silver mine district, you know. Bought out a couple of men who was failin' in business and then put 'em to work managin' their own stores for him. People around here have a right smart respect for him."

"Friendly sort of fella, eh?"

"Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that. He treats people well, gives money to the church and the school, gives a man a job if he's down and out, but I wouldn't say he was a likeable man personally."

"He's odd," said Chuck. "A real queer one. Maybe I shouldn't say it because I work for him, and he's done real proper by me, but—well, he's a funny one."

Brek raised an eyebrow. "Yeah—How?"

"Well, for one thing, he seems so—well, cold. Like he was a side-winder or a rattlesnake waitin' for a packrat to come by. He always seems to be figurin'—calculatin'. He don't smile much, and when he does, it don't look right on him."

"That funny accent of his don't help none," the sheriff chimed in. "It ain't that he can't speak good English, but it sounds funny, the way he says it."

"Been here very long?" Brek asked casually.

"'Bout three years, is all. Done right well by himself, considerin' he didn't have much when he came."

Chuck said: "After bein' robbed and all, it's a caution how he done so well." Then he laughed. "That was downright funny, when you come to think of it."

"Yeah," the sheriff said, grinning. "Him and his sister showed up one night, naked as jaybirds. A couple of owlhoots had robbed 'em and stripped 'em of everything they had. No horse, no clothes, no nothin'. He was lucky, in a way, though. He had a money-belt on him that he managed to hide in a mesquite bush while the bandits wasn't lookin'.

"I was sittin' in my office that night, when I heard a knock at the back door. I opened it, and there was John Sager, all dressed up in his birthday suit and nothin' more. Course, I didn't know who he was—"

Brek listened closely to the sheriff's story. It all fits in. Sagginer hadn't had time to prepare himself for this era; his speech was strange, and his clothes even stranger. So he'd taken off his clothes and pretended to have been robbed. And his sister?

"What's his sister like?" he asked.

"Pretty," Chuck said, "but she's not too bright. Goes 

 Prev. P 6/12 next