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“Or should we form a posse?”
    â€œNo need for a posse,” Lithgow said.
    â€œRight, no call for that,” Reid said.
    â€œAnd what is your reason, sir?” the prosperous man said.
    â€œBecause we know who done it,” Reid said. “And yeah, the murdering devil is in this very town and walks among us. Oh he’s a sly one, but me and the marshal have taken his measure, lay to that.”
    A matron, with the stern, lantern-jawed face of a prune juice drinker, called out, “Who is the fiend, Marshal? Are we in terrible danger? I fear for my daughter Ethel’s virtue.”
    â€œI will make an arrest very soon,” Lithgow said. “And your daughter is in no danger. This was a crime of passion.”
    For her part, Ethel, a scrawny girl who looked somewhat like a turkey, seemed aggrieved by the lawman’s last remark.
    Several women pushed and prodded Polly Mallory’s body, sniffing into tiny lace handkerchiefs like the grieving dwarfs around Snow White.
    Suddenly irritated, the marshal yelled, “You women get away from there. Someone bring Silas Strange. He’s got work to do.”
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    The undertaker, a small, thin man in a clawhammer coat three sizes too big for him, flapped along the boardwalk like a crow with a broken wing. He took the dead girl away in a reusable canvas coffin carried by two burly assistants, their faces professionally solemn.
    Flintlock caught a glimpse of the bruises on the girl’s throat and dismissed the murder as indeed a crime passionnel , not an unusual occurrence on the frontier when eligible women were few and desires and jealousies ran deep.
    In other words, he told himself, it was none of his business.

CHAPTER SIX
    â€œIt’s your kind of business, Sam,” Clifton Wraith said.
    Flintlock studied the Pinkerton agent with a mix of astonishment and disdain.
    â€œWhere’s the profit, Cliff?” he said.
    â€œFrom me, none. From the young man’s lawyer, gun wages. At least for a while.”
    â€œWhat’s a while?”
    â€œUntil he can get Jamie McPhee out of town.”
    â€œWell, I’m just about flat broke.”
    â€œI know. Too poor to paint, too proud to whitewash, as they say.”
    â€œYeah, well what they say just about sums it up.”
    â€œA man who relights the same cigarette three times and nurses the last inch of Old Crow in the bottle is hurting for the ready. I could see that.”
    There was only one chair in the hotel room and Wraith sat on it. Flintlock rose from his perch on the corner of his bed and stepped to the window. Day shaded slowly into evening and a night watchman wearing an old Confederate greatcoat lit the reflector lamps along the street one by one. It was payday Friday and across the way a row of cow ponies stood hipshot at the hitching rail of the Rocking Horse saloon. Inside the tinpanny piano played “Old Zip Coon,” but the notes lost themselves in the roar of whiskey-drinking men and the laughter of women who coaxed them to buy more of it.
    â€œPolly Mallory was murdered two weeks ago,” Wraith said.
    â€œI know,” Flintlock said. “You certain McPhee will walk?”
    â€œThe circuit judge told me he’ll release him tomorrow.”
    â€œSeems like McPhee is as guilty as hell,” Flintlock said.
    â€œHe says he and Polly planned to get married and he gave her his cross as a—”
    â€œGage l’amour,” Flintlock said.
    Wraith’s raised eyebrows revealed his surprise.
    â€œAll the years I’ve known you, Sam, I never reckoned you were such a romantic.”
    â€œI’m not,” Flintlock said. “McPhee said he didn’t get to his desk at the bank until noon on the day the girl was murdered. How does he explain being late that day?”
    â€œHe gets bad headaches. He had one that morning. The bank manager confirms that McPhee seemed to be in real pain.”
    â€œMighty