oo, waiting for him to move. He measured footsteps with Kenny,
advancing in the same direction from a different angle at a pace so
calculated that they seemed to meet by accident directly in front of us.

Bill didn't draw but his hand never left his hip. His voice came clear
and sharp and edged with cold insistence. "Know anything about it,
Kenny?"

Strain seemed to tighten Kenny's face, but there was no panic in his
eyes, no actual glint of fear. "What made you think I'd know?" he asked.

Bill didn't say a word. He just started staring at Kenny's shoes. He
stood back a bit and continued to stare as if something vitally
important had escaped him and taken refuge beneath the soggy leather
around Kenny's feet.

"What size shoes do you wear, Jim?" he asked.

Kenny must have suspected that the question was charged with as much
explosive risk as a detonating wire set to go off at the faintest jar.
His eyes grew shrewd and mocking.

"So the guy who did it left prints in the sand?" he said. "Prints made
by big shoes?"

"That's right," Bill said. "You have a very active mind."

Kenny laughed then, the mockery deepening in his stare. "Well," he said,
"suppose we have a look at those prints, and if it will ease your mind
I'll take off my shoes and you can try them out for size."

Kenny and Bill and I walked slowly from Molly's shack to the well in the
hot and blazing glare, and the whispering went right on, getting under
our skin in a tormenting sort of way.

Kenny still wore that disturbing grin. He looked at the prints and
grunted. "Yeah," he said, "they sure are big. Biggest prints I've ever
seen."

He sat down and started unlacing his shoes. First the right shoe, then
the left. He pulled off both shoes and handed them to Bill.

"Fit them in," he said. "Measure them for size. Measure _me_ for size,
and to hell with you!"

Bill made a careful check. There were eight prints, and he fitted the
shoes painstakingly into each of them. There was space to spare at each
try.

It cleared Kenny completely. He wasn't a killer--this time. We might
have roused the camp to a lynching fury and Kenny would have died for a
crime another man had committed. I shut my eyes and saw Larsen swinging
from a roof top, a black hood over his face. I saw Molly standing in the
sunlight by my side, her face a stony mask.

I opened my eyes and there was Kenny, grinning contemptuously at us.
He'd called our bluff and won out. Now the shoe w