“I don’t reckon you should of,” Hoke Birdsill said indulgendy.

Dingus was on his right side, and he turned his head experimentally, considering Hoke through the bars. The sheriff sat at his all-too-familiar desk, evidently writing something, and a shotgun was situated at his right hand, pointing direct;y into the cell. “Nice to have you back, you double-dealing, women-and-children-terrifying dishonorable skunk,” Hoke said, setting aside the pen.

So Dingus felt it then himself, finally began to taste the beginning of an outrage of his own. He started to sit up, forgetting about his wound, and then had to jerk back quickly as the pain caught him up. Hoke laughed. “You feeling somewhat peaked, are you, you miserable twerp?”

“I feel all right,” Dingus grunted. “No thanks to you, you boudoir-crawling varmint. Goldang it now, every durned time a feller takes off* his pants you — how’d you get me in here? You found me asleep and went and pistol-whipped me, dint you, you—”

“Weren’t nothing,” Hoke said casually. “Although as it happens I were jest writing the facts of it down, on account of the newspapers will no doubt be interested.”

“You gonter tell me, or jest sit there licking that floppy yeller mustache?”

“Why, sure, but like I say, it weren’t nothing. Miss Agnes Pfeffer come rushing in here, oh, maybe half an hour back, all distracted and talking about a preacher or some such, and so first I thought maybe it were a feller in town, name of Brother Rowbottom, raising a small ruckus somewheres like he does. But then she remarked about it being a boy all shot up, and so I dint have to ask what boy, not being a famous peace officer jest because of my handsome good looks alone, nacherly. So anyways I dint let her rave no more, but I told her who you was, and then that poor helpless creature, why, she like to scared me out’n my wits with a heartrending fainting fit. Goes to show you what being confronted with a immoral desperado like yourself will do to a well-bred lady, all right. Which reminds me that Doc has no doubt took her back home by now, and I ought to go on up and reassure her that you’re permanently out’n harm’s way once again in your degenerate career. I already done finished writing that letter, incidentally, asking when I kin get to put a rope around your miserable neck again, and the one to Santa Fe about that nine thousand and five hundred dollars in the new rewards likewise. Meantimes don’t start thinking you’re gonter trick me about escaping no second time, Dingus, not with them handcuffs and—”

“Did I ask you about all that? Did I ask you any blasted thing more than except how you got me in here?”

“Well, that were the all of it, anyways. After I took Miss Pfeffer to Doc’s I jest went on up to her residence and apprehended you.”

Dingus had raised himself to his hands and knees on the cot. “Well, fix your ornery hide — and I were asleep, weren’t I? So what did you have to go and coldcock me for in the process?”

“Why, Dingus, whatever give you the idea you was asleep? You was a mite drunk, I reckon, seeing as how you’d done took your clothes off after the lady ran out, but you was parading around the house with your six-guns all primed and strapped on under your nekked belly-button, sure enough.”

“Huh? Why, my guns wasn’t nowheres near the—”

“ ‘Course they was. And then we drawed on each other, like always happens when a stalwart sheriff meets up with a notorious desperado — but I beat you easy. Had the drop on you afore you could scratch two gnats off’n a whore’s behind. So then you tried to skedaddle, being cowardly at heart like most immoral criminals. I could of kilt you, but I dint see no reason to do that, seeing as how I get the same reward money either way. So I jest calmly shot you on a tangent, like, in a location where you couldn’t run too fast, is all.”

Dingus howled at him, charging to the front of the cell. “Why, you — you — is that what you’re saying done happened?”

“Reckon so, especially seeing as how I jest wrote it that way.”

“Why, you coyote-brained, pussle-gutted, limp-tooled old polecat!” Dingus was sputtering. “Now blast it all, Hoke, I were shot in the ass long afore you ever snuck on into Miss Pfeffer’s, and you know that for a gen-u-ine true fact!”

Hoke pursed his lips, eyeing him. “Now Dingus,” he said. “You think a famous law officer like C. L. Hoke Birdsill has got time to fret over details?”

So Hoke was content again, almost euphorically so. Because it had been a long and dismal six months, more full of frustration and bitterness than he wanted to remember.

Nor was Hoke thinking merely of that disastrous pretended jailbreak which had cost him both his reward money and his sinecure at Belle’s, since that had only been a beginning. After that there had still been the duplicity of the vest for him to endure, if not to say almost becoming a murderer over — not only tonight with Turkey Doolan but twice before. Even now, as he smirked over his ultimate victory, the memory of those earlier misdirected shootings still brought a taste of gall to Hoke’s mouth.

Both episodes had occurred very soon after Dingus tricked him. Hoke had taken instinctively to hanging around Belle’s again, in the hope that he might redeem at least part of the calamity by getting his original job back, but Belle would not hear of it. As a matter of fact she had finally added insult to injury by ordering him to keep away from the bordello altogether unless he had money to spend.

So he was actually moping disconsolately outside the house one night — wistfully eyeing Belle’s own prohibited upper rear doorway, in fact — when the first of the new indignities befell him. Two riders appeared along a rarely used trail, and before Hoke quite knew what he was doing he had emptied his Smith and Wesson at one of them. The second rider spurred off, but Hoke could not have cared less — until he discovered that the man he’d hit, the man in the red-and-yellow hinged Mexican-wool vest, was an inconsequential saddle tramp named Honig. The tramp had suffered a mild gash in the hip. What Hoke himself suffered at the realization of this new treachery was hardly endurable.

So he began to spend time behind the bordello deliberately after that, well-hidden in a grove of cottonwoods and no longer even caring that he was further alienating Belle by being there. In fact he virtually camped in the trees for eight days, or more precisely nights, until Dingus cantered up along the same trail once again. This time it developed that he had presented the vest to a down-at-the-heels prospector named Arden. Hoke had set out three revolvers on a dry pine stump, and his third shot from the second gun nicked the prospector in the shoulder, going away.

So by then the outrage was more than unappeasable: Hoke was almost mad. Belle actually threatened to shoot him on sight if she caught him within a hundred yards of her premises now — as did one of her better customers likewise, an elderly, normally undemonstrative barber who had suffered a mild stroke in the arms of a twelve-year-old Mexican girl while Hoke was blasting away at the vest for the second time, yet Hoke ignored both threats. In fact he was even starting to construct a semi-permanent lean-to shelter in the trees before the doctor finally managed to calm him down somewhat.

Reluctantly Hoke let himself be talked into returning to the more banal routines of his office. But then it did seem most sensible to wait anyhow, since, abruptly, new warrants on Dingus began to cross his desk with gratifying frequency. In quick succession the youth was accused of stopping a Wells Fargo stage, of emptying a bank, of removing the contents of a safe in a freight office. Little more than a month after his escape, he was worth exactly fifteen hundred dollars more than he had been the last time.