carrying me along easily and swiftly. It was too soon after midday for riding to be pleasant. Heat waves boiled out of the draw bottom, the sun hurt my eyes, dust caked my throat.

  Crossing from this draw into the larger one the Circle H.A.R. occupied, I found Peery waiting for me.

  He didn’t say anything, didn’t move a hand. He just sat his horse and watched me approach. Two .45’s were holstered on his legs.

  I came alongside and held out the lariat I had taken from the rear of the Border Palace. As I held it out I noticed that no rope decorated his saddle.

  “Know anything about this?” I asked.

  He looked at the rope. “Looks like one of those things hombres use to drag steers around with.”

  “Can’t fool you, can I?” I grunted. “Ever see this particular one before?”

  He took a minute or more to think up an answer. “Yeah,” finally. “Fact is, I lost that same rope somewheres between here and town this morning.”