Sheep's Clothing Read Free Page B

excuse me, Wolf, I need to make my rounds this morning. I should be home by ten. I trust you won’t burn down the clinic while I’m gone.”
    “Dun ya worry about that,” he replied, frowning, “I got a few things of my own to fix up before I can go after him.”
    “I should think you would worry more about healing first,” I said at the door.
    “Dun ya worry about that, neither,” he replied, “I’ll be fine, thanks to ya.” I did hear a note of genuine gratitude in his voice, and I wondered if he had strayed closer to death than he wished to indicate or even than I was able to determine. I donned my hat and headed for the door.
    “Keep yar eyes peeled,” he said as I opened the door, “and make a note if ya see anything that’s off.”
    “I shall certainly do so,” I replied, and headed out.
    My first stop was to the local smith. The owner was a powerfully-built man named Thomas Stone, who worked the metal while his oldest son James manned the counter. James was nowhere near as muscular as his father yet, but I had seen the boy box, and he had laid low men twice his size.
    James smiled as I walked in.
    “Morning, Doc!” he beamed. “How can I help ya?”
    “I was just dropping off a bit of scrap metal I dug out of a patient recently,” I said, taking the wedge of metal from my pocket and setting it on the counter.
    “What’s it from?” he asked, picking it up and holding it to the light.
    “The point of a knife, I think,” I said. “Someone stabbed him and broke it off.”
    “Let’s get this cleaned up, then, so I can see what we’re dealing with.”
    He washed the dried blood off the shard and polished it until it gleamed. He held it up again, and then squinted.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “I… don’t think this is steel.” He lowered it back down so I could see the print of his thumb stand out clearly against the polished surface. “See that?”
    I nodded.
                  “I just need to test one more thing,” he said, and rummaged until he found a compass. He set the compass on the counter, waited for the needle to settle, and passed the wedge of metal over it. The compass didn’t so much as twitch. He grinned. “Thought so.”
                  “What?” I asked.
                  “I think ya’ve got yarself some pure silver. Ya said this came from a knife?”
                  I nodded.
                  “Well, I can’t think why someone would want to make a knife of this stuff. It’s too soft for anything ya’d want to use a knife for. That’s probably why the point broke off in yar patient.”
                  “A keepsake, maybe?” I ventured.
                  James snorted. “What kind of spendthrift would stab someone with a silver keepsake?”
                  That I couldn’t answer. James was willing to pay a half-dollar for the knife-point, though, and I went on my way.
    I had a few regular clients that I liked to check on regularly, mainly because the folks of Salvation tended to live uncommonly long, but the only incident of any real note occurred at the house of the mayor, Samuel Cavanaugh, and his wife Carolyn.
    The Cavanaughs lived in a big mansion at the northeastern edge of town, with a large garden in the back populated by a sizeable grove of fruit trees. Samuel was a large man in his fifties, sturdily built due in equal measures to healthy breeding and the fresh air of Salvation. He typically kept his graying whiskers in neatly-groomed mutton chops, and the small army of servants conspired to keep his clothing tidy and well-mended. Carolyn was a lovely woman in her forties (though where she was in that decade I did not care to speculate) whose frequent bouts of insomnia and sleepwalking—a condition that had been around since before my arrival—left her looking drawn and hollow-eyed more often than not. The previous day I’d mixed up for her a new soporific,