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sit down?” said the Sheriff. Now and then he still caught a taste, some sort of chloride or oxide, at least a poison, of the medicine man’s evaporating drug. “What else you got in that bag?” He picked up his pamphlet, licked his thumb, then with asweep cleared the smothered desk. “You fellows have it all,” he said in a friendly, uncertain voice to the stranger who, sixty himself, might have been discovered plucking under the chin an old man suffering a head cold. “Hurt them when you want to, collecting all those bottles and knives. But,” and the Sheriff looked to the door, “there’s not much doctoring or tooth pulling for you here.”
    “That so.”
    “I don’t believe there’s a tree standing within a hundred mile where you could hang a shingle. If there was, they’d tear it down.”
    Cap Leech lifted the tin can, sniffed, fixed the cotton stopper. Those eye whites,, dull bits of glass pressed against the skin, hovered over the floor. Without raising them he began to laugh, “Open your hand.” Slowly, in the fat of the Sheriff’s upturned palm, he drew a circle with his broken fingertip. “Disease,” he said, “thriving. Catch a fly in your fist and you could infect the town.” Quickly, with the iced cotton, he swabbed the hand, let it go. “Clean. For awhile.”
    “Wade,” the Sheriff drew back and called, “come here, Wade!”
    In a stoop Wade pulled the pointer through the doorway. It brought with it the smell of rain, the smell of paws, forelegs and chest soaked in storm and caked with the mud of a downpour; it twisted its head, drops beating against its eyes, and shook, would have spattered the walls, between Wade’s knees. All day it shied and staggered under the sun. But by nightfall it was able to force moisture, to yelp at the shell-like roll of a cloudburst in its ears, to walk as if leaving puddles across the floor, to smell as if the rain had actually come down and driven it bleating and thin into a rivulet filling ditch.
    Wade walked stiff-legged, raised his head to smile, and pulled, lifted the dog by its throat. All four of the animal’s legs were rigid, hind legs clamped straight up and down, front paws crossed over itsbleeding snout. He dropped the dog in the middle of the room, released the matted fur. His hands were wet, the bottoms of his trousers damp.
    “Sheriff, this dog is scratched.”
    “Scratched?”
    “Yes, sir. She’s cut up.”
    “Got ahold of her, did they?”
    “Yes, sir. They must have claws.”
    The first motorcycle the Sheriff saw appeared at dusk, bounded around a corner of the granary and sped without lights down one gutter of the sanded street. He had raised a hand against it, started at the whirr of wheels spoked with dirt and a few oily flower stems, and had begun to run clumsily, freshly shaved and scented, as it jumped the wooden walk, leapt, a small thunderbird, and flashed through a plate glass window.
    The Sheriff sat down, stared thoughtfully at the animal whose rump still clung to the air, whose injured nose lay hidden. Then, slowly, he reached for it, lifted it with a brief grunt until its chest was on his lap. And he waited until the nose was uncovered, while it probed blindly, and at last allowed his fat cheek to be licked, touched with blood. He chuckled, “She’s been out back.”
    After shoving and kissing the round face of the Sheriff—the tongue that was clamped between its own teeth flicked once the lobe of his ear—the slick keen head of the pointer dropped and with slow high climbing motions the dog stepped and pawed ungainly hind legs against his trousers, attempted to thrust and double its whole body onto his knees. The Sheriff held his breath, slowly pushed the pointer to the floor.
    Without a murmur it slunk off. “She’s sick,” said the Sheriff and watched for some expression to curl across the healer’s cleft face. Nota grimace appeared, but slowly, with slackening pulse, he seemed to unwind and, reaching once