Outside, the sun was hot and white, the glare through the open front door so bright Lucas could not make out the face of the cowboy who entered the club and sat at the end of the bar and ordered not just coffee but the whole pot. His posture on the stool was rounded, his boots hooked in the rungs, his face shadowed by his hat. He smoked a thin cigar and dipped the unlit end into his coffee before he puffed on it.

A middle-aged Indian man, with a stomach that hung over his belt like a sack of birdseed, came through the front door, hesitating a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dark interior. He wore a peaked, battered hat, and the sunlight from outside shone through the holes in the felt. He could have been either the Indian girl’s father or her husband, or an uncle or an older brother. Or perhaps he was none of these. But he slapped the girl full in the face, so hard her eyes crossed.

It took her a moment to recognize who had struck her. Then she said in a subdued, wan voice, “Oh, hi, Joe, you want a drink?”

The middle-aged man ripped off his hat and whipped her head and face with it. The boy with the Indian girl did nothing, watching her humiliation in the mirror behind the bar as though it had nothing to do with his life.

The cowboy at the end of the bar unhooked his boots from the stool, went to the front door, and threw his cigar outside. Then walked toward the middle-aged man. The cowboy wore a heavy white long-sleeved shirt and a silver buckle that reflected light like a heliograph.

“Whoa there, bud,” the cowboy said, grabbing the Indian man’s wrist. “You done hit your last woman for today. Least while I’m around.”

“Stay out of-” the Indian man began.

The cowboy grabbed the man’s arm and shook him with such power the man’s teeth rattled. “I’ll walk you to your truck. Don’t be hurting that young woman again, either. I hear about it, I’ll be back and you’ll be walking on sticks,” he said.

He took the Indian man outside and watched him climb into the driver’s seat of an old pickup. “Hold on a minute,” he said. The cowboy went back inside the club and returned with the man’s hat, then dropped it inside the truck window. “That means you ain’t got no reason to come back.”

He reentered the club, picked up his coffeepot and cup, and walked to the back, where Lucas still sat at a table by the bandstand, his Martin across his thighs.

“Know who I am?” the cowboy said.

“I do now. I ain’t got anything to say to you either,” Lucas replied.

“I come out of the pen a different man.”

“Tell it to somebody else, Wyatt.”

“Me and you got a lot in common. I was a woods colt, too. My daddy knowed it and that’s why he made every day of my young life what you might call a learning experience.”

“Got nothing to say to you.”

“Want a beer or a soda pop?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’ll see you at the rodeo, then.”

Lucas continued to tune his Martin and didn’t answer. Wyatt Dixon was framed against the light like a scorched tin cutout.

“Johnny American Horse has got your old man jumping through hoops,” Wyatt said.

Don’t bite, Lucas told himself, his heart tripping. “How?” he asked.

“American Horse ain’t no shrinking violet. He’s a stone killer. Ask them two men he cut up with an ax and a knife. You get an Indian mad, run his pride down, make fun of his woman, he’ll either come at your throat or turn into a pitiful drunk like that ’un I just kicked out of here.”

Lucas looked into space, this time determined not to speak again.

“Here’s what it is,” Wyatt said. “American Horse’s sixteen-year-old nephew got executed by a white man. The word is executed. Boy was breaking into the white man’s truck and the white man come up behind him and put a bullet in his brain from three feet. That white man was turned loose with just an ankle bracelet on him. American Horse ain’t no mystic holy man. On the sauce he’s a mean machine out to put zippers all over white people. Take care of yourself, kid.”

Wyatt set his coffeepot and cup on the bar and walked out the front door, his boots loud on the plank floor.

“DIXON JUST DIDN’T seem like the same fellow,” Lucas said that night at the house.

“Believe it, bud, he’s the same fellow,” I replied.

We were eating dinner at the kitchen table; the moon was yellow on the side of the hill behind the house and up high snow was drifting on the fir trees.

“People change. That’s what your church teaches, don’t it?” Lucas said, his eyes playful now.

“The Bible doesn’t have a chapter on the likes of Wyatt Dixon,” I said.

Later, the three of us washed and put away the dishes, then Lucas went out on the front gallery and watched the deer grazing in the meadow. He looked pale and handsome in the moonglow, his body lean and angular, his jeans high on his hips, his flannel shirt rolled above his elbows.

Before he was born, his mother had run away from her husband, a hapless and violent man, and had moved in with me when I was a patrolman with the Houston Police Department, living in the Heights. After Lucas was born, his mother was electrocuted trying to fix a well pump her husband had previously repaired with adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet.

Lucas’s early life should have embittered him against the world. Instead, he became a loving and brave and decent kid, with an enormous musical talent. As I watched him leaning against a post on the gallery, his hat cocked on his head, serene inside his youthful thoughts, I wished I’d killed Wyatt Dixon years ago, when I had the chance.

THE NEXT MORNING, Wednesday, I saw Darrel McComb coming hard from the courthouse, crossing between cars to get to my office. I saw him glance behind him, almost getting hit by a truck in the bargain, then I heard him talking loudly in the reception area.

I went up front to meet him. “What’s the problem?” I said.

His face looked heated, the skin under his nose nicked by his razor.

“Sorry, Billy Bob,” Hildy said.

“It’s all right. Come on in, Darrel,” I said.

He followed me into my office and closed the door.

“Leave it open,” I said.

“Screw you.”

“What?”

“You sent your wife down to Stevensville to question this woman Greta Lundstrum. Your wife told her I was following Lundstrum around. Lundstrum just called the sheriff and gave him hell over the phone.”

“You deny you were in the woods above Romulus Finley’s house while Lundstrum was there?”

“I was following Wyatt Dixon. I filed a report on that,” he said.

“I bet you did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

There were circles under his eyes and a raw odor in his clothes. His coat was open, and I could see the small leather clip-on holster he wore on his belt. I walked past him and opened the door. “I can respect your problems, Darrel. But you beat up Johnny American Horse with a sap and we both know why you did it,” I said. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

His scalp glistened inside his crew cut. “I’ve seen Lundstrum before. I don’t know where,” he said, his brow knitting.

Then I realized he was somewhere out on the frayed edges of his life. “I’ve got appointments all morning. How about we have a talk after lunch?” I said.

“That’s out. I shouldn’t have come here. Tell your wife, no matter what you people think, I got a good record as a police officer and I don’t need a P.I. dragging my name in the dirt,” he said.

Who “you people” referred to was anybody’s guess.

BUT DARREL MCCOMB’S quest for personal vindication was not over. That afternoon he went to the home of Amber Finley. She was working in the garden, barefoot, wearing only a halter and shorts. There were sun freckles on her back, and when she sat up from her work to talk to him, her stomach creased above her exposed navel, causing him to fix his eyes intently on her face so as not to reveal the weakness he felt in his loins.