Mr. Dinwiddie started to ask just whose house I was referring to. But the others gave him a look that shut him up fast.

Robert Lee cleared his throat, and said for me to go on with my story.

“We can assume that you eventually reached the river, and you were there when the fire started. Then, what happened? What were you doing all the time that the rest of us were fighting the blaze?”

“I was trying to catch the fellas that started it,” I said. “They came crashing down through the underbrush afterward, trying to get away, and I hollered for ‘em to halt, they was under arrest, but it didn’t do no good. They kept on running, and I chased ‘em, yelling for them to stop or I’d shoot. But I reckon they knew I wouldn’t, knew I wouldn’t dare to, because they all got away.”

Robert Lee wet his lips, hesitating. “Did you see who they were, Nick?”

“Well, let’s put it this way,” I said. “It don’t make much difference whether I know who they were or not. As long as I didn’t catch ‘em, their names ain’t important and it would just cause hard feelin’s to say who they was.”

“But, Sheriff,” Mr. Dinwiddie said. “I don’t see, uh—” He broke off, seeing the look that Zeke Carlton gave him. Seeing the looks of the others, his most important depositors.

Because I’d fired another shot in the dark, and it had hit even closer on target than the first one.

With a couple of exceptions, there wasn’t a man there that didn’t have a grown or a semi-grown son. And there wasn’t a one of them younguns that was worth the powder it’d take to blow their nose. They loafed around town, puttin’ up a half-way pretense of working for their daddies. Whoring and drinking and thinking up meanness. Any troubles that broke out, you could bet that either one of ‘em or all of ‘em was mixed up in it.

The meeting broke up, hardly anyone nodding to me as they left.

I followed Robert Lee out to the walk and we stood talking together for a minute.

“I’m afraid you haven’t made yourself any friends tonight, Nick,” he told me. “You’ll really have to buckle down and work from now on, if you want to stay in office.”

“Work?” I scratched my head. “What at?”

“At your job, naturally! What else?” he said, and then his eyes shifted as I stared at him. “All right, perhaps you did have to compromise tonight. Perhaps you’ll have to again. But one or two exceptional cases don’t justify your doing nothing at all to enforce the law.”

“Well, I’ll tell you about that, Robert Lee,” I said. “Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example. A lot of fellas might think you was guilty of assault and battery when you punched Henry Clay Fanning in—”