Selby winced, and his eyes moved to the side. Fielding had the impression that Selby did not like to name names or even hear them spoken. As for Fielding, he could picture Adler as he had seen the man the day before, standing straight up in his white shirt and brown vest, with his gun and holster in plain view.
Selby spoke. “Everyone’s got to step careful here. The deputy asked me if anyone had anything against Richard, and I told him about the set-to over in their camp that day. I think we need to let him ask the questions.”
“And what do you plan to do?”
Selby blinked a couple of times. “We need to hang together, Tom, and be careful. No one sticks his neck out until we know what the deputy finds out.”
“You can pretty well predict that, can’t you?”
“I don’t know. If he asks around, maybe someone saw something.”
“Sure. Like the fellow up in Johnson County.” Fielding did not think he had to tell the rest, as it was well known how a man had seen Frank Canton and heard shots at ten in the morning at the place where Johnnie Tisdale was shot in the back and his two wagon horses and little dog were shot as well. The witness was so scared that he jumbled his testimony at the inquest, and Canton walked free. And that was a case in which there was a known witness. In others, like the case on the Sweetwater, the witnesses disappeared.
Selby did not answer, so Fielding spoke again. “Are his two horses still standing in the corral?”
“Oh, no,” Selby answered. “I took them to my place so they’d be taken care of.” He said it with the tone of someone who had performed his expected duty.
“Saddle, too?”
“Well, yeah. He had two of ’em. No sense in leavin’ ’em where someone could get his hands on ’em.”
Fielding decided not to pursue that line any more at the moment. “So they’ve got him in town?”
“That’s right.” Selby nodded his head in his officious way. “Funeral at ten in the morning, tomorrow. I was afraid you might miss it.”
The group that gathered at the cemetery consisted of Selby, Roe, Isabel, Leonora, Fielding, and Mullins. The wheat farmer would probably not have shown up except that he had been asked to work in the café for a couple of days while Leonora took some time off.
After the service, which was short and not very comforting, the group left the coffin next to the open hole and the pile of dirt and went to the parlor of the house where Leonora rented a room. Selby had arranged for cake and cold meats to be brought in from the café, and Mullins tended to the sideboard where the food was laid out.
A desolate feeling pervaded the room, and no one spoke much. When everyone had eaten and set their plates aside, Mullins poured coffee in china cups. The group sat on upholstered chairs arranged in an oval, and as there were three unoccupied, Mullins poured himself a cup of coffee and sat in respectful silence.
“He was a good man,” said Selby.
Fielding started to speak, then cleared his throat and said, “The best.”
Roe sniffed, rubbed his nose both ways, and said, “He was. Never a cross word to his friends, never owed a man a nickel.”
“Didn’t complain,” Selby added.
Leonora, still wearing the black veil she had worn to the cemetery, took a slow breath and sat up straight. She had a tremor in her voice as she said, “He was all that, and more. Generous, kind, intelligent.” She set her cup on its saucer, and it rattled until she stilled it. With her chin raised, she said, “He didn’t deserve to die that way.”
Selby and Roe looked at their own coffee cups, but Isabel’s eyes rose and met Fielding’s.
“I remember the last time I saw him,” she said. “He played a few songs for us.”
“Oh, he was fond of music,” Selby put in. “Wrote a few airs himself.”
“He liked birds,” said Fielding, caught up in the sadness of the moment. “Songbirds.” Then he felt silly for having said what he did.
“It’s too bad,” Mullins offered. “A man in his prime . . .” Mullins’s sentence trailed off.
Fielding steadied his voice as he spoke again. “He offered to ride along with me to Cogman’s Hole. I should have let him go. We would have still been up on the flats at that time.”
Leonora set her cup on the saucer and held the two pieces with both hands. “It wouldn’t have mattered,” she said in a bitter tone. “The cowards would have gotten him one way or another.”
Selby and Roe did not look up, and an uncomfortable silence hung in the room until Fielding said, “I think you’re right. The part I left out was that he offered to go along for my sake. He wasn’t worried about himself.”
“That was Richard,” said Leonora. “More of a man than the ones that came looking for him.”
Selby drew himself up as if he was about to speak, and Fielding was afraid he was going to say that it looked as if only one man did the job, but then Selby relaxed and said nothing. Leonora did not speak again, either. A few minutes later, Selby stood up and took leave. Roe followed, taking Isabel with him. Leonora withdrew, and Fielding helped Mullins carry the leftover cold food to the café.
Fielding woke to the sound of birds fluttering and squawking. As he peeked out of the flap of his pyramid tent, he could see the young cotton-woods against the gray sky of morning. A flock of starlings had moved in, and the birds were traveling back and forth across the creek, between the cottonwoods and the box elders. There wasn’t much food for them here, he thought. Even if he had a shotgun, it would not be easy to run off a flock like this one. He would just endure them and not leave out anything for them to drop their deposits on. Before long they would move on, and if they followed the creek they would find a patch of chokecherry bushes, where they would strip all the fruit before it ripened. After that they could go ten or fifteen miles north and plunder a wheat field.
He tended to his horses and got a fire going, then boiled some coffee to go with his cold biscuits. Nothing tasted good, and he had an irritated, dissatisfied feeling mixed in with the dread and sadness. If there was nothing good about Bracken’s death, there was even less so about Lodge’s, and brooding in camp alone had not improved his state of mind.
After breakfast, he put his few things away and saddled the bay horse. With his other horses corralled, he left his camp to the starlings and rode off across country. His plan was to visit Selby first and then Roe, and he didn’t want to ride past the junk collector’s on the way.
When he rode into Selby’s yard, the man came out to meet him. Selby looked ready for the day with his hat on and his gloves in his hip pocket, but he seemed fidgety as he said good morning and gave a smile.
Fielding returned the greeting and dismounted.
Selby sounded as if he was making an effort to appear cheerful. “What’s on your mind today,
Tom?”
“More of the same, I’d guess. And yourself?”
“Likewise. Are you goin’ out on another trip before long?”
“In a couple of days.”
“Well, that’s good. Keep you busy, get you away so your mind isn’t on all this other stuff.”
“It seems to follow me.”
“Oh.” Selby drew his mouth together as he closed off the sound.
Fielding tried to gauge the man but couldn’t. It seemed as if Selby had reconsidered things and was now avoiding both comment and confrontation. Fielding spoke. “I’ll tell you, Bill, I dropped in to see if we could come up with some idea of how we were going to do things.”
“Uh-huh.” Selby’s eyes had a blank expression.