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CHAPTER 9

      PURDY CAME in like a friendly dog, all smiles and headbobs, and Nugent introduced him all around.

      Purdy shook hands with each — even pointing his finger at Watson and saying, "Why, I met you today," as though that made them old schoolhouse friends. Watson expressed his sincere hope that the cigars he'd sold him weren't too stale, adding that if Purdy would come around, he had some good fresh stock he'd be glad to let him have.

      When Purdy was introduced to Luna, he bowed gallantly over her hand. Truth to tell, he really was overwhelmed by her beauty, but he warned himself sternly to be cautious. It had been a long time since he had met a woman socially.

      In any case, it was the men he had come for. He smiled at them all, these men he had sought for fifteen long years. He smiled at them as he took a glass of good whiskey from the sideboard, and as he lit up the fine cigar that Nugent offered him. He swallowed his anger and hate with the whiskey, showing them only a clear untroubled face — these rich honest-appearing men who had been deserters and renegades, and who had killed all his comrades, and who had nearly killed him as well. He laughed easily at a joke told by the man who had stolen his name, and not a flicker of Purdy's eye betrayed what he was feeling.

      But In fact, Purdy hardly knew what he felt, himself. He remembered that morning by the creek with vivid clarity, but so much time had passed that, except for Weitnaur, into whose face he had looked as he heard the roar of the gunshot that should have killed him — and Nugent, who had been their leader — Purdy wouldn't have recognized a one of them. They had put on weight and lost hair. But more important, they had put on good clothes and well-bred manners, and an air of confident ease.

      They looked like the salt of the earth now, and Purdy found it easy to play his role because he could so easily see how they expected to be treated. They, in turn, lavished kind attentions on him, seeing in him a rich man's son ripe for the picking. But there was also a wariness about the way they treated him, and he chalked that up to Weitnaur's being robbed and their suspicion that he might have been the robber. Surely they would consider that possibility.

      Nugent sat at the head of the table, and he had put Purdy next to him on his right. Luna was at the foot, and as Purdy gazed at her down the length of the table, and again he found himself thinking that she was one of the handsomest women he had ever seen — a real Spanish beauty with lustrous eyes, jet black hair, and satiny olive skin.

      When she spoke he was surprised that her English was as good as any of theirs, probably better, although it was tinged with a slight Spanish accent.

      Sheriff Amhearst, a smooth-faced dandy, without a hair out of place and his silver badge polished like jewelry, had been watching Purdy watching Luna. Now he interrupted Purdy's thoughts. "How long will you be staying in Tres Marias?"

      "Why I don't know for sure." Purdy said brightly. "Frank, here, told me he'd take care of me, and I presume I'll leave when we've made some kind of arrangements." He pretended not to notice the sudden smiles. Take care of him indeed. And the arrangements would undoubtedly be of the funeral type.

      "So this is their sheriff," Purdy thought, looking at Amhearst and remembering the sober Massachusetts boy who had originally worn that name. "Except for Nugent, he's probably the most dangerous man in the room."

      Then, as he returned the man's bland smile, Purdy reconsidered. "No," he thought, "I'm wrong about that. I think it's pretty likely that I'm the most dangerous man in this room!"

      The dinner was served by a young Chinese girl, the daughter of the cook. It was a huge meat and potato pie, with tender boiled beef cut into small pieces and then baked with its gravy and sliced-up potatoes under a flaky crust. The dish was served with Mexican rolls, bolillos Luna called them, that they tore in half to sop up the gravy. There were side dishes of smoked ham, and good Colorado-grown corn from the San Luis Valley, brought in from half the state away. For dessert, the girl brought out two French pies filled with a custard made of eggs and sugar and milk, flavored with nutmeg, with apples cut in thin slices on the bottom crust, and they drank a sweet-tasting peach liqueur served in small glasses.

      Hopper, who seemed to be closest to Purdy in age, kept engaging him in conversation, and it turned out they had a lot in common, both having been in several of the same cities. Hopper had a short beard and a freckled face under his thinning red hair, and when he smiled, which he did often, he looked like a happy-go-lucky cowboy instead of an undertaker. As the evening was winding down, Hopper said, "Unless somebody passes away, which is undertaker talk for kicking the bucket, I have nothing to do tomorrow. I'd be pleased to show you around the mining camp. They're a rough lot out there, and knowing a little about them may prevent you from becoming another customer of mine."

      Everybody laughed at that. Purdy especially.

      As they said their goodbyes, Luna invited Purdy to come back again, and her look said she meant it. She and Nugent stood on the porch together, side by side, genial hosts waving them goodbye as they mounted up and headed for their homes.

      In the darkness, Hopper cantered up beside Purdy, suggesting that they stop off for another couple of whiskeys and good conversation, before calling it a day. Purdy agreed, and as they passed through the town, they drew up at the Golden Rose, with its gold-leaf drawing of a rose on the narrow window by the door.

      Inside the saloon the heat from the big woodstove was welcome, but it soon grew so hot that they peeled off their coats. The place smelled of sweat and wet wool and tobacco smoke. A few miners stood drinking at the bar and most of the tables were occupied by cardplayers whose faces were gaunt with fatigue. One of them fell asleep and had to be roused so he could pass or ante up. A whore who looked as tired as the miners, sat playing five card stud with them at one of the tables.

      Charlie, the bartender, knew that Hopper was a member of the Law and Order Committee along with his boss, Gaines, so he set up the first drinks free. Purdy drifted over to look at the piano and saw that the keys were dusty and broken. When he depressed a key there was no sound.

      Purdy and Hopper drank together companionably, and Purdy opined that Hopper had a hard business, laying out and burying the dead.

      "It is a hard business, but not for the reason you think," Hopper said. "The dead are empty vessels. The thing that made them go, their immortal souls, have fled. Their bodies are ready to go back to the earth from which we all come and to which we always return, some way or another. No, Bill, the job is hard because of all the grieving. The widows scream and cry. Sometimes I get a child that's died of the croup or some such thing, and its parents come crying and cursing fate. That, and actually getting the money to pay for the funeral, is the hard part."

      "I'd think it was the diggin'," Purdy said.

      "I got a Mexican to do that. There's going to be a planting tomorrow afternoon, and the hole will be dug in the morning. A nice deep hole with straight sides. It's hard digging because of the cold, but keep burying them until dead winter, and the ground's frozen. When it's too solid to dig through, we have to stack up the coffins and wait for a thaw. There's no smell or anything — they're frozen solid." He laughed.

      Gaines came down from his place upstairs, saw them, and waved, but did not join them. After talking to the bartender for a few minutes, he went back up. Purdy's face was flushed but he wasn't as drunk as he let on. And although he and Hopper had hit it off well — too well, he thought — he had felt eyes on him at dinner when he wasn't looking.

      At last Purdy rose to his feet, stretched, and remarked that he'd been up pretty late last night. They flipped a coin for the privilege of paying, and Hopper won. As they went out together, Hopper suggested that Purdy come across the river to his house in the morning.

      "Get there around seven and I'll introduce you to my wife, Ellie. She'll make us some breakfast, and then you and I'll take a tour of the camp," Hopper said. "My place is just a couple of hundred yards up the hill from where the mill is being built," Hopper said. "It's got a sign on it saying 'Funeral Parlor,' but the side door leads right into my kitchen. No need to come in the front door. There's a man set up for a funeral tomorrow, and his coffin's open because his lady friend may come up and see him. Maybe men who shot him will take a peek to make sure he's really dead."

      After they parted, Purdy left his horse at the livery, and walked back to his hotel.

      In his room, he saw that the hair he had left lying on the edge of chiffonier door was gone and the toothpick he had left leaning on the inside of a drawer had fallen down.

      Nothing was missing. He wormed himself inside the chiffonier and lit a match so he could see where he had concealed the marshal's papers and badge, and they were still tucked far out of the way in the darkest corner, untouched. After a moment's thought, he took out the papers and badge and put them in his wallet. Probably just as safe to carry them as to conceal them. If they'd searched his room once, they might search again. At least if he carried them, and somebody found them, he'd know about it.

      As Purdy sat down on the edge of his bed to take off his boots, a short distance away Deputy Sheriff Edgar Dipp, little and skinny and bitter because he was up after his usual bedtime, stood in the kitchen of Amhearst's house telling him that he had found a U.S. Deputy Marshal's identification for a man named Feeney, and a U.S. Deputy Marshal's badge engraved on the back with Feeney's name, stuck way out of sight in the chiffonier in Purdy's room.

      A half hour later, while Purdy slept in his bed at the hotel, Dipp, cursing the cold, and Amhearst, and the whole damned Law and Order Committee, as well as himself for telling Amhearst about what he'd found, was riding through the frigid night towards Central City with a note Amhearst had given him to have sent over the telegraph.

      The note was to the U.S. Marshal's office in Lincoln, Nebraska, asking about the whereabouts of a Deputy Marshal named Kenneth Feeney who was believed to have been working out of that jurisdiction. The message was signed "Sheriff Bolt," and it didn't mention Tres Marias at all.

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