“Take a chair, sir, take a chair,” said the conformable deputy, perceiving that politeness had come to be the order of the day.
Tubal Sims, almost paralyzed by the number and character of the new impressions crowded upon his unaccustomed old brain, still stood staring from one to the other, his sunburned, grooved, lank-jawed face showing a sharp contrast with his shock of tow hair, which, having been yellow and growing partially gray, seemed to have reverted to the lighter tint that it had affected when he came into the world. His hat was perched on the back of his head, and now and then he reached up to readjust it there; some subtle connection surely exists between the hat of a man and his brain, some obscure ganglion, for never does embarrassment beset his intellect but the solicitous hand travels straight to the outer integument. His creased boots moved slowly forward with the jeans-clothed continuations above them. He doubtfully seized on the back of a chair, and, still gazing from one to the other of his companions, deposited himself with exaggerated caution on the stanch wooden seat as if he half expected it to collapse beneath him.
“Now,” said the sheriff smoothly, “you are a sensible man, I know, an’ I wish you well.”
“How ’bout that thar pistol?” said Tubal Cain Sims, instantly presuming upon this expression of amity.
“I didn’t make that law,” said Enott Blake testily. “But I’m here to enforce it, and you’ll find that I know my duty an’ will do it.”
Tubal Sims relapsed into his friendless despair. And once more the deputy essayed a new device.
He turned his round, red, freckled, good-natured face full upon the visitor across the table, and, pushing back his black hat from the blond tendrils that overhung his forehead like an overgrown infant’s, he said, fixing a grave blue eye upon Tubal Sims, “You came here to tell us about some crime you’ve s’picioned.”
The sheriff plucked up his faculties as if an inspiration had smitten him. “You were going to give us the names an’ fac’s as far as you knew or they had developed,” he followed hard on the heels of the pioneering deputy.
“You caved after you got here, ’cause you wished the man no harm, and the sight o’ the jail sorter staggered you,” pursued the subordinate.
“But you had some personal motive,” interjected the sheriff, suddenly solicitous for the verisimilitude of the sketch of the interior workings of Tubal Cain’s astounded intellect. “It has to be a mighty plain, open case, with no s’picion ’bout it, when information ain’t got some personal motive,—justifiable, maybe, and without direct malice, but personal motive.”