They could hear the muffled windy sound of a choked voice, the righteous tune of one who continued to talk even when closeted with the Missouri madman. “Old Sheriff ain’t going to be stabbed,” grinned Wade from side to side. More soft now came the Sheriff’s muddled sermon through drifting leaves, as something, a dream, slowly stopped his mouth.
“You, Wade, you been in there?”
“Ain’t anybody going to put Wade in that wagon, are they, Wade? Maybe he couldn’t take care of himself like the Sheriff.”
The horse sniffed the milling of the men. The head waved, hard of sight, feeling in the darkness for the hand with a rope. He was roman nosed, carried at the tip of his skull a broad sloping pad of fuzz and moleskin that had been cuffed when he refused to ford a river or rise in the morning to the traces. He was one that would stand when gimp-legged farmers came out to ask for help. The slack pockets in the nose closed in winter; in summer he snorted, the long ears lay flat. The tail switched, swept between the shaggy legs, rolled briskly into the black pear rump of an animal a fraction blooded with the mule. He turned his head away. From the desert other signs — a missing sheep, a carcass — now awakened the linings of his nerves. One foot moved, returned.
“When’s the show come on? When’s this fellow going to bring out that girl?”
“Or a two head calf.”
“Or a baby in a mason jar.”
The door opened an inch, a crack of fire, and was sloughed shut again by a helping shoulder. It opened, swung to, was pushed like a shutter from the nest of flames, and Cap Leech, careful not to smash his hands, stepping backwards, lifted the drowsy Sheriff into sight. They stood on the narrow platform of the top step from which Cap Leech, who now held the Sheriff’s faintly reeling body with one thin straight arm, had squinted at an early and voiceless dawn, scratching his face. With the other hand he picked at the lawkeeper’s hidden shirt front and the tip of a long white sheet was tossed back into the fire.
The Sheriff continued to swing his head, mumbled through misfit jaws, “The Range and Prairie Almanac never lies, the Moon don’t stand still. You bide by what I tell you.” Leech propped the Sheriff, took quick small steps to make of himself a ramrod. “If you don’t listen,” said the Sheriff, “I’ll fall.” Odors of disinfecting floor wash and spirits of ammonia drifted from the red door.
“Boys,” Wade tried to free his arms, “they’re dancing!”