Power, The by Frank M. Robinson

in case you were wondering.”
    “So I gathered. He’s Jim Hendricks—most people in town think he’s a pretty good boy.”
    “He’s very good. Particularly with a knife.”
    The doctor took two more stitches and coated the cut with salve and lightly taped a strip of gauze across it.
    “Be careful not to smile or frown—at least for a few days. I wish I could say it wouldn’t scar but it probably will. The cut went pretty deep.”
    Tanner could already feel the pain thread back into his cheek. The doctor started to wash up at a basin in the corner. “Are you going to push charges?”
    “Wouldn’t you?”
    “Kids sometimes do funny things. I don’t think most people out here would want to see a boy punished for the rest of his life for something he had done on the spur of the moment.”
    Tanner looked at him coldly. “Is that the way you look at it, Doctor?”
    “No. But I’m afraid that’s the way a jury out here would look at it. The Hendricks boy is well liked in town, his father’s a respected member of the community—runs the feed store two blocks over.” He pulled some paper towels out of a wall rack. “You’ve got to realize that you’re a stranger. Country towns don’t care for strangers, especially those from the city. Before the trial was half over the town would have convinced itself that it was all your fault. They’d probably twist it around so they could rack you on a contributing charge.”
    He crumpled up the paper towels and self-consciously potted them towards a wire wastebasket. “Why was Hendricks trying to kill you?”
    Tanner’s cheek had started to throb and he felt weak. He wanted to go back to his hotel and sleep for twenty-four hours, then light out for a town that had never heard of Adam Hart or John Olson. But he realized he wouldn’t be permitted to do that. He was in the game all the way, and there was no getting out.
    “Is it any business of yours?”
    “No, but I can’t help being curious. Things like this don’t happen here very often.”
    It might be an act, Tanner thought. Doctor Schwartz could be another booby trap that Adam Hart had left behind.
    “When did you start practice in this town, Doctor?”
    Schwartz looked at him intently. “Five years ago. But it would make a difference if I had been here—oh, say for more than eight years, wouldn’t it?”
    Tanner said, “What do you know about him?”
    Schwartz drummed his fingers on the table top. “I’m the only doctor in this town, I’m the only one they’ve had for the last five years. I know almost everything there is to know about everybody. I know all their virtues, I know all their sins. And believe me, both would fill a book.”
    He brushed the sweat from a faint moustache. “I never met Adam Hart but I’m surprised how much I know about him. He must have been quite a guy. He borrowed money from everybody but so far as I can discover, he never paid it back and nobody ever pressed him to repay. They wrote it off the books and considered it an honor. For kicks, he used to start fights among the young toughs in town just to see what would happen. Nobody ever complained. If anybody else had done it, they would have been run in. When Adam Hart did it, it was just high spirits.
    “That isn’t all. There were half a dozen bastard children in town at one time who could have claimed Adam Hart for a father.”
    Tanner felt a little sick, thinking of a future twenty years away when there would be six Adam Harts running around. “You said ‘were’—what happened to them?”
    “They were sickly kids—all of them. Nothing you could put your finger on, and nothing I could do for them. Maybe it was something in the genes, I don’t know, but they caught every childhood disease there was and they didn’t have any resistance. They died, all of them.”
    Unsuccessful sports, Tanner thought. Mutations that hadn’t made the grade.
    “The girls who had them didn’t care that it was out of wedlock,”