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Half an hour passed. Without tobacco it seemed a long time.
I stood there, holding it, wondering what it had to do with me. Wondering, and not having the faintest glimmer of an idea.
“Well,” he said, loud and forceful at the beginning of a fresh day.
She raised her eyebrows, but the expression looked artificial to me, as if it just went with the question I asked, as a matter of form.
The cop with me suddenly spotted the gun lying on the telephone table. He charged at it violently, like a downfield blocker. “This the death gun?” he almost shouted. “I should imagine so. It’s been fired.” “Ha!” He leaned over the gun, baring his teeth at me, and put his hand to his holster. His finger tickled the flap off the stud and he grasped the butt of the black revolver. “You should what?” he barked. “I should imagine so.” “That’s very good,” he sneered. “That’s very good indeed.” “It’s not that good,” I said.
“A likely story,” Webber said bitterly. “You get a lot of that sort of thing in your business?” “A lot of what sort of thing?”
I brushed my hair and looked at the gray in it. There was getting to be plenty of gray in it. The face under the hair had a sick look. I didn’t like the face at all.
I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.
“One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?” Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?” “Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.” Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it.
“I’m all done with hating you,” I said. “It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.”
It was a .38 Smith and Wesson on a .44 frame, a wicked weapon with a kick like a .45 and a much greater effective range.
We didn’t talk any more now. We had no more to talk about.
“Suppose I told you to go jump in the lake,” Degarmo sneered. The sentry said: “I might do it. I scare easily.” He patted the breech of his rifle with a leathery hand.
The same gaudy slacks and short shorts and peasant handkerchiefs as the day before yesterday, the same light breeze and golden sun and clear blue sky, the same smell of pine needles, the same cool softness of a mountain summer. But that was a hundred years ago, something crystallized in time, like a fly in amber.
