“Carpenter, is it? Ah, no. Not today, I think.” He waved a hand. “But who knows?
We see each other often, one day is like the next. He is not at his shop?” Shanaghy shook his head. He liked the store, and the pleasant smells of dry goods, slabs of bacon, fresh-cut chewing tobacco, new leather from the saddles and bridles, and coffee from the coffee-grinder. “Sometimes, Marshal, I think you worry too much. When the men of Patterson come you can talk. Maybe he will listen to you.”
“Maybe.” He looked out of the window at the empty street. A hatful of breeze caught at the dust and swirled it, then dropped it reluctantly. He went to the huge circular cheese under glass and lifted it, slicing off an edge for himself, then he strolled back to the counter.
“Maybe I should go back to New York,” he muttered. “Since coming here I’ve been thinking of other things than myself. I’m growing soft.” “It is a small place here,” Holstrum agreed. “We have not much to offer.”
“Where were you from, Holstrum? Another small town?” “A farm,” the older man said. “On a farm I was born. On a farm I lived. There was work, much work. Morning, noon and night, there was work. Always, I think of other places, better places than the farm. I think of women, too, of soft, warm, beautiful women mit perfume. On the farm I see no such women. My mama, she is gone before I know more than her face, and we are all men. My father, he drives us. Always it is work.”
“So you came west?”
“I work on a boat on the canal. Then I come to Chicago, where I work. I save a little. I see always people with much. I envy them. I go where they go and stand outside and look in on them.
“They are rich people. Their women are soft and warm, and when they passed me going from their carriages, I smell their perfume. So I say, someday … “ He broke off. “A boy’s foolishness, that’s what it was. Now I have good business. Soon I shall be rich man.”
“What happened to the farm? And your brothers who stayed?”
Holstrum shrugged. “My father is dead. The farm is now only one of five farms.
They have done well, my brothers. One also owns a store. One has a bank.” Shanaghy finished the cheese. “You might have been a banker had you stayed, but you wouldn’t have seen all this.” He waved a hand. Holstrum stared at him over his glasses. “I do not like all this. Sometime I will have a big business in a big town … You’ll see.” Shanaghy grinned. “And maybe the woman with the perfume … or have you found her already?”
Holstrum lowered his head and stared at the marshal over his glasses. For a moment he peered at Shanaghy, then shook his head. “One time I think I meet such a woman. She wished to go to a fine place so I dress in my new black suit and take her there. We ate and we talked, but I do not know what she says … many words of things of which I know nothing.” He paused. “I never see her again. And the meal,” he added, “it cost me all I would earn in one week. For one meal. “Someday,” he added, “it will not be so! I shall eat many such meals, and I shall not think of cost! I will know many such women, and they will not think small of me.”
“You think she did?”
“I never see her again. When I go to ask they say she is not at home, or is not ‘receiving.’ “ “Tough,” Shanaghy said. “That could happen to anyone.” He was thinking of Jan Pendleton. What a fool Holstrum was! But he wouldn’t be. Not by a damned sight. He wasn’t going to make a fool of himself.
By suppertime they all knew Carpenter was gone. None of his horses were missing. His saddle was in the barn. His pistol, rifle and shotgun were all in place. Yet Carpenter was nowhere around.
The judge was in the restaurant when Shanaghy came in. He remembered him from that first night when some man had come in to tell the judge that something must have happened to Rig Barrett. The judge nodded when he saw Shanaghy. He held out his hand. “Marshal? I am Judge McBane. Judge by courtesy, that is. Once, back in Illinois, I was a judge. Out here I am merely another lawyer, trying to make a living.”
“We need a judge, and we need a court. The nearest one is miles away.” “You may be right. Sometimes I think the fewer laws the better. We are an orderly people, we Americans, although others do not think of us so.” He was a short, heavyset man with a bulging vest, a heavy watch chain with a gold nugget and an elk’s tooth suspended from it, and a thick mustache that covered his upper lip and most of his mouth. “I understand our smith has disappeared?”
“Well … he doesn’t seem to be around. But there are no horses missing that we’ve heard of, and all his are in the corral.” The judge led the way to a table, seated himself and brushed his mustache with the back of his forefinger, first the right side, then the left. “He was in to see me,” the judge commented casually, his eyes roaming the room. “Said the horses of those men you have chained down in the street had disappeared.”
“They have.”
Judge McBane turned his slightly bulging eyes back to Shanaghy. “Seems to me,” he suggested, speaking quietly, “that a marshal looking for a missing man could go through every stable in town. If he didn’t find Carpenter he might find those horses. Their brands might tell him something.” Shanaghy flushed. “Of course!” He shook his head ruefully. “I’m new at this business, Judge, but why couldn’t I think of what’s so obvious?” “I do it all the time,” the judge replied cheerfully.
Shanaghy got up suddenly. “Judge? If I may be excused-?”
Later, he thought, How did I remember to say that? He had not realized there were so many stables in the town, but where horses are used there must be places in which to keep them. In the ninth stable, near an abandoned corral, both by the smell and by struck matches, Shanaghy found fresh manure and places where the horses had stood. They were gone now.
He was turning away when he saw the boot-toe. It was barely showing above the hay in the long manger-hay with which a body had obviously been hastily covered. Even before he brushed away the hay, Tom Shanaghy knew.
It was Carpenter.
THIRTEEN
He had been struck over the head, then stabbed at least three times. The blow over the head seemed to have come from behind.
Shanaghy thought of Mrs. Carpenter and swore softly, bitterly. He would have to tell her. It was something that must be done, and now. Yet first, he must look around. Whoever had killed Carpenter had come here with him, or had come up behind him. It was unlikely that Carpenter had been killed elsewhere and brought here. Undoubtedly he had found the horses and been killed at that moment.
Why kill him for seeing the horses unless the horses pointed to someone? Yet from what he had gathered there were few local brands. There were but a few local people who ran cattle, and the farmers did not have any but a few milk cows which they kept up or picketed on grass so they could not stray. Shanaghy straightened up and stood very still, thinking. He had started to strike another match when he heard a faint stirring … Was it outside? Or inside?
Careful to make no sound, he eased himself back into the stall and squatted on his heels. The double doors of the stable stood open. Along one side was a row of four stalls, divided one from another simply by horizontal poles and floor-to-roof posts. The manger was simply a long trough that extended through all four stalls.
On the opposite side there was simply the wall. Nails had been driven into the boards on which to hang odd bits of old harness, links of chain, and whatever had been lying around loose. Near that wall was a wooden bucket and a pitchfork. On the ledge formed by a two-by-four that ran the length of the side between supporting posts, there had been a currycomb, a brush and some heavy shears. At the back of the barn was a window. Here and there cracks allowed a glimpse of the lights of the town. The nearest building was about fifty yards off, the pole corral on the side away from the town.