Threepersons Hunt by Brian Garfield

did not turn it down out of politeness. He followed the old man inside. Luxan moved with deliberate strength; age had not hurt his coordination.
    The front room on the right was a living room, twelve by fourteen. The furniture was what you could buy in the trading post: inexpensive, functional. There were two old stuffed chairs in need of reupholstering. The room had no closets and no occupants and Watchman followed Luxan out of it across the hall into the other front room. There were two bunks and some children’s wooden furniture. Watchman opened the closet and got the smell of old sneakers. He said, “I guess you’re a good businessman.”
    â€œI work hard and I have a great many brothers-in-law.”
    There was another children’s room, two double-deck bunks in it and a litter of clothes and wooden toys. Opposite it was a slightly larger bedroom with a straw tick on the floor. Watchman looked in both closets and the bathroom. Across the hall was another empty bathroom and then Luxan showed him the utility room with its oil burner and water heater, and after that the corridor emptied into a kitchen that ran the width of the back of the house.
    The twelve-year-old boy and a younger brother sat at a chrome dinette table playing checkers. A middle-aged woman with the lean handsomeness of a grande dame stood beside the stove chopping vegetables into a colander. A girl about fourteen, with the same face as the girl in the roadhouse but no lipstick, was reading a book at a small wooden table in the far corner. There was a small refrigerator and a sink and a lot of open shelves, and the whole back wall was windows looking out upon arid fields that rolled away beyond the fringe of cottonwood trees.
    â€œIt’s a very fine house, Grandfather.”
    Luxan was the only person in the room who acknowledged that Watchman existed. All the others including Luxan’s wife were staring at fixed points on the walls or the floors. The twelve-year-old boy was continuously raking the hair back from his forehead; with an impatient gesture he slammed a checker across the board and said, “King me,” and cleared his throat because his voice was changing.
    â€œNow I have told you and your own eyes have told you he is not here,” Luxan said.
    The older boy who had brought the cows in came through the back door and stopped in his tracks to lay a narrowed stare against Watchman. He didn’t speak at all.
    Watchman said, “It is possible you’ll see Joe, or hear from him.”
    â€œIt is possible.” Luxan conceded nothing.
    â€œHe ought to give himself to me. It will be bad for him if we have to find him ourselves.”
    â€œHe has made his trouble,” Luxan said. “Let him get out of it by himself.”
    â€œWhy have you turned against him, Grandfather?”
    â€œI’ll tell you, men get bad sometimes. Sometimes they’re witched bad and sometimes they just get bad.”
    â€œAnd Joe got bad, and you wash your hands of him.”
    He wasn’t sure Luxan understood the idiom. But Luxan said, “Joe never wanted to help anybody, he was never any good to his own clan. He made a lot of fights and finally he didn’t have any friends around here at all.”
    â€œThat when he took the job on the Anglo ranch?”
    â€œAround that time, I think.”
    â€œAnd you haven’t talked to him since then?”
    â€œI saw him one time, maybe two times when they arrested him that time. Before he went away to the prison.”
    â€œBut not since then.”
    â€œI always told him he shouldn’t get drunk from too much beer. But he stopped listening. When a man stops listening to his elders there isn’t anything more they can do for him. He has his trouble, we all know this—but he has to find his own way out of it this time.”
    Puritanical righteousness and forgiving compassion made a strange admixture in the old man. Watchman thanked