The Murdock's Law by Loren D. Estleman

smiled, but it died short of his eyes. “I never could resist a target like that. I’m the champion rifle shot of the county three years running.”
    I watched him, especially his eyes. At length I sighed and replaced the revolver in its holster. “It was a hell of a good shot.” I wanted to say something
more, to try and restore the good thing that had been growing between us. Instead I said, “What are you doing out here?”
    â€œLooking for you.” His tone was colder than it had been when we’d met. “Pardee rolled into town an hour ago on a buckboard. His brother’s in the back. Someone lynched him, and this time they finished the job.”
    Â 
    We found the buckboard in front of one of the town’s two undertaking parlors. The box was empty but for a coil of rotted twine and about a pound of wet sawdust, wagon stuff. BYRON C. FITCH, MORTICIAN was lettered in gold paint across the parlor’s curtained front window.
    The interior of the parlor looked more like a cathouse than most cathouses I’d seen. Curtains were drawn across the front window and lamplight sifted dimly over the muted carpet and rows of mourners’ chairs arranged in front of a casket on a raised platform draped in black felt. The sweet smell of hothouse-grown flowers enveloped us as we entered.
    An old man with wispy white hair brushed back over dry pink scalp and a scowl that had defied the undertaker’s best efforts lay in the casket, his head raised on a satin pillow and spotted hands folded across his vest. We took off our hats, as if that mattered any more, and went on past him through a door standing half open into the back room.
    Rosy light from the setting sun fell through two small windows high in the west wall, illuminating a cluttered pine bench, half a dozen lidless caskets,
and a naked corpse stretched out on a pair of planks nailed together and propped across a pair of sawhorses. The raw stench of formaldehyde contrasted sharply with the flowery smell in the parlor.
    A pudgy man in shirtsleeves who had been bent over the body glanced up and said, “Thank God! Please help Mr. Pardee out of here, Marshal. He’s not doing anyone any good, especially himself.” I recognized him as the man I had seen riding shotgun on Marshal Arno’s hearse the day before.
    Pardee, in rusty range clothes and a Stetson grown colorless from sweat and weather, looked like a man on the wrong end of a long fever. His face was slack and heavy, his eyes hot and sunk deep in purple-black sockets. I almost didn’t recognize him without a cigar.
    â€œLook at him.” His voice was so low he might have been praying. “Look at what those bastards did to him.” He was gazing at the thing on the planks.
    The dead man was whipsaw-lean, tanned from neck to hairline and from fingers to wrists, and gray-white everywhere else. His eyes bulged, the burst blood vessels in the whites black and twisted like hairs on the lip of a washbasin, and his tongue was a dark swollen thing that had grown too big for his mouth to hold. The rope had burned a blue line around his neck and the weight of his body had stretched it twice its normal length. His clothes had been flung to the floor in a heap.
    â€œPardee said he was last seen this morning, when he rode north after some strays,” Yardlinger said. “When he didn’t show up by midafternoon, Pardee and some of the hands went looking for him. They
found him dangling from a tree a mile inside the Circle T’s northwest corner.”
    â€œA mile short of the Six Bar Six.” The foreman’s prayerful moan had fallen to a hoarse whisper. “They didn’t even bother to tie much of a knot. They just let him strangle.”
    â€œWhose strays was he after?” I asked. “Terwilliger’s or Mather’s?”
    Yardlinger gaped. “Murdock, for God’s sake—”
    But Pardee was already moving. In one