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face was split by a wide smile.
    As soon as the door opened, the man lifted his hand in a casual salute. “Howdy, boys.” His voice was as high pitched and soft as a woman’s.
    Wesley could see why the knock on the door was so faint. The man wore bright yellow buckskin mittens with fur-lined cuffs that came halfway up his forearms. Wesley had seen similar mittens, designed especially for hunters, but the ones he had seen had the trigger finger cut free. The man’s rimless spectacles were well down his nose; no doubt he had tilted them down when he came in out of the cold and they steamed up in the sudden warmth of the hotel. “I’m Sheriff Cooke,” he said. “And might you be the boys from Montana?”
    In the silence that followed only Wesley was able to find his tongue. “That’s us,” he said. As soon as he spoke he felt as though he had already admitted to some guilt.
    Sheriff Cooke stepped into the room alone, but Wesley
felt as though others were with him. Once Wesley got to his feet and looked into the hall he saw his intuition was right.
    Two men in wool caps waited a few yards down the hall. They faced the open door and stood with their legs spread wide as if they were prepared to block the way. One of the men wore a long belted overcoat that looked as though it might at one time have been military issue. The other man wore a short wool jacket, and he was carrying a rifle or shotgun. Wesley didn’t know for certain because the gun was in a cloth scabbard. He cradled the gun loosely in his arms.
    Sheriff Cooke waved his hand in front of him as if to clear the air. “Better pull on your boots, boys. I’m going to have you come with me.”
    â€œWhat’s the trouble, sir?” Frank asked.
    The sheriff kept waving his hand, and now he began to sniff the air as well. “You suppose you could spare one of those cigars?”
    Wesley wondered if this might be a trick of some kind—first they would admit to smoking cigars and next he would inquire about the whiskey.
    Tommy, however, had already reached into the box and was handing a cigar to the sheriff.
    Sheriff Cooke held the cigar to his nose and inhaled deeply. “You won’t need your coats. We don’t have that far to walk.” He put the cigar in his coat pocket and led the way out of the hotel room.
    Wesley had a momentary impulse to hang back and then slam and lock the door behind the sheriff’s back. Then—then what? Leap from the window? Wait for the sheriff and his
deputies to crash through the door and drag him out? Frank followed the sheriff, and Wesley fell in behind his brother.

    The sheriff’s office was not at all what Wesley expected. Their own father’s office was in the basement of Mercer County courthouse, a large stone building fronted by a long flight of steps leading to heavy glass doors between massive fluted columns. The Great Northern depot was the only public building in Bentrock older than the courthouse.
    McCoy, North Dakota, had its sheriff’s office and county jail in a small, simple one-story building made of the same orange brick as the hotel.
    The boys had walked coatless the length of McCoy’s main street, and though the snow had stopped and the wind died down, the temperature had continued to drop. The windpacked snow crunched underfoot, and their breath formed great clouds of steam. They thrust their hands deep into their pockets or wrapped their arms around themselves trying to make smaller targets for the cold. Once inside the jail they relaxed their shoulders and raised their eyes to examine their surroundings.
    The jail’s interior was as plain as the exterior. There was a desk and swivel chair, a long bench that could at one time have been a church pew, and a coal stove with its pipe extending sideways through the wall. An empty electric light socket hung from the ceiling, and the room’s only light came from two