Here by the Bloods Read Free Page A

something else, then stops, exhausted.
    â€œWe will get you to Doc’s. I swear it.” I watch the blood drain from his face. He starts to look through me again, all the way to heaven. I try to lock eyes with him, but I cannot see his face through all the damn water.

CHAPTER TWO
    The last of the mourners disappears down the hill trail heading back to town. My Sunday shirt is soaked from shoveling. I take a seat beneath the shade of the big pinyon pine and steal my first smoke of the day. Even with three of us laying into our spades, it took a quarter hour to fill in the berm of fresh earth that holds the sheriff.
    The widow was laid to rest earlier this morning, in the churchyard. Padre spoke a good piece beforehand, carrying on about damnation for the offenders and the broken morality of the West. He had to lump his lamentations for Sheriff and widow Daubman into a single go because he knows most rightly that assembling the citizenry of the Bend twice in one day, even if the second time is for their beloved sheriff, is beyond the miracles of the Almighty.
    From the churchyard the townsfolk followed the wagon carrying Sheriff’s casket—a handsome, cherrywood design donated with respectful condolences from the mortuary in Heavendale—in a slow-moving processional down Main Street and up the half-mile trail to Sheriff’s final resting place. The heat stirred a few sighs of vexation, which stern eyes quickly silenced.
    All of Caliche Bend had come to honor its fallen lawman. All except Frank Wallace, who remains bedridden on Doc’s orders, and Mrs. Wallace, who must be half-deaf herself the way poor Frank shouts everything now. Frank Wallace has come along in the two days since the Snowfall, when the search party, headed by me, found him mumbling nonsense in Big Jack Early’s cornfield an hour after dusk. My nose led the way, the smell of charred flesh and urine-drenched wool lighting him up like a beacon.
    Frank Wallace is lucky. Whatever shard of metal dismembered him was hot enough to cauterize what it left behind. Otherwise he would have bled out and the smell that drew me to him would have been the same one that attracts the vultures.
    Doc worked on him through the night while the padre convened a vigil of the widows that prayed and wailed by candlelight until dawn. When Frank Wallace opened his eyes just before noon the next day, he was, save for his damaged hearing, in remarkable possession of his faculties—so much so that two hours later he was able to holler out his account of the robbery from his bed.
    At the mayor’s insistence, a man from Western Union was brought in to serve as scribe, scribbling down every word. I and a dozen other folks gathered outside Frank’s window to hear the account, while Mayor Boone stood bedside, nodding solemnly at the appropriate junctures. When Frank Wallace, hoarse and weak of body, finally concluded his narrative, Boone anointed himself official witness by certifying the written record with his signature.
    â€œWell done, Frank. They will hang by this, for certain,” Walter Boone said, collecting the ream of parchment the moment the ink had dried.
    Tending to personal matters in Santa Fe at the time of the murders, Boone had received the news by telegram at his hotel and returned on the first train. He had not yet been home when he strode out of Frank Wallace’s house carrying the pages in his valise. The sight of his steamer trunk aboard the wagon, hastily packed no doubt, confirmed his direct arrival from the depot.
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    The fine headstone, spared the vicious glare of an unfettered sun by the broad branches of the pinyon, sends its gentle warmth through my waistcoat as I lean against it. I know it is the warmth of Sheriff and of Mrs. Pardell next to him, beneath a fathom of New Mexico dirt. My finger drifts languidly over the stonecutter’s work. The Pardell name I have seen enough times to know the letters. But the