Sliphammer

Uphill, Caroline came away from the grave, her face hidden by the borrowed veil. Tree stepped off to meet her, saying over his shoulder, “I’ll be seeing you sometime, Sheriff.”

“I’ll count the hours,” McKesson said with dismal humor, and went away down the long slope to town.

Tree glanced across the bleak anonymous grove of grave markers and brought his attention to rest on Caroline. Her body, clothed in severe black, seemed rigid with ill-controlled wrath.

She didn’t speak right away. They walked downhill together, not touching each other, and behind him Tree could hear the scrape and chink of the gravediggers’ shovels. Only when they were beyond the carry of that sound did Caroline stir from silence. She removed the veiled hat and held it at her side as she walked. Her eyes were sleepless-raw, but they burned with fevered brilliance.

She said in a hoarse voice that seemed drugged, “Well, Jerr?”

He only shook his head, and after a single frown at him she kept her peace. They walked together into town and Tree led her to a point a block from the Inter Ocean, where they stood and looked at the place; and he thought with sour irony that just thirty-six hours ago he had walked into that place and had a drink with Wyatt Earp, and they had laughed together over a coarse joke of Wayde Cardiff’s. Just thirty-six hours, and now he could no more walk peaceably into that place than fly to the moon. It had turned into a fortress and the drawbridge was up against him.

Caroline said, “Jerr, do people always have to be scared?”

He had no answer for that; what he said was, “If that warrant was for Cooley-”

“How would that make any difference?”

“I’ve got a reason to want Cooley.”

She stepped in front of him to face him. “You’re wrong, then. If Cooley’s guilty so is Wyatt Earp.”

“It wasn’t Earp that shot Rafe.”

“Earp could have prevented it. It amounts to the same thing, Jerr-don’t you see that?”

“I don’t think he had time to stop it.”

“He had plenty of time,” she said viciously. “He could have-if he’d cared.”

“No. You’re letting your temper get in the way of your sense.”

“Am I,” she said without inflection. She threw her head back to look him in the eye. “I’ll prove it to you. Will you come with me and listen to a man?”

“What man?”

“You’ll see when we get there.”

“Where?”

“Just come,” she said, and walked off. A few paces away she stopped to look back and see if he was coming. He broke loose, shaking his head, and went with her. She turned the corner and headed in the direction of Poverty Row.

On the way she said, “You still don’t want to arrest Wyatt Earp, and it’s not because you’re scared-”

“I’m not?”

“You are, but that’s not what’s making you hesitate. It’s that you don’t really think Wyatt Earp deserves to be arrested. You’re not sure where justice, is. You think Wyatt Earp’s a big wonderful man, you still believe all that dime novel junk-you think he’s the man of the legend.”

“You put it a bit strong. He’s a human being. But there’s a good chance if I arrest him he’ll get railroaded.”

“Only an i

She stopped in front of a boarding house and nodded. Tree held the door for her and they went inside. She seemed to know exactly where she was going; she went through the narrow foyer and turned up the stairs without glancing into the parlor whose door stood open across the hall. She said over her shoulder, “I was here last night,” and went right up. He followed her to the head of the stairs, where she turned left down a hallway lit only by the weak daylight that filtered through a small window set in the fire door at the far end. A little way along, she stopped at a door and lifted her small fist, whereupon a door behind her opened, across the hall, and a stout woman in a soiled apron appeared.

Caroline said, “How are they?”

“They all right.”

“Is Mr. Sparrow in here?”

“I reckon. You knock and you’ll find out.”

Coming up, Tree could see past the stout woman into the room behind her. There were two cots, both occupied by men in bandages-one on the leg, the other across his shoulder: probably the two miners who’d been shot by Earp’s people in the street fight.

Caroline was knocking at the opposite door. Little Floyd Sparrow answered it. The stout woman went back into the sickroom and closed the door. Sparrow gave Caroline his nervous glance and acknowledged Tree with a brief look of smouldering preoccupation.

Caroline said, without warmth, “I want you to tell him what you told me last night.”

Sparrow stepped back to let them in. His mouth was turned town in a scornful expression which seemed to have been shaped by a long, intimate acquaintance with life’s dour iniquities. Instead of making an immediate reply, he walked across the room and sat down on the sill of the filthy window, hipshot, swinging his free leg loosely. Caroline walked in and stood beside a writing desk, the entire surface of which was mounted high with disordered piles of books and pamphlets-atheist tracts, radical labor monographs, and, curiously, a copy of the Book of Mormon.

Tree propped his shoulder in the doorway, admitting to himself that he had let Caroline lead him here by the nose only because it afforded him a cheap excuse to postpone making the inevitable decision and doing what had to be done. He tried to put some show of interest on his face.

Sparrow gave him a twisted glance and said, “She tell you what I told her?”

“No.”

“Are you interested?”

“Why should I be?”

“Because it’s about your brother-how he died.” Sparrow’s city-bred voice was high-pitched, abrasive. “I was there, you weren’t.”

“Sure. Does that guarantee your word’s gospel?”

“Why? Because you expect me to make up a lie that will put the Earp gang in a bad light?”

Tree said, “Your game would be a lot easier if Wyatt Earp was out of your way.”

“So would yours, I imagine,” Sparrow said with his crooked smile. “You and I have a few interests in common, Tree.”

“Is that an offer of help?”

“You could use some, couldn’t you?”

Tree wondered if it was part of Sparrow’s technique always to answer questions with questions. He said, “Offer it and see.”

“I can’t. I’m afraid. Even if I wanted to…The miners are scared green of the Earp crowd, especially after what happened yesterday. I’ve got my hands full just keeping the fires lighted.”

“Your miners scare easy.”

“They’re not gunslingers,” Sparrow said harshly. “Neither am I. I can fight a mob with clubs by using my own mob with clubs, but we haven’t got the kind of money it takes to import hired gunmen. I’ve got a tough enough fight on my hands without taking on Wyatt Earp. All I want is to see him out of town.”

“And you expect me to do that?”

“I don’t expect anything,” Sparrow answered. “Your sister-in-law came to me last night to find out what really happened out on that street. I told her. If you want to hear it, I’ll tell you. Otherwise you can go-I’m busy.”

Tree shrugged, turned, and reached for the door latch. Caroline’s voice grabbed him as if by the elbow and turned him around again: “You’re so damn sure Wyatt Earp told you the truth that you’re not even willing to listen to the other side of the story, is that it?”

He made a face. “What other side of the story?”

“Mine,” said Sparrow. “Like I said-I was there.”

“All right, go ahead, for whatever good you think it will do you.”

Sparrow glanced bleakly at Caroline and said, “I saw all of it when your brother came out on the street. Cooley spotted him first and Cooley turned his gun on your brother. He cocked it and waited for your brother to stop moving so’s he’d have a clear shot. It was cold-blooded and deliberate, he didn’t just shoot in blind reaction. Wyatt Earp watched the whole thing. I can’t prove it but I believe if Earp had cared about seeing an i