be followed. I found a few, but they didn’t lead nowhere; and everybody had run all over the place before I got there, so I couldn’t tell who they belonged to.
“Far’s I can learn, there ain’t been no suspicious characters in the neighborhood lately. The only folks around here who have got any grudge against the old man are the Deemses—Exon beat ’em in a lawsuit a couple years back—but all of them—the father and both the boys—were at home when the shooting was done.”
“How long has Exon been living here?”
“Four—five years, I reckon. Came in 1918 or ’19.”
“Nothing at all to work on, then?”
He shifted one of the kids around to keep from having an eye jabbed by a stubby finger, and shook his head.
“Nothing I know about.”
“What do you know about the Exon family?” I asked.
Shand scratched his head thoughtfully and frowned.
“I reckon it’s Hilary Gallaway you’re meaning,” he said slowly. “I thought of that. The Gallaways showed up here a couple of years after her father had bought the place, and Hilary seems to spend most of his evenings up in Ady’s back room, teaching the boys how to play poker. I hear he’s fitted to teach them a lot. I don’t know, myself. Ady runs a quiet game, so I let ’em alone. But naturally I don’t never set in, myself. I just stay away so I won’t see nothing.
“Outside of being a card-hound, and drinking pretty heavy, and making a lot of trips to the city, where he’s supposed to have a girl on the string, I