Pruitt made a throwing motion at Simon and cried, “Play ‘The Hog-Eye Man’! Let’s hear it!”

An orange peel landed at Simon’s feet. He did not even look down but called out, “Miss Dillon, don’t come in here!” He held the bow and fiddle down at his side and called to a waiter. “Go down and escort her outside. Hurry.”

But she walked in, into this abode of men and prostitutes, with her skirts in both hands and a desperate expression. Pruitt stood up, singing,

Sally’s in the garden punching duff

The cheeks of her ass go chuff chuff chuff

Simon called out, “Shut up, Pruitt! Miss Dillon, I will meet you outside, what is it?”

She called out, “Simon, you must go, hurry! Colonel Webb has an arrest warrant . . . ,” and at the same time Pruitt kept on singing about Sally and her duck and the line with the rhyming word and Simon’s rage took hold of him as a fiend or a dark demon would possess a body. Pruitt turned and saw her and grabbed hold of her skirt in a thick wad in his fist and jerked hard enough to make her stagger. She struck at him with her bare hand. Then Pruitt cried out the last words of his life,

“Hey girl, let’s hear that ass go chuff chuff chuff!”

Simon dropped his fiddle and jumped off the stage with his black coat flying open. With one powerful backhand swing he broke his fiddle bow across Pruitt’s face. The broken half of the bow flew loose in a scarf of horsehair like a stream of smoke. Simon heard hoarse shouting. Pruitt’s head flew back and came up again with blood springing red out of his face; a look of astonishment, then he rose from his chair. His hand went to his belt. He drew a knife, held it low, and with the other hand reached for Simon’s coat. Damon had grabbed Doris and was hustling her outside. Clattering noise as Damon’s D whistle rolled off the little stage. Pruitt’s knife coming up underhand. Simon bowed his body back in an arc and the blade swept up his belly and parted his shirt in a line. A button of his vest went flying.

In his right hand was the other half of the broken bow, splintered sharp as a needle on one end. Simon shut his hand hard around the end remaining, stepped close when Pruitt’s hand with the knife swept high in the air, and drove the sharp end straight into the place just below Pruitt’s sternum. He drove it in with all his strength. Right through that loud striped shirt and into his heart. Blood shot out in a thin spray, fine as mist. A sudden pause. Everything stopped. Then the knife fell from Pruitt’s hand and he bent low over the pulsing spray in his chest as if to contain it. He fell in segments, to his knees, his hands dropped, then he fell to one side.

Several men had hold of Simon’s arms. Pruitt lay on the saloon floor with the fiddle bow sticking out of his chest and the horsehair in a white silky stream flowing over his shirt. His eyes were fixed, staring blindly toward the ceiling. There was blood everywhere. Simon half-turned to look for Doris, but then somebody had hold of his lapels. He called out for Doris, elbowed a man away, but then another pair of hands took him from behind, under his arms, twisted upward.

He was being hustled outside. He had no idea where Doris was or Damon either. He found himself in the hands of several large men, one of them wearing a star. Another one had his fiddle. He fought them all the way across Main Plaza and down the alleyway called Trevi?o between the cathedral and the Horde Hotel; from here and there in the shadowed city came lights and music. They were hustling him toward the jail behind the Bat Cave. They knocked him down and then hauled him to his feet again by one wrist and somebody behind him gripped him by the hair as if he would pull it out by the hank and shoved him forward.

By the time they got him into the jail and into a cell he felt several hot places on his face where they had struck him with fists or pistols. His shoulder joints hurt. He was bleeding from the wound on his belly. They wrote down his name in a book; other names were there and the preferred charges: epilepsy, pocket-picking, habitual drunkenness, evading service. Simon, a fidler. Imployment musician. Charge homocide. Misspelled. They slapped his pockets and then propelled him into a cell with a shove.

He went and lay down on a bunk for a moment to get his balance back. After a while he sat up. He kept one hand against his abdomen. His shirt was sticky with blood. He realized that a lot of it was Pruitt’s blood. One man put an oil lamp on the floor in front of his cell and then left. The only man remaining was a thick fellow in a long dark frock coat, a short-brimmed hat, and a star. He turned the lock on Simon’s cell door and put the ring of keys in his pocket. It was the man who had been thanking Davis for his help in getting the sheriff’s position. At the dance. “The Moonlight Waltz.”

The jail behind city hall was one long row of cells with a narrow corridor or hall in front of them. Down at the entrance a sort of ready room where they had written his name down. He had been taken to the end cell farthest away from the door. There was a window across from him in the thick wall, an unlit lamp on the dirty sill, straw on the corridor floor, and sacks of corn piled up along with a shovel and a box of old horseshoes, a boot, an auger.

“Well, then. I had a warrant for your arrest, fiddler, and I had some doubt about its legality but that is now a moot point. This is a hanging offense.”

“Where is Miss Dillon?”

“I believe she’s being escorted back to her place of residence. I am a friend of Colonel Webb’s. Being fair here. Just so you know.”

“All right.” Simon stared down at the floor. “Is he dead?”

“As a doornail.”

“Good.”

The sheriff regarded Simon with an interested expression.

“I see you are unrepentant. It appears you were about to go tearing off somewhere with Miss Dillon. An abduction.” The man’s voice became high and tense and was heavy with stresses. “It seems you were planning on abducting her. Seducing her. A respectable girl. Not from this country. Unfamiliar with our ways. Looks like you talked her into coming into that saloon, a notorious haunt of prostitutes and drunks! Well. Fiddlers have their ways.”

Simon sat on the cot with his hands dangling between his knees. So that’s how it is. “Where’s my fiddle?”

“Here.” The sheriff lifted it from the windowsill. “You are a sort of predator. A desperado. Preying on young women.”

“I want Damon Lessing to come and get my fiddle. In the meantime go to hell and stay there.”

In the cell down at the other end of the long corridor a madman sang and spoke to the rank jail air in disconnected sentences. He sang snatches of Stephen Foster songs, spoke to an invisible man who was to write his name down in the Bible, they could see it there; he was Light-Horse Harry Lee, they could see it written down there. The one oil lamp threw long shadows down the corridor.

“Shut up,” said the sheriff, and the madman shut up. The sheriff turned to Simon, leaned toward the bars. “You were not with any Indiana regiment, you were with Giddings. I checked. I asked around. You’re from Paducah, you’re a bastard, raised on the Ohio, a river that is just a running slum from Cincinnati to Cairo.” He paused, waiting for Simon to ask him how he knew this. Simon was silent. “You want to know how we know this. Well. You’re lately come and since you are not equipped with wings you had to have come up with the freights. So Colonel Webb asked around there and found a driver who knew you. Told him all he needed to know. Well. It appears that you were about to drag that young lady into a life of crime and drinking and who knows what else?”

“I won’t have you or anybody speaking of her in that way,” said Simon. “She can’t be dragged. She is undraggable. Webb couldn’t keep his damned hands off her. We were to be married.”

“In your imagination. You are deluded. She is promised to Lieutenant Whittaker.” The sheriff smiled. Struck a match to the lantern on the windowsill. The other one was going out. Shadows changed places on the walls.

“You made that up,” said Simon. “You Goddamned liar.”

“Say that again.”

“You are a Goddamned liar.” Simon lowered his head, raised it. “You kissed ass to get this sheriff job. You’re not going to hang anybody.”

“You’re going to regret that. You watch your mouth.” The man grew jerky with anger and the keys rattled.

Simon knew he should shut up, let it all calm down, but he had killed a man and his fury was still upon him and had taken hold of him, stopped here at this last minute when they were about to start for the Red River Valley, that beautiful valley, that treacherous river, and all this now standing in his way.

“Boy, they are going to execute you.” The man’s voice got louder, as if Simon were hard of hearing. “For murder!”

“Not without a trial.”

“You’re going to hang!”

“Bullshit.”