Nell was closing up the place.
“How’s the patient?” I asked.
“Coming along,” she said. “I kept his head sopped in wet towels, and by the time the tomato juice had started his saliva trickling he was yelling for water. I didn’t give him too much, just a little bit at a time. He’d been in the desert before, and he knew enough to help me. I guess he’s gone by this time. I had to come back here for the supper trade, and he said he’d be all right.
“I sort of thought he’d come in and see me before he left, but he didn’t. Guess he’s over at the hotel by this time.”
“I’ll go take a look with you,” I told her.
She had an electric flash light. Together we walked out to the tent. I raised the flap. She flashed the torch into the interior of the tent.
Things have a way of being grim in the desert. The veneer gets stripped off of everything. That holds true for murders. I’ve seen a murder or two in my time, and always the murders that take place in the desert are killings that haven’t any sugar coating.
This one wasn’t any exception.
The man lay on his back on the cot. There was a cut in his throat, a thing of red horror that made a gap between his chin and his chest.
One glance and I knew that Nell would never be able to use the bedding again.
The white illumination of the flash light, boring into that dark interior of the tent house, caught the form on the bed, the head that was tilted back at such a grotesque angle, and made a shadow of horror on the canvas side of the house.
I caught Nell as she screamed and her hand became limp.
The flash light rolled to the floor, slipping from her numbed fingers. She clung to me in the darkness like a child clinging to its father. Then she shuddered, took a deep breath, and said:
“I’m sorry. I dropped the flash light. Do you want to go in and make an investigation, Bob?”
“Yes,” I told her, and picked up the flash light.
“I’ll stay out here,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, “but I’d like to have a witness. The gold, you know.”
“I’d forgotten about that,” she said.
We went in. I opened the man’s shirt.
The gold was gone.
“That’s all I wanted to know.” I said. “Now we’ll get in touch with Stan Walker. He can take charge.”
Stan Walker was the resident deputy sheriff. He was an excitable sort of cuss, and I knew he’d resent it if he wasn’t told of the crime at once. Perhaps as a desert man who’s been accustomed to the reading of trail I might have discovered something if I’d looked around, but Walker would have resented that.
Nell was trembling as she put her hand on my arm, but she didn’t say anything, and she walked along with firm steps.
The desert was big and silent and dark over on the left. The lights of the town made the sky bright over on the right. A phonograph made music from a scratchy record. A girl laughed in the darkness; a low, seductive, throaty laugh.
“Walker was in a poker game about half an hour ago,” I told Nell. “I’ll see if I can round him up.”
But I didn’t need to take the trouble. We were coming to the lighted section of the town when I saw a figure come out of the dance hall. It looked like Stan Walker, and I whistled. He turned and I saw it was the man I was looking for.
He looked us over with that look of halfway hostility that he always had for me. Now that he was a deputy, Walker took himself seriously, and I wasn’t inclined to take him so seriously, remembering back to the time when he’d got drunk in Mojave and tried to steal a locomotive.
“What is it?” he asked.
Before his appointment he’d always worn a sensible Stetson with a color that matched the desert dust. Now he’d broken out in one of those dressy, wide-brimmed black hats that are worn by sheriffs out in the West.
“Stan,” I said, “there’s been a man murdered.”
He stared at me, then seemed to swell up with importance.
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know, a prospector who stumbled into Nell’s restaurant.”
“Who murdered him?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did you happen to discover the crime?”
I told him, in a few words, telling about the man’s arrival, the gold, the gambler.
Stan Walker was a weatherbeaten cuss who’d seen fifty-five or fifty-six years go by in the course of his checkered lifetime. He had a bony face, a long, catfish mouth and eyes that he tried to make look penetrating now that he was a deputy.
“The motive,” he said, “was robbery.”
“Apparently,” I told him.
“Four people are under suspicion,” he said. “That is, there are four people who must explain their whereabouts. The murderer is certain to be one of the four.”
“Yes?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well,” I told him, “If you’re going to figure it that way, I can see where you can suspect the gambler, and Pedro Gonzales, and myself, but I don’t figure the fourth.”
He fastened his steely eyes on Nell Hastings.
“There’s Nell here,” he said. “She had equal knowledge, and probably a better opportunity.”
I could feel my face getting red, and my knuckles were pushing against the skin on the back of my hands. I kept myself in check, though.
“If you want some advice from a bystander,” I told him, “you’d better get the sheriff here just as fast as you can. You start handling this thing by yourself and you’re going to get hurt.”
He stared threateningly.
“Who’s going to hurt me?” he asked.
“You are,” I told him.
He clamped that catfish mouth of his into a grim line, and said:
“I want you to understand, Bob Zane, that this is murder, and the law doesn’t take cognizance of individuals. I don’t give a damn whether a man is friend or foe. I suspect him until he can prove his innocence.”
“All right,” I said. “As an efficient officer, would you rather visit the scene of the crime, or would you prefer to stand here and debate about your devotion to duty?”
He couldn’t answer that with words.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“Nell’s tent.”
“Come on,” he said. “I want you both to remain with me until I release you.”
I was mad, but Nell laughed, and the sound of that laughter made Stan Walker’s back bristle up like an angry cat’s. He stalked with the imposing dignity of a man who takes himself very, very seriously.
We trailed along.
III. Who Is Guilty?
Stan Walker emerged from the tent with a look of professional gravity.
“It’s murder,” he said.
“What the hell did you think it was?” I snapped, my nerves rubbed raw by his unjust suspicion of Nell Hastings.
“That’ll do,” he said. “This is a serious matter. The motive was robbery. Now we’re going to round up Pedro Gonzales and this gambler. When we’ve done that we’ll have an investigation.”
There wasn’t any use arguing with him. He represented the law, and law should be respected, even when it picks funny agents.
“I’d suggest the gambler first,” I said.
“You get his name?” he asked.
“No. But we won’t have any great trouble finding him. He’s registered at the hotel, and they won’t mistake him for any one else. I say he’s a gambler. Of course I don’t know, but I’m betting he is. His hands, his eyes, the way he holds his face...”