y, which is reason enough
why Luis was chary of confiding Mexican secrets to his keeping.

Elfigo Apodaca had quarreled with Estan, said Luis. He had come to the
ranch, and Luis had heard them quarreling over water rights. Elfigo had
threatened to "get" Estan, and to "fix" him, and Luis had been afraid
that Estan would be shot before the quarrel was over. He had heard the
voice that called Estan out of the house that night, and he told the
sheriff that he had recognized Elfigo's voice. Luis surely did all he
could to settle any doubt in the mind of the sheriff, and he felt that he
had been very smart to say they quarreled over water rights; a lawsuit
two years ago over that very water-right business lent convincingness to
the statement.

The sheriff had not said anything at all after Luis had finished his
story of the shooting. He had chewed gum with the slow, deliberate jaw of
a cow meditating over her cud, and he had juggled the wheel of his
machine and shifted his gears on hills and in sandy stretches with the
same matter-of-fact deliberation. Sheriff O'Malley might be called one of
the old school of rail-roosting, stick-whittling thinkers. He took his
time, and he did not commit himself too impulsively to any cause. But he
could act with surprising suddenness, and that made him always an
uncertain factor, so that lawbreakers feared him as they feared
nightmares.

The sheriff, then, stood around with his hands in his pockets and his
feet planted squarely under him, squeezing a generous quid of gum
between his teeth and very slightly teetering on heels and toes, while
the coroner made a cursory examination and observed, since it was coming
gray daylight, how the lamp lay shattered just where it had fallen with
Estan. He asked, in bad Spanish, a few questions of the grief-worn
senora, who answered him dully as she had answered Starr. She had heard
the call, yes.

"You know Elfigo Apodaca?" the sheriff asked suddenly, and watched how
the eyes of the senora went questioningly, uneasily, to Luis; watched how
she hesitated before she admitted that she knew him.

"You know his voice?"

But the senora closed her thin lips and shook her head, and in a minute
she laid her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes also, and would
talk no more.

The sheriff chewed and teetered meditatively, his eyes on the ground.
From the tail of his eye Starr watched him, secretly willing to bet that
he knew what the sheriff was thi