He heard her steps. Then she was framed in the doorway, smiling at him, with the little court-plaster beauty mark very black against her pale face. “Good morning, Deputy.”

“Good morning, Miss Dollar,” he said, standing quickly upright. She glanced at the empty cell and took a handkerchief from her reticule and daubed at her temples. The bottom of her skirt was white with dust. Still, perspiring and dusty as she was, she was a handsome woman, and, standing before her, incapable of easy conversation, he felt intensely his own awkwardness, his own inadequacy and ugliness.

“It’s cool in here,” she said, and came a little farther inside.

“Yes, ma’am. And hot out.”

“I’ve rented a house.”

“You are lucky to find a house. Are you — I mean, I guess you are going to stay in Warlock awhile, then.”

“I’ve been here a month. I guess I am staying.” She was looking at the names scratched in the whitewashed wall. “It’s a pretty fair house,” she went on. “I rented it from a miner. Some boys from the livery stable are bringing my trunks around this afternoon.” She smiled at him with a mechanical tilt of her reddened lips. “I wondered if you would help me move in.”

“Why—” he said. “Why, I would surely appreciate to help, Miss Dollar. What time would you—”

“Toward five. I will try a hand at cooking some supper for us.” Then she smiled again, not so mechanically. “You don’t have to look worried. I can cook, Deputy.”

“I am sure!” he protested. “I will surely be pleased to come.”

Her eyes examined him in that way she had that was both careless and intense, as though she could see right through him, but at the same time as though she were searching for something. He had felt it most intensely when, after Billy’s death, he had met her on the street and she had stopped to say she was sorry about his brother.

She remained and chatted a little longer, but he became more and more tongue-tied and stupid, as he always did, and finally she left. From the doorway he watched her cross Southend and walk past the loungers in front of the saloons. They did not bother her, he noticed.

He saw the lead mules of a freighter swinging wide into Main Street from the Welltown road, and he moved back inside the jail to get out of the dust. The mules plodded past, almost invisible in the dust they raised, with Earl Posten trotting alongside the swing team, and Mosbie standing and cracking his long whip from the lead wagon. Carl came in and sailed his hat toward the peg on which the key ring hung.

“Damn!” Carl said, and went to pick up his hat, where it had fallen. He sat down at the table and said, in a gloomy voice, “I’ve been up at the stable talking to Joe Kennon. You don’t suppose they are going to find against Blaisedell, do you?”

Gannon shook his head, while Carl guardedly watched his face. “I don’t see how they can, Carl.”

“Well, I don’t like them putting it off a week like this. Like they think if they keep putting it off there’ll nobody go in to witness for him. By God, if that’s what they think they’re trying to do, I’ll set up camp on the courthouse steps!”

“Do you think I ought to go in?”

Carl sat scowling down at his hands. He sighed and said, “No, I guess I don’t know what good it’d do. I don’t know — I have just got the nerves, I guess.”

Gannon watched a bluefly circle past Carl’s head, to strike and buzz angrily against the window glass. Hoofs clopped by in the street — two of Blaikie’s riders. One waved in to him, and he raised a hand in reply.

Carl said, “Saw that Kate Dollar woman coming out of here. What did she want?”

He found himself grinning foolishly. “Well, she wants me to come and help her move her things for her. She has rented herself a house.”

“You!” Carl said, in an awed voice.

“Me, sure enough.”

“You!” Carl said. “By God, a lady-killer underneath all. I never thought it of you.”

“Well, she said she had picked the handsomest man in town here to help her.”

“Thought I was,” Carl said. He squinted at Gannon. “Well, I’ll just pass on what my Daddy said to me. ‘Look out for women!’ he said, and I have done it all my life. But not a one went and looked back.” He laughed a little. “Well, now, that’s fine,” he said. “She is a handsome-looking woman. What is she doing out here, did she ever say to you, Johnny?”

“Looking for me,” he said, and felt himself flush. He grinned at Carl, who snorted.

“A lady-killer underneath,” Carl said. “Well, if that don’t beat all.”

II

At four o’clock Gannon went to the Mexican barber on Medusa Street for a haircut and shave, and, reeking of toilet water, hurried back to his room at Birch’s roominghouse and washed off the stink and put on his best shirt and his store suit. Surveying himself in the shard of mirror over the washstand he thought there had never been a face so ugly, and the suit did not look like anything but what it was, a cheap store-bought, with the jacket pinch-waisted and short and the store creases still in the trousers.

He took off the suit and put on clean moleskin pants; anyway he was going to help her move her things, not to a soiree. He dusted and oiled his shell belt, put on his new star boots that were too small for him, and spent some time brushing his hat and adjusting it upon his head. Then he limped out. He looked in at the jail, where Carl was poring over a Wild West magazine.

“In a pure sweat, aren’t you?” Carl said. “I was betting on that store suit of yours, though.”

“It’s that red-trim house over on Grant Street. If you need me for anything.”

“I’m too soft-hearted a man to pull you out of there short of McQuown coming in to burn the town down,” Carl said. “Then I guess you’d hear the shooting anyway.”

Gannon grinned and went on east along Main Street, walking pigeon-toed and wincing in his star boots. He turned into the Lucky Dollar for a glass of whisky, taking a place at the bar where he could watch the thin hands of the Seth Thomas clock.

He had finished his whisky and was marveling at the incredibly slow movement of the minute hand, when there was a sudden silence in the Lucky Dollar, and then a scuff of bootheels and clink of spurs. In the mirror he saw Abe and Curley entering. They walked past him, unnoticing, and he watched them find a table and seat themselves.

A barkeeper took them a bottle and two glasses; the hum of conversation was resumed, in a lower, sibilant key. In the mirror Gannon watched Curley whispering to Abe behind his hand, and Abe glancing around him continually with little nervous movements of his head, the lines in his cheeks deeply cut, his face bitter, watchful, and — Gannon thought with a shock — almost fearful.

When the minute hand stood two minutes away from straight up, Gannon turned to go. He nodded to Abe, who stared back without recognition; he nodded to Curley, who wrinkled his nose a little, as though he had smelled something bad. Gannon went on outside. He did not think there was going to be any trouble. Probably they were on their way into Bright’s City and Abe had felt he had to show himself in Warlock on the way. The red-bearded face with the clawed-looking lines in the cheeks remained in his mind’s eye as he went on east toward Grant Street. He had never thought that he would see Abe McQuown frightened.

The house Kate Dollar had rented was of tarpaper and wooden battens, with red trim around the door and a single narrow window at the front. The door stood open and he knocked on the red frame and waited, hat in hands. Inside he could see two scuffed leather trunks with curved lids, one with a valise on top of it, the other standing open. In the room were three rawhide straight chairs, a love seat with one corner propped up on some bricks, an oilcloth-covered table beneath the pulley lamp, and, on the wall opposite him, a painting in a chipped gilt frame of a shepherd tending some sheep. The glass over it was cracked.