The Transgressors by Jim Thompson Read Free Book Online

and the lady to tell what happened.”
    “You think about that for a minute,” Lord said. “See if you can’t find just a leetle somethin’ wrong with the picture.”
    He rubbed his eyes tiredly, looked down the slope among a stand of blackjack trees. Several oblongs of natural rock had been laid there, abutting to form a building foundation. Affixed to them were the edge-up timbers of the studding.
    “McBride’s house,” Norton answered his silent question. “He was bringin’ his wife out here as soon as she had her baby. Wanted to have ’em a good long way from town, I reckon.”
    “I thought his wife was dead.”
    “This is his second one. Used to be what you’d call his ward, I guess.” Norton grinned feebly. “One way of gettin’ a wife. Raise her yourself.”
    Lord looked down at the ground. Curly frowned at Red.
    “About what you was sayin’ a minute ago, Tom. What…?”
    “Well, suppose the killin’ had been my fault. You’re my friends, and you didn’t have no use for McBride. What would your story have been?”
    “Well…” said Curly. “Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.”
    “You’re sayin’,” said Norton, “that our word don’t amount to nothin’?” He frowned, scratched his head uneasily. “Come to think about it, I guess it don’t either.”
    “Oh, it amounts to something, all right. If you said this was all my fault, folks’d believe you right off. It’s only if you back me up that they won’t.”
    “What do you want to do, Tom?”
    “Well, that kinda depends on you boys. Don’t want you puttin’ your tail in a sling for me, but…”
    He explained his plan. The two men were agreeing to it long before he had finished. He was not asking them to perjure themselves; only to say nothing unless he later told them to. And that seemed safe enough. They had been fired along with the other workmen on the well. Like the others, they could have left soon after the firing; they could have no knowledge of McBride’s death or, of course, of Lord’s presence at the well. Someone would be stopping by the lease tomorrow; some supply man or mud-washer [ geologist ] or company scout. Let him discover the body, and report it.
    Red and Curley were both confident that the scheme would work. Lord was not so sure, but conceded that the death did look like suicide.
    “And it kind of was in a way,” he added dully. “Might be it really was.”
    They walked back down the hill with him. They shook hands. As he drove off, they were hastily repairing the tool-house door and disposing of the other mementos of his visit.
     
    With the approach of sunset, the August evening had turned cool. And as the sun dropped abruptly below the horizon, the cool became cold. Lord put up the car top and closed the windows. Then, moodily, he drove on again.
    He had hardly spoken since leaving the lease. Now, as Joyce began to prod him insistently, he told her of his talk with Red and Curly and about what they had agreed.
    She started to nod. Then, instead, her eyes narrowing slightly, she withdrew to her own side of the seat and sat there, looking straight ahead, a strange primness modifying the lines of her hard-pretty face. Lord gave her a quickly covert look. Grinning sadly to himself, he fumbled for a cigar, found none, and dug a wooden match from his pocket. He tucked it into the corner of his mouth and began to chew on it.
    “ ’Course, I didn’t ask how you felt about it,” he observed. “Didn’t figure I had to. Just thought you’d go along with whatever I said.”
    “We-el, I’d certainly like to, Tom. You know I’m always anxious to do whatever you want.”
    “Uh-huh?”
    “I—I’m not what I used to be, Tom. I haven’t been since we started going together.”
    “So I noticed,” Lord said. “Been wonderin’ how you got by fi-nan-shelly.”
    “Well, I haven’t been really. I’ve had to do without a lot. But I haven’t minded. I’d do anything for you, Tom; anything! But