“Bunk! It was a shabby trick, right enough. But a woman who’ll pull a trick like that for you when you are in a jam is worth a million an ounce, and you’d know it if you had anything to know anything with. Now you run out and find this Clio person, and bring her back with you, and no nonsense!”
He pretended he was going reluctantly. But I heard her voice when he knocked on her door. And they let me lay there in my bed of pain for one solid hour before they remembered me. They came in walking so close together that they were stumbling over each other’s feet.
“Now let’s talk business,” I grumbled. “What day is this?”
“Monday.”
“Did you get the Jew?”
“I done that thing,” Milk River said, dividing the one chair with the girl. “He’s over to the county seat now—went over with the others. He swallowed that self-defense bait, and told me all about it. How’d you ever figure it out, chief?”
“Figure what out?”
“That the Jew killed poor old Slim. He says Slim come in there that night, woke him up, ate a dollar and ten cents’ worth of grub on him, and then dared him to try and collect. In the argument that follows, Slim goes for his gun, and the Jew gets scared and shoots him—after which Slim obligingly staggers out o’ doors to die. I can see all that clear enough, but how’d you hit on it?”
“I oughtn’t give away my professional secrets, but I will this once. The Jew was cleaning house when I went in to ask him for what he knew about the killing, and he had scrubbed his floor before he started on the ceiling. If that meant anything at all, it meant that he had had to scrub