I felt guilty. I passed Grandma Magpie’s house looking to be where I shouldn’t be. The house was smudged in smoke, quiet against the sooted fields. I parked the car for a moment and scanned the hillside where there was nothing but the slow wane of smoke from ashes scattered by the breeze. I turned the car around, back to my duties and the Dixon Bar. Bradlock had called me early that morning to tell me Louise was getting married to Yellow Knife. I had burned the fields like bridges.

Behind the shaggy screen door I could see Louise sitting on a tall stool with her back to the bar. I wasn’t expecting to see her; my heart leaped. Her hair was lit to shining by the bare bulb glaring from the ceiling. She had a drifting look about her, like she was thinking of someone. She was wearing a fancy dress I hadn’t seen before. If she had been wearing shoes she would have looked like she was going somewhere special. I didn’t think I’d been called in to pick up Louise. I surveyed the bar for a moment. I had a grim sense. A swirl of white gnats stirred above my head. I had that crawling feeling. The lights in the bar were bright, too bright, the faces too harsh, no softness. I recognized the mood from all my years as an officer. It was an atmosphere that called up meanness. One innocent quip becomes shrill. I stooped low, and squinted into the barroom to see who was there, ready for trouble. Eddie wasn’t bartending. Sheila Owens was standing behind the bar with a smear of lipstick on her face. Her bun was knotted at the back of her neck. She was laughing with someone and smoking, and I remembered Railer had said Sheila liked bartending a little too much. I could see that now. She slurred even in her laughter, a tall glass perched in front of her filled, five or six whiskey shots I guessed. I crooked my head so I might get a look at who she was talking to. I didn’t want to take any chances.

I saw the polished boot of a man who wasn’t a cowboy, the cuff of an ironed sleeve. It was Harvey Stoner, Harvey Stoner alone, no wife in sight. Everyone was having such a good time they didn’t even notice me. I pressed my face to the screen to see Stoner leering at Louise. I never liked Stoner, a sour big shot with an ass-crack smile, who made his money off poor Indians selling their allotments. He’d cashed in on the land around the lake, owned half the waterfront property, and now he was turning his greedy eyes inland. Stoner owned so many allotments on the Flathead some Indians called it the Stoner Reservation. It wasn’t funny to me.