The American Gun Mystery (Death At the Rodeo)

17: Celebration

Late afternoon found Mr. Ellery Queen leaning against the concrete wall rimming the oval arena of the Colosseum, speculating on the cursoriness of human grief. Anguish dulls; memories dim; it is only the scene that remains the same, an uncomfortable and silent reminder of what was and what is as opposed to what might have been. There, not twenty feet away, was the very spot on the tanbark where a man’s contorted limbs had sprawled in their last earthly obeisance short weeks before. Now quick men in serving togs pounded over the place bearing platters of food.

“Out, damned spot,” he sighed, and strolled over to the assembling group.

A long table had been set up on the dirt core of the oval, constructed out of wooden horses and boards covered with cloths. The table gleamed with silverware and glassware; there was a profusion of salads and hors d’oeuvres and crystalline hams... He looked around. Nowhere was there the faintest sign of the scene of the night before. The ring, the ringside seats, were gone; as were the lowered overhead arcs and the electrical equipment of the newspapermen and the broadcasting people.

The caterers concluded their preparations; Wild Bill Grant appeared with his arm about his son’s broad shoulders.

“Everybody here?” roared Grant.

The troupe, already dressed in their regalia for the evening performance, applauded vigorously.

“Then set an’ fall to!” roared Grant. “Here’s one cook-wagon gives you more’n slumgullion ’n’ hash!” And he followed his own advice by dropping into the chair at the head of the long table and attacking the sugarbrown carcass of a ham.

Curly sat down at his father’s right, Kit to the left. Ellery was a few seats farther along the table on Kit’s side. Tony Mars sat across the table from Ellery. Next to Curly there was a tall ruddy old gentleman who parked a small Stetson and a lawyer’s brief-case beneath his chair.

The troupe fell to, as directed. A product of the effete East, Ellery marvelled at their appetites. Food began to disappear with alarming speed. There was a constant chatter of chaffing and broad commentary from full mouths and powerfully champing jaws. Only the head of the table fell silent.

And gradually a pall settled over the table, and the clamor of the troupe grew less. Perhaps it was Wild Bill’s own depressed and moody air, or Kit’s grim quiet presence, although she did her best to be sociable. But as the food disappeared, so did the talk; until with the last scrap there was a booming silence over which one might have said the ghost of Buck Horne gloomily presided.

Grant threw down his napkin and rose. His bowed legs shook a little, and his heavy face was a deep brown-red. “Folks!” he shouted, with an attempt at geniality. “You all know the reason fer this barbecue. Today my son Curly is thirty years old.” There was a mild cheer. “Now that he’s a man, (laughter) he comes into his own. His mother, bless ’er soul, who’s dead an’ buried these nineteen years, made out her last will an’ testament ’fore she passed on, an’ in that will she made provision fer our son. She directed that when he got to the age of thutty he was to receive ten thousand dollars. He’s thutty today, an’ he gets it. Mr. Comerford, who’s been the fam’ly lawyer since the French ’n’ Injun Wars, seems like, come all the way from Cheyenne to make the legacy legal, like, an’ pay his respects; though the Lord knows he didn’t tote any money from the West, what with gangsters an’ — an’ all. I got only one more thing to say.” He stopped, and after their polite grins at his feeble attempts at humor, there was a strained and expectant silence; and suddenly a ripple that had no movement and was the more horrible for that flashed down the long table and left staring eyes behind. “I got only one more thing to say,” Grant repeated, and his voice faltered. “I only wish to the good God my ole pardner Buck Horne was — was here.”

He sat down, and frowned at the cloth.

Kit sat rigid, staring at Curly across the table.

The tall old Westerner rose, stooped for his briefcase, and then straightened up. He fumbled with the catch. “I’ve got here,” he announced, “the sum of ten thousand dollars in cash, done up in one-thousand-dollar bills.” He got the brief-case open, dipped his hand inside, and it emerged with a neat stack of yellow-backs held together by a rubber-band. “Curly my boy, I consider it a great privilege to be the instrument of carrying out your dear mother’s last wishes. Use the money wisely and well, as she wished you to.”

Curly rose and took the sheaf of bills rather mechanically. “Mr. Comerford, thanks. An’ you, pop. I— Hell, I don’t know what to say!” and he sat down abruptly.

They chuckled and chortled over that, and the spell was broken.

But only for a moment. Wild Bill, Grant said: “You boys an’ gals better take a last look at yore gear. We don’t want no slip-ups t’night,” and quietly nodded to the chief caterer. Chairs were instantly scuffed back, cowboys wandered off, the caterer’s men-attacked the dishes...

It was all as simple and uneventful as that. And yet Ellery felt, and saw reflected from the honest brown faces about him, the same feeling, the intangible presence of something unearthly which might have been the efflorescence of a ghost and was merely a manifestation of mass consciousness. Superstitious, impressionable, the group of alien men and women shuffled off, headed by the saturnine One-Arm Woody, bound for their dressing rooms, whispering of portents and dire things in the air. Many repaired to the stables to seek solace in their horses, or to go over their gear, while others felt furtively for their good-luck pieces.

The tables were whisked away and all traces of the festivities, such as they had been, were removed, so that soon not a crumb remained in the arena. A gang of workmen flocked into the amphitheatre through the various entrances above and began to put the finishing touches on the preparations for the evening’s performance.

Ellery stood quietly by himself, off at one side, watching.

Only ten feet away Grant was attempting to talk cheerfully to his son and Kit. Kit was pale, but smiling. And Curly was unnaturally silent. The old lawyer beamed on them from the side. Grant continued to be cheerful... And then in the midst of a sentence that famous old Indian fighter and United States Marshal stopped, grew white, gulped hard and noisily, and, muttering something, half-ran across the arena to the exit which led most directly to his office.

Curly and Kit were stunned, and Comerford rubbed his face foolishly.

Ellery came alert as a dog to the point. Something had happened. But what? He strove — so imperfect is unprepared and innocent observation — to recall Grant’s precise position at the instant he had ceased talking; and the best he could recall was that the showman had stared over Curly’s shoulder at that peculiar instant, had stared at the eastern main gateway from the arena, the gateway through which the troupe had shuffled a few moments before.

It was almost, Ellery reflected minutes later as he stood a lone and slender figure of puzzlement among Tony Mars’s busy workmen, it was almost as if Grant had seen a strange face in the dark gateway.