Power Read Free Page B

way into the sheriff’s office, which was even more crowded than the street outside. I noticed the two deputies, one of them hobbling on a bandaged leg. Sheriff Jim Flecker sat behind his desk, listening stonily to a half-hysterical man who leaned over the desk and alternately shouted at him and pleaded with him. This man, I learned, was Max Macintosh, the mayor, and as I pushed my way toward the desk, he was shouting,
    â€œWhat you don’t seem to understand, Jim, is that someone is going to have to answer for this!”
    â€œI told you I’d answer for it.”
    â€œYou told me hell—you told me nothing. The state police are on their way over here. I’m the mayor. There are eleven bodies outside I’m going to have to explain! My God, man, you’re not up in the hills! This ain’t no feud where you can wipe out a tribe of people and notch your gun!”
    â€œOh, shut up!” Flecker burst out suddenly. “You make me sick!”
    â€œThen you’ll be a lot sicker,” the mayor said, and then, seeing the hard look of rage beginning to gather on Flecker’s face, began to plead. The least Flecker could do, he pleaded, was to get together a set of sworn depositions to the effect that the shooting was actually a case of self-defense. Some men standing behind the mayor backed him up. Flecker listened, his eyes fixed on his desk; when he glanced up, I had pushed through to the desk, and he saw me and demanded to know who in the hell I was and what in hell I was doing there.
    â€œI’m a reporter,” I said. “I told you that before.”
    His face was cloudy with rage and frustration and the attempt to remember how this devilish day had begun. “How did you get here so quick?” the mayor wanted to know. I told them that I had been here, and then they wanted to know whether I had filed a story.
    â€œOf course I did. Mister, this is news—the biggest news in a long time!”
    â€œThen you better kill that damn story and kill it quick!” Flecker roared at me.
    Looking back at myself then, at the whole incident and what it began and what would flow from it—looking back at the kind of fresh and ignorant kid that I was, I can take some satisfaction from the fact that I was not afraid or intimidated, but was able to face Sheriff Jim Flecker and tell him that the story wouldn’t be killed because it was already in New York and probably everywhere else in America, and that within a few hours the whole town would be swarming with reporters, and that the best thing he could do would be to talk to me as he might to a human being. I think he would have killed me if he hadn’t been restrained by the mayor and the other men present; and then the mayor took me outside and said that I shouldn’t mind Jim Flecker, since the state he was in was understandable and only to be expected. “This is a thing that happened,” he told me, glancing at the crowd around the bodies. “Great God Almighty, don’t we all wish that it had never happened at all! But you put two trains on the same track and start them off at each other at eighty miles an hour, and by golly something terrible’s going to happen, isn’t it?”
    â€œWhat I would like,” I said, “is to look through the personal effects of the dead men so that I can get their names and addresses. Where are their personal effects?”
    â€œWith Jim Flecker, but for heaven’s sake let that rest for a while, Mister—?”
    â€œCutter.”
    â€œMr. Cutter—suppose you wait a spell, and I’ll see if I can’t get you what you need. Not that I’m trying to hide anything. What happened here can’t be hidden. But first things first—”
    He was interrupted by people who wanted to speak to him; just about everyone present wanted to speak to that poor man, from the doctor, who reported that the wounded man in the hotel had just