The sheriff, then, stood around with his hands in his pockets and his feet planted squarely under him, squeezing a generous quid of gum between his teeth and very slightly teetering on heels and toes, while the coroner made a cursory examination and observed, since it was coming gray daylight, how the lamp lay shattered just where it had fallen with Estan.  He asked, in bad Spanish, a few questions of the grief-worn senora, who answered him dully as she had answered Starr.  She had heard the call, yes.

“You know Elfigo Apodaca?” the sheriff asked suddenly, and watched how the eyes of the senora went questioningly, uneasily, to Luis; watched how she hesitated before she admitted that she knew him.

“You know his voice?”

But the senora closed her thin lips and shook her head, and in a minute she laid her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes also, and would talk no more.

The sheriff chewed and teetered meditatively, his eyes on the ground.  From the tail of his eye Starr watched him, secretly willing to bet that he knew what the sheriff was thinking.  When O’Malley turned and strolled back to the porch, his hands still in his pockets and his eyes still on the ground as though he were weighing the matter carefully, Starr stood where he was, apparently unaware that the sheriff had moved.  Starr seemed to be watching the coroner curiously, but he knew just when the sheriff passed cat-footedly behind him, and he grinned to himself.

The sheriff made one of his sudden moves, and jerked the six-shooter from its holster at Starr’s hip, pulled out the cylinder pin and released the cylinder with its customary five loaded chambers and an empty one under the hammer.  He tilted the gun, muzzle to him, toward the rising sun and squinted into its barrel that shone with the care it got, save where particles of dust had lodged in the bore.  He held the gun close under his red nose and sniffed for the smell of oil that would betray a fresh cleaning.  And Starr watched him interestedly, smiling approval.

“All right, far as you’ve gone,” he said casually, when the sheriff was replacing the cylinder in the gun.  “If you want to go a step farther, I reckon maybe I can show you where I come down off the bluff when I heard the shot, and where I went back again after my horse.  And you’ll see, maybe, that I couldn’t shoot from the bluff and get a man around on the far side of the house.  Won’t take but a minute to show yuh.”  He gave the slight head tilt and the slight wink of one eye which, the world over, asks for a secret conference, and started off around the corner of the house.

The sheriff followed noncommittally but he kept close at Starr’s heels as though he suspected that Starr meant to disappear somehow.  So they reached the bluff, which Starr knew would be out of hearing from the house so long as they did not speak loudly.  He pointed down at the prints of his boots where he had left the rocks of the steep hillside for the sand of the level; and he even made a print beside the clearest track to show the sheriff that he had really come down there as he climbed.  But it was plain that Starr’s mind was not on the matter of footprints.