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debris consisted mainly of cigar butts, though I did notice a dead rat or two in the pile.
    â€œYou’re a wage earner now,” I informed him at once. “The gun and the holster’s on me but the ammunition is charged to you. Where’s Teddy?”
    â€œHe’s upstairs napping in the big cell,” Jackson said. “I don’t think he wants to be disturbed. He might have a toothache.”
    â€œI’m curious about something, Jackson,” I remarked, snooping around the jail and looking in drawers, as women will.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThis fellow Mexican Joe, who is supposed to be a bad killer, I guess, came in the jail and took a broom. Why would a murderous killer take a broom?”
    â€œI don’t know and I hope you’re not thinking of waking Sheriff Bunsen up to ask him,” Jackson said. “I expect he needs his rest.”
    â€œHis rest from me, is what you mean,” I told him. I could tell that my little brother was soon going to take against me and defend his fellow male. Jackson was plainly nervous about my snooping in drawers, but I didn’t let that stop me. Teddy Bunsen had proposed to me six times, and was probably working up to a seventh try. In my view that gave me every right to snoop—after all, he could have a locket with another woman’s picture in it. The fact that I had no intention of marrying him didn’t mean that I had no right to be curious about what other ladies he might have in his life.
    â€œI hope you don’t think I’m too hard on Teddy,” I said, with a grin.
    Jackson just sighed in a tired way, as if the whole subject of myself and Ted and Father’s death and the move to town had worn him to a frazzle, on the inside at least.
    â€œYou’d better get on up to that rooming house,” he said. “What if somebody else rents that room—then where would you sleep?”
    He squatted down to prise the lid off the paint can and looked at me with one of those lonely looks that never failed to touch me. Father’s foolishness with the noose was forcing Jackson to have to grow up, and at a rapid pace. Father wasn’t coming back, and even when he was alive, he had been only occasionally helpful. Father looked to his own needs, and expected the whole family—a shrinking company—to look after him too. If anybody raised Jackson it was me—except for a dance or two back in Virginia, when I stayed out all night kicking up my heels, Jackson and I had never spent a night apart. But here we were in Rita Blanca, faced with the necessity of sleeping under different roofs for nearly the first time in our lives.
    â€œJackson, are you sorry we moved into town?” I asked him.
    â€œI don’t know yet,” he said, “but I like this jail—it feels peaceful. I just wish you could stay here with me, Nellie.”
    â€œOut of the question,” I said. “But I won’t be far.”
    Jackson managed to get the top off the can of paint and was staring into the white paint as if he wished he could drown in it. Young men are just moody—there’s not a woman alive who wouldn’t testify to that.
    Then another thought crossed my mind.
    â€œIs it Virginia you’re hankering for?” I asked. “Is it that you’d rather just give up on the West?”
    Jackson had found a stick and had begun to stir the paint, which was going to have to be thinned a good bit before it could be slapped onto those dry-as-a-bone gallows boards.
    I suppose I was asking myself the same question I had addressed to Jack, my brother.
    â€œDo I have to answer right now? I need to find paint thinner,” Jackson said. “I sure don’t want to be quitting Sheriff Bunsen until I at least get those gallows painted.”
    â€œI wonder if the criminals will feel any better about being hungonce they notice that at least the gallows have been newly painted,” I