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wet stain just above his gunbelt. "Well I'll be damned/' he said, smiling ruefully, as if he had committed something rather foolish. She had him by the arm and was turning him around.
    "Come upstairs," she said.
    "What for?"
    "So you can get off your feet. Mr. Price, would you ride out to Doc's house right away?"
    "You betcha!"
    "Come on," she said to Buchanan. "Up these stairs."
    He held back, remembering. "This isn't anything," he assured her.
    "How do you know?" she said with the kind of anger you use for a child.
    "After a while," Buchanan explained, "you get to tell between a little scratch and a hole. This is a scratch."
    "We'll let Doc Vincent decide that," she told him firm ly. "Until then you're going to lie down."
    "Might as well do what Cristy says," said her bartender brother. "She'll save your life if she has to hound you to death."
    "That's very funny, Steve," she replied, pulling Bu chanan insistently toward the staircase.
    "How about the other gent?" he asked in an undertone.
    "What other gent?"
    "Isn't there somebody up there?"
    Her eyebrows shot skyward. "Up there?" she said. "In my room? What would a man be doing in my room?"
    Buchanan winced. "I just thought ... I mean, I ..."
    "Well, you can just think again!"
    "Miss, I'm sorry," Buchanan apologized. "I really am."
    "Let's stop talking and get you quiet until the doc gets here," she said with finality, urging him up the steps. He went along now, not daring to protest after making such a jackass of himself.
    Not that he didn't have a few questions about Rig Bog- an, though. The only difference was, he wouldn't put them to her quite so bluntly now. He had been only briefly singed by her anger a moment ago and he was sure he didn't want the full treatment. She opened the door, stood aside for him to pass on through. It was a small room with a single window, big enough to accommodate only an armchair and a table in addition to the washstand and the single bed. The empty single bed with the crisp white sheet and pillowcase, the light blue blanket.
    "Well, at least my gent made the bed before he sneaked out through the window," she commented.
    "I said I was sorry, ma'am."
    "Sorry because you were wrong? Take your shirt off and lie down."
    "Just sorry," he said. "And I'm not going to mess that bed."
    "You can be stubborn, can't you?"
    "Only when I'm pushed," he said and that made her pause, give his rugged face a close study.
    "Yes," she said, less brusquely. "And you've been pushed." She reached up, began unbuttoning the shirt herself.
    "I can do that."
    "You take the gunbelt off."
    Buchanan did the one, she the other. After she peeled the shirt from his shoulders he went and laid the gun rig across the back of the chair.
    "Horrible," he heard her say and turned his head.
    "Me?"
    "The gun. All guns."
    He smiled at her. "It started with fists," he said. "Then clubs and spears. Now we got guns."
    "And men who get paid to use them . . ." Her voice broke off. "I imagine that includes you," she said and Buchanan laughed.
    "Earned me a drink and dinner tonight," he said. She smiled back. "And that little scratch the whole length of your side," she said, coming toward him with a towel in her hand. She laid the towel over the gash, pressed gently. "Another inch," she said, "and there'd be a bullet in your body." "It's a life of inches."
    "It's a life of ... You'd better lie down," she said. "Hold the towel close and maybe the bleeding will stop a little."
    Buchanan did as he was told. He stretched out and his legs extended the bed by six inches.
    "Lordy," she laughed, "how tall are you, anyhow?"
    "Too damn, sometimes." He turned his shaggy head sideways and sniffed suspiciously.
    "What's the matter?"
    "Perfume in the pillow," he said. "That's a new one on me."
    "Not where I come from."
    "Carolina," Buchanan said. "Or Tennessee."
    "South Carolina. But how did you know?"
    "My favorite pastime. Placing people by their voices."
    "Is this the patient?" an old man asked from