There was the same ring of truthfulness in this as when Fleharty had said the same thing to Parker Travis in his saloon. Parker believed him; the others read this much in his face. They exchanged glances, looking baffled now more than doubting.
“The bullion,” spoke up Parker, “was cached under the rear stoop of Fleharty’s saloon. Fleharty told me that and I looked under there before coming up here. It was there, all right, but it’s not there now.”
Pierson began to scowl. “I thought Fleharty said he knew where the money was!” he exclaimed.
Parker nodded, placing his big paw upon Johnny’s shoulder again. “That’s exactly right. He knew where it was. Not where it now is.” He gave Johnny a little tug. The two of them went toward the door. None of the others moved until Parker had the door open. Then Amy stepped away from her uncle, crossed over, and said in reply to Parker’s questioning look: “I’ll walk over to the jailhouse with you.” She closed the door gently, leaving her uncle, the doctor, and the town councilmen behind in Hub Wheaton’s room.
Downstairs, in the hotel lobby, people who had obviously been furtively speaking before these three came down among them turned quiet. They watched Parker herd the saloon owner out into the furious morning heat. Afterward, they slipped to the door and watched Amy, Parker, and Johnny Fleharty step out into the roadway, heading toward Sheriff Wheaton’s sturdy building with the barred windows.
“That’s Travis,” said a bearded cowman. “Damned if he ain’t wearin’ Hub Wheaton’s star.”
Another man added to this by saying: “That rumor must have been true. The one about Fleharty being mixed up in Hub’s shooting. I heard it early this morning. I was told by a feller, who seen ’em, that Charley Swindin an’ Fleharty were talkin’ together out behind the saloon last night only a little while before Hub got shot.”
The bearded cowman growled malevolently: “I know how to take care of fellers like that an’ I don’t need no courtroom, either…just a sixty-foot lariat and a stout tree limb.”
A thoughtful-looking elderly man said: “You try that, Clint, and you’ll likely wind up stiffer’n a plank. That Travis’s got the look to him of a man who’d be hell on wheels if he got really stirred up.”
A woman among the onlookers, watching Fleharty being driven along, made a little sniffing sound. “’Pears to me,” she said acidly, “that Amy Morgan’s making a spectacle of herself, walking out there with that man in plain sight and all…like a hussy.”
All the men turned when Fleharty, Amy, and Parker Travis entered the jailhouse and were lost to them, and gazed in deep silence at the woman who’d said this.
She furiously blushed under their stares. “It’s not seemly,” she uttered, blustering now, “for a young woman to go tagging after a man like that. It’s not lady-like.”
That thoughtful-looking elderly man chuckled. “You know, Nettie,” he said, “nowadays, if a pretty girl’s going to catch her man, she’s got to trot a little. It isn’t like it used to be. Waitin’ can make a girl wind up a spinster.”
There were sly smiles over this remark; the men knew Nettie Fellows and her acid tongue. Nettie, at thirty-five, had never been married. She drew herself up, said: “Hump!”—and flounced back into the hotel lobby.
Chapter Fourteen
Parker locked Fleharty in a strap-steel cell, closed the intervening door on him, and returned to Wheaton’s little stuffy office. There he got a dipper full of water from a bucket, drank deeply, and observed Amy over the dipper’s blue rim. She was standing half in shadow over by the sheriff’s desk watching Parker, and as before her gaze did not falter under Travis’s regard. As Parker was putting aside the dipper, she spoke.
“You know something you didn’t mention up in Hubbell’s room, don’t you, Parker?”
He turned, walked over closer, and stopped to cock his head a little at her, looking critical. “You’re smart, Amy. As smart as any man in town. I was impressed with your looks the first time I laid eyes on you. But upstairs at the hotel just now, it dawned on me that you’re smart along with it.”
“If that’s a compliment,” retorted Amy without smiling, without lowering her eyes before that critically masculine stare, “I thank you for it. But the tone of voice was wrong. I think it wasn’t so much a compliment as an appraisal.”
“You’re dead right.”
“I didn’t measure up, did I?”
Parker removed his hat, dropped it upon Hub Wheaton’s desk, and carefully put together the words for his reply to that question. “You measured up all right, but not particularly as a woman.”
She dropped her eyes now, not uneasy under his stare but so that he would not see that sad and knowing look in their smoky depths. She stood thus for a moment, darkly in thought. Light from the little barred window came into the room, glowing against the coppery darkness of her hair, putting its barred pattern across the fullness of her breasts. She was thinking of him; he knew that much even though her face was averted.
“You’ve been a smart woman in a man’s world too long, Amy,” he said, paused, and went on, a faintly rough edge coming to his voice. “Standing as you are now, half in light, half shadowed…you’re a picture a man could take with him over the years, because this minute you’re a full woman, and that’s the substance every man’s dreams are made of.”
“You’re telling me to be more woman and less…whatever else I am…aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
She raised her eyes to him, showing a tenderness, a good warmth. “I couldn’t change, Parker, any more than you could. But for the right man that would be no problem.”
“What kind of a right man?”
“The kind you are. Not the kind my uncle is, or those others. You think calmly. You don’t do rash things. You didn’t ride in here like other men would have…with hate like a banner in your eyes and a cocked gun in your fist. You came quietly and you felt your way. You were more interested in truth than in killing.”
“You didn’t think that before,” he said.
“Yes, I did. I’ve thought that ever since we first talked in the dell. But several times you wavered. I know why you wavered, because you loved your brother so. You don’t show things to the world. You keep things inside you. When you wavered, I was cruel to you because I couldn’t bear the idea of your abandoning fairness and becoming hair-triggered like the others are.”
She had a little stain of color in her face as she faced him, as she saw him as he was, not yet at peace with himself but near to it, his strong, dark face with its tough set to the mouth, handsome, his dead-level eyes deeply thoughtful, his expression more gentle than anything else.
“You see a lot,” he murmured. “Maybe you see too much.” A shadow appeared in his eyes. “Why should I show the world that it hurts like hell to think of Frank’s dying like he did?”
“The world knows anyway, Parker. All people aren’t blind. Hub Wheaton for instance…he knows how you feel.”
“He’s the only one, Amy.”
“No. I also understand.”
She swayed toward him a little, fighting down a powerful impulse to reach forth and touch him. Tenderness and want came out of her deepest thoughts. Yet she held herself away for a reason; he’d need her more later on, when the anguish and the things he’d set as his goal were done with.