McCarty’s face was like a skull made of frozen flesh. “They saw me, they turned yellow. You should of give me the gun, Carmody.”
One more time I said—sorry, Tex.
When I walked him down to the jail there was company waiting, stretched out on the floor in front of the sheriff’s desk. The sheriff was there, the two deputies, the dead whore, Noah Saxbee, the bartender, and Morgan.
“The gang’s all here,” I said to McCarty. “And now you’re here too.”
The row of corpses didn’t bother McCarty, and before I found the keys and put him in a cell, he walked over and looked at them, like a man proud of something he had made with his own hands. He turned to me. “I did for all of them—and they never put a scratch on me.”
McCarty was ripped and scratched from head to heels. So much dried blood stuck to his body that he looked like a Mexican Christ. “Not a scratch,” he bragged.
“In a manner of speaking,” I said. I locked him up, hung the keys on the tack, and that was the last thing I ever said to McCarty. I shut the door between the office and the cells, so I wouldn’t have to listen to anything more.
Most of a bottle was in the bottom drawer of the sheriff’s desk, and I pulled at that while I waited for the judge. People came nosing around the open door, and I told them to scat. Lord, how I wanted to get away from that town.
I was sort of drunk when Dink Westfall walked in.
“Raise your right hand,” I told him. He didn’t do it; that was all right; it wasn’t legal anyway. “By the powers vested, so on,” I said. “I hereby appoint you acting sheriff of Mariposa County. The kid’s in the cooler—and there’s the evidence.”
I finished the last two inches of the dead sheriff’s whisky, set the bottle on the desk, picked up my rifle. “Be seeing you, Westfall,” I said.
“Where the hell are you going?”
“To buy me a good horse. Can’t go any place without a horse.”
Not long after that, with a fair horse under me, I was riding out of town. An old man with nose glasses that I took to be the judge was in a buckboard coming in the other way. The man in the loud suit was with him. Maybe the judge was deaf, or just naturally loud. “That’s a mean looking character,” he said, meaning me.
I rode on, grinning.
Why argue with a judge?
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