as quiet as little towns get. I didn’t feel like doing nothing except go lie down, but instead, I made myself hike to the courthouse square, where the sheriff office was, along with the local lockup.
Bragg made me mad, tellin’ me I was too dumb to see what was what.
It sure was a peaceful spring morning. Doubtful was doing its usual trade. There was a few ranch wagons parked at George Waller’s emporium, and a few saddle horses tied to hitch rails. A playful little spring breeze, with an edge of cold on it, seemed to coil through town. It sure was nicer than the hot summers that sometimes roasted northern Wyoming. I was uncommonly glad to be alive, even if my knees wobbled a little. I smiled at folks and they smiled at me.
I got over to the courthouse, which baked in the sun, and made my way into the sheriff office. Sure enough, my undersheriff, Rusty, was parked there, his boots up on a desk.
“Where you been?” he asked.
“Getting myself hanged,” I said.
Rusty, he smiled crookedly. “That’s rich,” he said.
I didn’t argue. Rusty wouldn’t believe it even if I swore to it on a stack of King James Bibles.
“You fed the prisoner?”
“Yeah, I picked up some flapjacks at Ma Ginger’s. He complained some, but I suppose someone with two weeks on his string got a right to.”
“What did he complain about?”
“The flapjacks wasn’t cooked through, all dough.”
“He’s probably right,” I said. “Ma Ginger gets it wrong most of the time.”
“Serves him right,” Rusty said.
“You empty his bucket?”
“You sure stick it to me, don’t ya?”
“Somebody’s got to do it. I’ll do it.”
Rusty smiled. “Knew you would if you got pushed into it.”
I grabbed the big iron key off the peg and hung my gun belt on the same peg. It wasn’t bright to go back there armed. King Bragg was the only prisoner we had at the moment, but I wasn’t one to take chances. I opened up on the gloomy jail, lit only by a small barred window at the end of the front corridor. Three cells opened onto the corridor. King was kept in the farthest one.
He was lyin’ on his bunk, which was a metal shelf with a blanket on it. The Puma County lockup wasn’t no comfort palace. King’s bucket stank.
“You want to push that through the food gate there?” I asked.
“Maybe I should just throw it in your face.”
“I imagine you could do that.”
He sprang off the metal bunk, grabbed the bucket, and eased it through the porthole, no trouble.
“I’ll be back. I want to talk,” I said.
“Sure, ease your conscience, hanging an innocent man.”
I ignored him. He’d been saying that from the moment I nabbed him out at Anchor Ranch. I took his stinking bucket out to the crapper behind the jail, emptied it, pumped some well water into it and tossed that, and brought it back. It still stank; even the metal stinks after a while, and that’s how it is in a jailhouse.
I opened the food gate and passed it through.
“Tell me again what happened,” I said.
“Why bother?”
“Because your old man hanged me this morning. And it set me to wondering.”
King Bragg wheezed, and then cackled. I sure didn’t like him. He was a muscular punk, young and full of beans, deep-set eyes that seemed to mock. He was born to privilege, and he wore it in his manners, his face, his attitude, and his smirk.
“You don’t look hanged,” he said, getting smirky.
I sort of wanted to pulverize his smart-ass lips, but I didn’t.
“Guess I’m lying to you about being hanged,” I said. “So, go ahead and lie back. Start at the beginning.”
The beginning was the middle of February, when King Bragg rode into Doubtful for some serious boozing, and alighted at Saloon Row, five drinkin’ parlors side by side on the east end of town, catering to the cowboys, ranchers, and wanderers coming in on the pike heading toward Laramie.
“You parked that black horse in front of the Last Chance and wandered in,” I said, trying to get him started.
“No, I went to the Stockman and then the Sampling Room, and then the Last Chance. Only I don’t remember any of that. Last I knew, I took a sip of red-eye at the Last Chance, Sammy the barkeep handed it to me, and I don’t remember anything else. I couldn’t even remember my own name when I came to.”
THREE
There’s some folks you just don’t like. It don’t matter how they treat you. It don’t matter if they tip their hat to you. If you don’t like ’em, that’s it. There’s no sense gnawing on it. There was no sense dodging my dislike for King Bragg. I don’t know where it come from. Maybe it was the way he kept himself groomed. Most fellers, they got two weeks to live, they don’t care how they look. But King Bragg, he trimmed up his beard each morning, washed himself right smart, and even washed his duds and hung them to dry. That sure was a puzzle. The young man was keeping up appearances and it didn’t make no sense. Not with the hourglass dribbling sand.
Now he stood quietly on the other side of them iron bars, telling me the same story I’d heard twenty times, and it didn’t make any more sense now than the first time he spun it. It was just another yarn, maybe concocted with a little help from that lawyer, and it was his official alibi. Actually, it was more a crock than an alibi.
What King Bragg kept sayin’ was that he had dozed through the killings, and when he woke up, he was holding his revolver and every shell had been fired. So he’d gotten awake after his siesta and got told he’d killed three men. And that was all he knew.
Well, that was a crock if ever I heard one.
“Maybe you got yourself liquored up real good, got crazy, picked a fight with them T-Bar cowboys, spilled a lot of blood, and got yourself charged with some killings.”
That was the official version, the one that had convicted King Bragg of a triple murder. The one that was gonna pop his neck in a few days.
He stared. “I have nothing more to say about it,” he said.
“Well I got nothing more to ask you,” I said.
“Why are you asking? I’ve been sentenced, I’m going to hang. Why do you care?”
“Your pa, he asked me to look into it.”
“Admiral Bragg doesn’t ask anyone for anything. He orders.”
“Well,
