* * *
Cherty Stevens was a bad man. He was the kind who liked to take revenge in the nastiest way possible, but he was generally sneaky about it. Albert Wilkins had not been all that nice himself. He had made a fool out of Cherty in a poker game a week back, and Cherty had threatened him. Then the night before, Mr. Wilkins had been found behind the saloon with a batch of knife cuts in his belly. Wilkins, however, was tough, and still alive, although unable to say who knifed him. It seemed likely to be Cherty.
The town didn’t have a jail. Didn’t even have its own law office, but the sheriff from Laidlaw was there. He found an empty room on the third floor of the house next to the doctor’s house, and he locked Cherty up there. Cherty said there was no proof he did it, and maybe he was right, but Wilkins was still alive, and the doctor said there was a good chance he would recover enough to say who’d knifed him.
Casey and I happened to be in town, having joined up with the sheriff to discuss the possibility of a reward if we tracked down a certain road agent who was giving trouble to travelers up mountain. The sheriff had quick deputized us, and we had helped carry Mr. Wilkins up to a bed in the doctor’s house.
And since Cherty was claiming loudly that he hadn’t done it, and that whoever did would go finish Wilkins off during the night, we had taken the job of sitting on the stairs all night to keep him safe. The stairs were the only way up there, and the only ones who had gone near him were the doctor and Mrs. Holt. And us.