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next day or two to claim your brother's belongings, and keeping yourself out of trouble while you're in our town."
    He looked at me hard for several seconds, then put his back to me again and stalked off without another word.
    When the front door slammed, Obe said, '' Whooee. That's some fella, that is."
    "I don't like him much, either," I said.
    "Give me the willies. Those eyes of his, and the way he smacked the        wall . . . well."
    I knew what he meant.
    And I knew something else, too: Sooner or later, in spite of my warning, we were going to have trouble with Mr. Emmett Bodeen.

Chapter 5
    IT DID NOT TAKE LONG FOR THE TROUBLE TO COME. THAT same night Bodeen found his way to Swede's Beer Hall, got himself liquored up, and ended the evening in a fight with a riverman who didn't like the questions he was asking or the things he was saying about Tule Bend. But fights were common enough in the Swede's, and unless they turned into a free-for-all, no one even bothered to summon me. This one hadn't got to the brawling stage; Swede's bouncers had broken it up before much damage was done. So I didn't hear about it until Saturday morning, and by then there was not much I could about it. Except look up Bodeen and issue another warning, which I meant to do. Only I got sidetracked by Verne Gladstone and the arrival of Joe Perkins from Santa Rosa, and spent most of the day defending myself and playing political games.
    It was early afternoon before I shook loose. The first place I went then was to the Western Union office, to see if there were any answers to the three wires I had sent Friday afternoon—one to the sheriff of Stockton, one to the authorities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and one to the law in Tucson, Arizona, each requesting information on Emmett Bodeen. No replies yet.
    Then I combed the town for Bodeen, but he was nowhere to be found. Nobody seemed to know where he'd gone, either. The only person who had seen him was Obe Spencer; Bodeen had stopped by to make burial arrangements for his brother, at least. Jeremy Bodeen was being buried in the Tule Bend cemetery that afternoon. Plain coffin, no services. Emmett Bodeen had told Obe that he didn't believe in funerals or religious ceremony.
    Wherever Bodeen had gone, it was not back to Stockton because he had taken a room at Magruder's, a cheap lodging house over near the S.F. & N.P. yards. I found that out from Magruder himself. After which I told him to tell Bodeen when he showed up again that I wanted to see him.
    The rest of the day was quiet. Boze stopped by the office and we shot the breeze and played two-handed pinochle. Some before six I went on home and listened to Ivy carry on about the Bodeen brothers and what a state everybody was in because Jeremy Bodeen's murderer was still on the loose. She didn't start in on me about Hannah, though. She had tried it again the night before—called Hannah a "shameless hussy," among other things—and I had barked at her sharply enough to throw her into a fit of pique. That dinner had been a chore to get through and this one was not much better.
    Later, I sat alone on the front porch to smoke my pipe. It was a fine night. The temperature had climbed considerably over the past two days—the last warm breath of Indian summer, before the autumn chill took hold for good and blew us on into winter. I sat there enjoying it, my thoughts on Hannah.
    They were easy, pleasant thoughts for a while, but then they began to grow complicated, the way they did more and more often lately. What was I going to do about my feelings for her? I could not just keep yearning for her from afar; it was a foolish, cowardly way for a grown man to behave. And yet I couldn't seem to work up the nerve to tell her straight out how I felt. She was not looking for a man, that was plain, and even if she was, a man like me . . . well, it was too much to hope that she might have any romantic notions in return.
    I had never dealt well with rejection, even