Karen Memory

Chapter Thirteen

Of course, Miss Francina weren’t about to let me get away with taking the fall for her, and she followed me right down the hall to Madame’s office and stood with me inside the door. Madame watched her do it with an expression of exactly zero surprise. Madame didn’t follow us right on, and I didn’t know whether she was making us sweat or taking a closer survey of the damage. Either way, I was pretty sure none of it looked good.

I wanted to say something to Miss Francina, but I wasn’t sure what. The door was closed, though, and she was eyeing me like maybe she was trying to reckon out what to say as well.

“It was my plan,” I said. “I should be responsible for the results.”

Miss Francina scoffed at me, “Ain’t you a martyr, just like our Lord. ’Cause I sure as hell didn’t volunteer myself as a grown free woman, and you’re the only one in the room as cares about Priya.”

Well, when she put it that way.

I frowned and twisted the toe on my boot on Madame’s blue-and-cream knotted silk rug. Her office is made to look like a boudoir, all lace and mother-of-pearl and silk draperies. “Damn me to hell,” I said. “I’m as self-important as Da always said I could be.”

Miss Francina shrugged. “You have your good qualities, too.”

Whatever we might of talked about next, we never got to it. Because there was a hitching tread in the hall and the door swung open, then closed again as Madame stepped into the room and shut it behind her. She walked between Miss Francina and me, went around her gilt, scrolled desk, and sat heavily in the armchair there, using her cane as a prop to lever herself down.

“You girls sit,” she said to Miss Francina and me.

We sat.

Madame stared at us for ten seconds or so. I could hear her desk clock ticking. Then she looked from one of us to the other and sighed and said, “All right, then. Which one of you wants to explain what exactly just happened in my parlor?”

We looked at each other, Miss Francina and I. Apparently it was one thing to volunteer. And another entirely to actually carry out the task you had volunteered for.

When we broke, though, we both started to talk at the same instant. Then I knuckled back and let Miss Francina have it, but she’d quit also. We stared at each other.

Madame sighed. “Karen,” she said. “You first. Though by rights I should be interviewing you separately. So you don’t get your stories straight.”

Miss Francina looked righteously hurt at that. “I have never lied to you.”

“Nor do you tell me everything,” Madame said. She held up her hand, forestalling further protest. “God help me, nor do I want you to, Francie. I want to hear from Karen, please.”

No way through but both feet in, I reasoned. I said, “Peter Bantle has a machine that lets him change people’s minds.”

“People,” Madame said. “Voters?”

I nodded. “And it can make people do hasty things. Hurt people they don’t mean to hurt. Get in fights with friends.”

When she sucked her teeth like that it was unsettling, because I knowed it meant she was thinking. She said, “That’s what happened downstairs, then? He … influenced a passel of my clients to wreck up my parlor?”

Miss Francina nodded. I bit my lip.

“How do you know this?”

“Priya told me,” I said. “About the machine. And he used it on me, when he chased her and Merry Lee in here. I just about took Miss Bethel’s shotgun from Effie and pointed it at her. And I know he’s used it on the Marshal, too—”

I choked up before I could tell her what had happened the previous night. We’d gone against her direct orders, and I knowed it. But whatever I was holding back — and I meant to tell her, I swear I did. I just … choked on it.

But Madame gave me a canny look anyway. “So why’d he pick today to have another go at us?”

“To scare us,” Miss Francina said quickly.

Madame shot her a warning glance. She subsided, but not without a sigh.

“Karen?”

I fixed my gaze on that carpet and stared at it like to set it on fire. “What I said about him using that machine on the Marshal?”

“Yes?”

“That were last night,” I said on a rush. “Marshal Reeves and his posseman and Merry Lee and me went and busted Priya’s sister out of the cribs.”

“And I,” Miss Francina said dryly, so at first I thought she were playing Miss Bethel and correcting my grammar, but then I realized she was putting herself in the rescue party, too, when I’d intentionally left her out.

“Francina, dear,” Madame said. “Fetch me that decanter, please?”

Miss Francina rose and did it and brought her a snifter, too. She set both on the edge of Madame’s desk blotter. As Miss Francina sat again, Madame poured two inches of brandy into the bottom of the balloon glass, and knocked it right back. Then she poured a second, smaller glass, closed up the decanter, and held the snifter under her nose for a long minute or two.

“I’m not overjoyed with either of you,” she said, unnecessarily in my holding. “Do you know what Bantle can do to this house — to all of us — if he makes mayor?”

I didn’t, really. Not know. But I could come up with some pretty chilling fantasies. And Miss Francina nodded, so I did, too.

Then she put the glass down. “But it can be fought off?”

“The men who started the fight,” Miss Francina said. “They were the ones who had been drinking the most, or smoking a little hemp. Maybe their idea of what was wrong and right had gotten a little … malleable.”

“That’s true,” I said. “None of the girls was drinking much. And none of the girls went crazy. And when he tried it on me, before … I was sober. And I could kind of … see around it?”

We didn’t drink much, on duty, in Madame’s house. She thought it weren’t safe to cloud our wits that way while dealing with customers. And she didn’t want no woman whoring for her who had to get herself tangle footed to get through it. “And you and the Marshal both shook it off on your own.”

I nodded. “And Mr. Jonathan Smith, who started it all downstairs — he could have kilt me with that stool he was waving around. But he just waved it around for a bit and then threw it at the back bar. And he’d had several whiskeys.”

“So maybe it ain’t too powerful.”

“I’m unsettled to point out that I’ve only ever witnessed him use it when he was right near whoever he was aiming at,” Miss Francina said. “Priya says it’s a big machine in his house that does the dirty work, but it seems to my observation as if he has got to focus it through his glove. If I’m right about that, he was right here. Right outside, maybe. Might still be, although I sadly expect he’s got more sense than that.”

“It sounds more like an urge than a compulsion,” Miss Francina said.

“Or he uses it on some drunk who already thinks it might be a good prank to bust up a whorehouse. Or dump a whore on her ass for laughs, especially if he ain’t none too comfortable around the sisters,” Madame said, as if she was thinking out loud. “So he’s got enough to sway somebody who thinks it’s their own whim. Like whether to run for mayor, or for whom to vote.”

“Especially,” I said slowly, “if there’s also some blackmail in train. You know, for the old-fashioned kind of attitude adjusting.”

I didn’t say Dyer Stone, and Madame couldn’t fault me on that. She nodded, though, and flicked a fingernail back and forth against the stitching of a leather-bound book that was resting on her desk. I weren’t used to seeing it there, but that didn’t signify: she kept the ledgers locked up when she was out.

“Well, that’s a shit sandwich and no mistake,” Madame said.

* * *

It got worse by morning. Priya still weren’t home — I hoped somebody had sent her a message to stay away, and nobody seemed upset that she wasn’t there, so I expected she’d sent Miss Lizzie or Miss Francina a note — but when I went out for Connie’s eggs I could feel the eyes of strangers following me. I was wearing my plain walking dress — I wasn’t out trying to drum up custom, and my hair was barely braided, to tell the truth — so it weren’t my stunning appearance of beauty drawing the attention.

I reckoned word of the fight had gotten around and tried to ignore the stares and the heads bent in mutters, and I didn’t have to leave the neighborhood. So it was the corner grocer Mr. Mulligan who shook his head at me and said, “Have you heard what they’re saying about that Negro United States Marshal of yours?”

I almost said, He’s not mine, but Mr. Mulligan wouldn’t of understood it the way I meant it, and his misunderstanding would make me feel disloyal. So I fingered the lucky silver dollar that was in my pocket now and I said, “What are they saying?”

He sucked his teeth and added two extra eggs to my basket, tucking ’em well into the padding straw. Brown ones. I missed hens, but not as much as I missed horses. “The frail sisters started dropping dead of an overdose of horsewhipping right about when he and his pet Comanche came to town.”

A chill crept through my belly. Of course they were saying that. Because Peter Bantle was putting ideas in their heads.

“You know,” he continued, “them Comanche are savages. Things they do as a matter of course would chill normal folk. Skinning, scalping, roasting people alive. They cut folks up — babies, women — and torture ’em just for the fun. And word’s gotten around that those two have been coming and going at Madame’s place. You might want to pass the word to her that some people aren’t too pleased about it.”

He dropped his voice down low. “Some people is even saying that Madame’s a colored girl herself, what’s been passing, and that’s why she lets all these”—he flipped his hand back and forth, like there was a word he weren’t going to say in front of a lady—“scalawags come and go as they please. Course, old Mrs. Mulligan and me, we don’t believe that for an instant.”

I thought of the shiny healed burns on Priya’s arms, the dogfights down by the docks, and I held my peace, though what I wanted to say was, Does it seem to you that one race in particular holds the patent on savagery?

But I didn’t want to argue with Mr. Mulligan right now, especially if he was defending Madame in the court of gossip. What I wanted was to drop that basket of eggs and go running down the street shouting for the Marshal.

I didn’t do that, either. What I did do was pay for Connie’s victuals and smile nicely when Mr. Mulligan threw in some butter, too, and then I lifted my heavy basket up and went out to try to climb the ladder at the end of the block without spilling any eggs.

Made it, too. Without cracking any of the four dozen plus two. And once I’d delivered them to Connie, I went back out again, climbed up the ladder, and walked two more blocks to the telegraph station.

* * *

The telegram I sent was just: WE MUST TALK SOONEST DONT COME TO THE HOUSE, because I didn’t want to say too much where it would get around town. And I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in a sort of agony, twisted up left and right and inside and outside and upside down with not hearing from the Marshal. But of course I didn’t know if he’d gotten the telegram yet or if he’d even been back to his rooming house. All my wild imaginings of him clapped in irons or lynched from a lamppost were just that. It’s a real particular twisting razor, having a bad intuition and no news as such. At least Priya had returned by the time I came back, and she was hard at work sweeping the parlor carpet with Madame’s newfangled suction engine that didn’t half work half the time.

The good — or bad — news kept coming, in that the only visitor we had all night other than a messenger was the john we’re not supposed to know about, and he went upstairs with Pollywog and neither one came back down. So us girls and the Professor entertained ourselves in the parlor playing cards and playing piano. Bea told fortunes from tea leaves for half an hour — my leaves looked like storm clouds breaking, she said, and that meant good fortune out of bad, but what I saw in them was a herd of mustangs running. The Professor said he was going home, fooling no one, and wandered out before the witching hour to find a card game for money. Most of the Misses was in bed not half an hour later.

I crinkled the note in my pocket, not much more crumpled than when the messenger had handed it to me, and didn’t even bother to change my dress. I pulled on street boots and buttoned them, though, and fetched my heavy coat. It was getting on December by then, and the air through the door when Crispin had opened it earlier had been sharp. I wasn’t sneaking out, not exactly — I told Priya where I was going and why; she worrited at me, but she didn’t nag or naysay, and I had that good feeling again that I hadn’t had since Da was alive — that somebody sensible cared about me and wanted to help me on my path rather than bending me to their own. I collected a kiss from her for luck and good measure. I could still feel it tingling on my lips long after the cold should of wiped it away.

I slipped out the kitchen door, because Connie had sent the day girls home and gone to bed herself already and because Bea and Effie was still playing bezique by the parlor fire with cups of Miss Bethel’s best sherry, pretending — if I’m not mistaken — at being the ladies of their own homes.

When I clambered up to the street, the abject dark of the sidewalks gave way to flickering gaslight. I was nervous being out alone, no mistake — but I didn’t think I’d have to go far. The Marshal’s note had said he’d be waiting for me, and the Marshal hadn’t let me down once yet. Which put him right up there with Crispin and my da and Madame, and damn few anybodies else. I felt bad for telling him to stay away from Madame’s, but I had thought of what Mr. Mulligan had said about how folk were talking and I had realized that I had even more of a duty to Madame and Crispin and the girls as I did to the Marshal and Tomoatooah.

Being a growed woman, it turned out, was harder work than it looked. But that’s a thing, too, ain’t it? Them as work hardest get no respect for it — women, ranch hands, sharecroppers, factory help, domestics — and them as spend all their time talking about how hard they work have no idea what an honest day’s labor for nary enough pay to put beans in your family’s bellies is all about.

I got less and less patience for any of that talk, the older I get, lessen it comes from a miner or a picker or some such.

I was standing in the dark on the cobbles, knowing it was safer out of sight even though every scrap of my soul — if whores got souls — wanted to go stand under a streetlight where every robber or rapist for ten miles could mark me. The light would of felt good, but you see I knowed it wasn’t safe.

So I lurked in the dark, pinching my coat closed across my bosom with my left hand, and I waited for the Marshal to show.

Hoofbeats told me he was coming. I didn’t turn my head; if somebody was watching me, even here in the shadows, I didn’t want to look like I was looking. Or worried about anything. But I knowed Dusty’s hoofbeats from the other night, and I didn’t expect anyone else would be on her.

Nor were they. The Marshal pulled the chestnut up under the hissing streetlight, letting the light flicker and fall on every side. His spurs jingled, and I knowed from their pure tone they was silver. I may have smiled a little over men and their vanity.

He just sat there, slouched under his hat, the collar of his duster mostly hiding his face. He waited. I was sure he hadn’t spotted me, for I was in the shadows and waiting very still. Also, he was looking in the other direction.

I didn’t keep him waiting long. Just a half a moment, in which I reviewed what I needed to tell him and got it all ordered out in my head. Then I stepped out of the dark and strode toward him, letting my boot heels make noise.

The walking boots didn’t go with the skirts I was wearing, but sometimes being fashionable ain’t a priority. Even for me.

He turned at my first footfall. You know how sometimes you can see the tension go out of somebody? Like their shoulders fall and they sit up both more straight and less, simultaneous?

Well, the change in the Marshal as he caught sight of me was the opposite of that.

As I came up on Dusty, I noticed she had a red-and-blue Indian blanket under her saddle, and Marshal Reeves held out his hand and pulled his foot out of the stirrup. “Swing up,” he said. “Let’s not all talk in one place.”

Well, I wasn’t kitted for riding astride, but the thing about my working dresses is most of ’em’s slit to the hip bone. That makes it a pile easier to do all sorts of things in ’em, and it turns out one of those things is jumping up on a horse.

I swung up over the cantle and settled myself. It might of been cold, but the coat kept the gap in my skirts covered. At least, as long as we was moving slow. If Dusty was given cause to canter, it might come to be a different story.

“Bantle’s trying to get you lynched,” I told the Marshal, once the mare was under way. “You and Tomoatooah both.”

“Is that so?”

I was trying not to press up against the Marshal’s back, mindful of what he’d said about his Jennie. But he was warm, and my being there didn’t seem to faze him. Also, the pitch of the saddle made it well-nigh impossible to hold myself back.

“He’s spreading the rumor that the murders started just when you and Tomoatooah happened to arrive in town.”

“Well,” the Marshal allowed, between the slow clop of Dusty’s hooves, “that ain’t a misrepresentation.”

“Because you was chasing the killer here!”

The Marshal shrugged. “In an ideal world, more folks would see it that way.”

“He’d get you both killed soon as look at you. He’s mean enough to eat off the same plate with a snake,” I opined.

“And ugly as a burned boot,” the Marshal agreed. “This don’t change anything, though. I still have a writ of arrest to serve. It just means the clock’s ticking.”

“What do you mean?”

He rolled his shoulders. “The clock on how long Tomoatooah and me can stay in town. And stay in a boardinghouse. Instead of laying our heads on velvet couches somewhere out in the hills and hoping no bounty hunter don’t find us.”

“A velvet couch” was a cowboy’s term for his thin and usually smelly woolen bedroll. “Bounty hunter?!”

“Sure,” the Marshal said. “He’ll have a bounty on us next week, at the latest. He just needs enough time to convince enough people that the case against us is incontrovertible.” (I didn’t know the word then, but I looked it up when I got home that night.)

“So you’ve got to catch the murderer before Bantle finishes laying his trap.”

Marshal Reeves turned his head and smiled so I could see it. He laid one finger alongside his nose. I was nervous and sick, and the Marshal seemed pleased as a pup with two tails.“We’ve learned something useful, though,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“The killer’s somebody Bantle has a percentage in protecting,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “Damn it. Priya said that Bantle’s mechanic, a Russian alias Bruce Scarlet, might fit the bill. She said all the girls were scared of him.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” the Marshal said. “I can ask Tomoatooah if he will tail this Scarlet and see where he drinks. Maybe we can find a way to have a word with him outside.”

“If he drinks.”

“Mechanics all drink.”

“Not Miss Lizzie.” I grinned, and the Marshal tipped his hat at me in surrender.

I was just about to rummage around for something else to twit the Marshal’s dignity with — just being near him, and his calm boredom at Bantle’s machinations, was taking the edge off all my worry — when we were both startled by a scream and the almost-immediate shrilling of constables’ whistles. I grabbed for the Marshal’s waist as he raised the reins and jingled his spurs at Dusty.

He sure didn’t need to stick her with ’em, because just the ring sent her forward like a scorched weasel. The horse went, and he went, and a split second later I went, too — and a damn fine thing I have a practiced seat, or I’d have been rolling in the cold cobbles clutching my tailbone and wondering what happened. Speaking of the tailbone in question, it weren’t none too fond of its new accommodations, being enmeshed in recollections of its recent encounter with Mr. Jonathan Smith’s boot toe. I was determined not to whimper in front of the Marshal — or behind him as the case might be. So I held on and tried to grip as good as I could with my thighs, having no stirrups.

Thank whoever looks out for whores and cowboys that Dusty’s canter was as smooth as they come. You get that in a real strong horse sometimes; they catch themselves, like, and let themselves down easy instead of just hitting the ground. Feels like they got springs in their step for literal like.

Well, Dusty was about the strongest horse I ever rode. I could feel all the muscles moving under me — not bulky, but no yielding in ’em at all. I worrited after her in the dark, on the could-be-slick stones, but I figured the best thing I could do to help was just to hang on, try not to throw her balance, and let her be about her business.

Best plan I ever had, letting Dusty take care of me. Pity I can’t talk that mare into doing my tax paperwork.

She cantered and I suffered for maybe two minutes and not more than four, though it seemed a hell of a lot longer. The whistles shrilled up sharp and then dropped off for a bit, started up again more hesitant like for a second wave and then shushed completely. I figured at that point every constable in the Frog Hollow neighborhood had gotten a chance to toot his pipe and they needed a little rest before they got up to it again.

By then, anyways, Dusty and the Marshal had found the locus of the activity, so to speak. And I recognized where we was — red lanterns outside and red velvet curtains drawn over the windows facing the street.

“Aw, horsefeathers,” I said. “This is Breakneck Hill. This is Miss Pearl’s establishment.”

I felt the big sigh, and he nodded.

I expected Marshal Reeves would pull his foot from the iron again, so I could get down, but he just reined up into the middle of the swirling herd of constables and counted on them to clear a path for him. It worked, too.

I was starting to covet that man’s authority for my very own. It wasn’t that different from being with Madame; people just plain tended to did what she said, because it was her saying it. I wanted that, I realized. I wanted that respect.

The Marshal reined Dusty around, peering through the torches and over the heads of the swarm of constables all milling about like red ants. “Where’s Waterson?” he bellowed.

“Right here, Marshal,” Waterson said, appearing at the top of a ladder. He levered his foot over to stand and came up to Dusty, right fearless. “You want to rein that horse back? This is a crime scene.”

“Where’s the girl?” Marshal Reeves asked.

“Girl?”

“You get another murdered girl?”

“Yes,” Sergeant Waterson said shortly. “She’s down there. Whipped to ribbons, too.”

The Marshal reined Dusty over, closer to the edge of the road than I thought she’d go, but she trusted him enough to step right up against it. I held my breath. There ain’t no railing. Every week, a drunk or two tumbles off the edge of the street and is crippled or he dies. In the papers and over at the coroner’s office, they call it involuntary suicide.

If I’d been holding my breath a minute before, now I squeaked. Because the Marshal hooked one knee over the saddletree and just slid right down Dusty’s side, hanging there upside down with his head next to the red mare’s knees. “Torch!” he yelled, and somebody brought over a lantern and held it out.

“You could dismount,” Sergeant Waterson said dryly. “Because that looks more than a little ridiculous.”

The Marshal flipped upright again, so smooth in the saddle he hardly even nudged me. “Son of a bitch ain’t got far. Begging your pardon.”

“What’d you see?” Waterson asked.

“There’s a butt still smoldering there.” Reeves pointed. “Right by the mark where he ran his rope to lower her.” He turned in the saddle, left and right. “And we know he likes to watch the fun, now don’t we.… Hang on, Miss Memery!”

I grabbed for his gun belt quick as I’d grab for a bolting colt, and I got it, too. My fingers hooked leather, spurs rang, and the next thing I knowed Dusty was stretched out running like she was after hounds. I have a vague recollection of her clearing a couple of constables and of me striking against Bass Reeves’ back when she landed, but it ain’t more than the memory of a story somebody else had told you.

I just put my head down and tried to hang on while the Marshal laid his rein ends against Dusty’s shoulder — just once — and she somehow accelerated. “You saw him?” I yelled over Reeves’ shoulder.

“I saw something!” he yelled back. “Man on foot, shadow of that building over there. Could just be a damned rubberneck, but if so, why’s he lurking back there? And why’d he take to his heels as soon as I laid eyes on him?”

Dusty cornered like a cutting horse and barreled up the next street — it was River Styx Road. No, I don’t know who names these damn things. We also got us a Sarcophagus Street. Anyway, as she ran it, I saw a flicker of movement up one of the ladder escapes on the building sides.

“There!”

The Marshal reined Dusty so sparks flew. “Damn,” he said, “Can’t shoot at him. There’s people behind those windows.”

He didn’t bother dismounting, just jumped up on her saddle, tossed me the reins, and threw himself up at the first landing on the escape. It was a jump out across that drop-off to the sidewalk thirty feet below us that would of curled my hair if Mr. Marcel hadn’t handled that already.

“Follow on the ground!” He yelled something else, but it was lost in his boot nails ringing on the wrought iron.

I grabbed the reins and did the best I could. Dusty’s stirrups was too long, and no time to fix them, so I kicked my calves into the straps to keep the irons from banging her belly. She didn’t think much of the change of rider, but she was too much a professional to do more than flick an ear at me and smack my thigh with her tail. She moved for me, though, and no argument, and that was the bit that mattered.

Craning my head, I could make out the silhouette of a man vanishing over the roof edge, slightly darker against the moonlit clouds. He was only there for an instant — the same instant I realized that the Marshal had left me a long arm in the saddle holster. The Winchester with the chip out of its stock. Damn it, I’d had a shot.

But I didn’t know who I’d have been shooting at or if he’d committed any crime worse than running from a Marshal. Hell, I’ve run from an officer of the courts once or twice myself.

I felt a horrible chill at the thought that the Marshal didn’t have a weapon. I almost yelled up to where I could still hear his boot heels climbing the iron, but then I’d be letting the maybe killer know Reeves’d left his gun. I was just about to expire from apoplexy when I remembered the gun belt I’d grabbed.

So he was heeled, and all I was doing chasing myself in circles down here was letting our suspect build up a lead.

I reined Dusty forward again. She went, asking for more rein than I was comfortable giving. But she took the corner easily, and in time to see somebody hurtle past overhead, jumping between buildings.

“This way!” I yelled, in case the Marshal could hear me, and gave chase.

I kept Dusty as tight to the building walls as I could without putting her in the sidewalk ditches. No bullets yet, but that didn’t mean old what’s-his-face up there didn’t have a gun. Just that he hadn’t decided to use it yet.

Dusty and me followed on, trying to track him. We saw him jump one more time, and we followed — but two or three blocks later and I had to admit we’d lost him somewhere. I was about to turn Dusty around to go look for the Marshal when I heard a rising whistle and suddenly I was just a passenger on the big red mare. She whirled and snorted, then trotted along as businesslike as you please, back the way she came.

We met the Marshal standing at the roadside, looking crestfallen as a cat trying to seem unconcerned at a mousehole.

“No luck, either,” I told him. “Where the hell did he go?”

The Marshal shook his head. “I had him. I was right on him. And I slipped on a damned roof tile.” He turned his head and spat. “That’ll teach me to chase people across rooftops without Sky.”

I offered him Dusty’s reins. She weren’t listening to anything I had to say through them, anyhow. “I wish the damn constables had gotten that search dirigible they’re always trying to pry money out of the mayor for,” I groused. “We’d have seen him try to give us the slip then.”

The Marshal laughed, not sounding too happy. “I got enough of a look at him to say he’s a white, at least. Not as tall as me. Hat over his hair, more’s the pity, and his face all muffled up.”

“It’s winter,” I said. “So is everybody’s.”

He stood there, stroking Dusty’s nose. He didn’t talk, but I could about smell his frustration.

I sighed, heart hurting as the excitement faded and I remembered the other business at hand. “We should go find out who’s dead.” I hoped it wasn’t somebody I knowed, and I felt awful about that at the same time.

“Miss Memery,” the Marshal said. “I make you a promise that I will do everything in my power to stop this man. I’ll catch him, and if I can’t catch him…” He shrugged. “If that’s what it takes, I’ll bed him down.”

He meant a pine bed, and a narrow one. “God bless you, sir,” I said. “Now come on, let’s go see whose murder you’re next to be blamed for.”