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glimpse of the pistol butt sticking up from Dahl’s belt. His eyes grew large as he pointed at it. “Look! Mr. Dahl is carrying a gun!”
    â€œQuiet, Joel,” said the schoolmaster. But the children all stared in awe, seeing the imprint of the pistol clearly now that it had been pointed out to them.
    â€œA lot of good it did,” said Eddie Duvall. “You could have done something, but you didn’t even try!You just stood there and let them bully you, Mr. Dahl. You let them burn down our schoolhouse!”
    â€œChildren, that was a bad situation, and I did what I had to do. This is not the time to stop and explain it to you,” Sherman Dahl responded. “The schoolhouse is gone.” His eyes went to the twisting, spinning rise of flames and black smoke that only moments ago had been the Rileyville’s first school, a structure that he, the townsmen and even the children themselves had built less than two years ago. As his eyes turned to it, he and the children saw the front wall collapse inward across rows of burning desks.
    In the dirt twenty yards away, a shaggy brown housecat whose job it had been to keep down the rodent population sat staring as both her home and her livelihood disappeared before her eyes. “There’s nothing we can do here,” Sherman Dahl said gently to the children. “Let’s hurry into town and help put out the other fires. At least we’ll be doing
something.
…”

Chapter 3

    In their haste, the Peltry Gang had not done their best work starting the fires. They had hurriedly set the fires at three random locations with no regard to the direction of the wind or to the structure of the buildings. Then the gang had left town quickly, without giving the fires adequate time to completely destroy the three large buildings. In spite of the overwhelming black cloud adrift above Rileyville, the fires were soon reduced to steam beneath the relentless efforts of the bucket brigade.
    Abner Webb stood exhausted, his shirtsleeves rolled above his elbows, his face smeared with black soot. Beside him, Will Summers batted his wet hat against his wet trouser leg. Then he rolled the hat brim between both hands and put it on. “Looks like Rileyville has cheated the odds once again,” he said. “This is a tough town to kill.”
    â€œYeah, so it looks,” Webb replied, looking all around. Wooden buckets littered the muddy street. Charred dry goods from the nearly destroyed mercantile store lay in a smoke-streaked pile. A long hose lay serpentine from the front of the smoldering barbershop to the hand pump attached to the edge of an empty water trough. “If I was you, Will, I’d make tracks out of here before these men have time to catch their breath. They’ll start blaming you sure enough.”
    â€œThen I’m glad you ain’t me, Webb,” said Summers. “Leaving would be like admitting I was guilty of something. If I’d done anything wrong, I wouldn’t have come riding back when I saw all the smoke.”
    â€œSuit yourself then,” said Abner Webb. “I’ve got enough to worry about, explaining to the sheriff what I was doing when all this came about.”
    â€œYou mean about you and the French woman, Renee Marie Daniels?” Will Summers asked in a lowered voice.
    â€œHow’d you know?” Abner Webb asked. “You weren’t even here!”
    â€œI just figured it,” said Will Summers. “Different times I’ve seen the two of you together without you knowing it.”
    â€œYou have?” Abner Webb looked crushed by the news.
    â€œSure have,” said Will Summers. “The fact is, so have a lot of other people. There’s few secrets in a town this size, Deputy; you ought to know that. I only pass through here a few times a year, but I hear everything that’s gone on between. People love to gossip.”
    â€œJesus,” Abner Webb