He was smoking a Camel unfiltered, sitting on an egg crate patiently working, at this point even using the sweat on his fingertips to make the tiny bomb parts stick to his fingers so he could work at them, taking the whole works down to its constituent pieces, where it was no longer a bomb, but just a collection of demolition materials on a table.
Meanwhile, Neville Brand came through cussing about Marshall Jim Brantley, having committed some kind of legal/technical faux pas that was just coming to light. Neville had back-trailed across the mesa on the hind-end of one of those 10,000 acre ranches that comprises almost a whole Texas county by its darn self. They always said something that the Brand family and Brantley family came from a common origin, but nobody really brooked enough of a notion to look that up, but instead it was something they just assumed.
"They smell alike" they would say. "Drop 'em off a building, one from each fambly, en dey hits the ground about the same. Splat." And that was your frontier version of 23 and me: just idle chat at the saloon.
Anyway, out on the table, there were a slew of bodies, with some hid well and some not, and even dead chickens, which Neville Brand ate some that hadn't turned yet, preferring chicken meat over other stuff, and even the whole event still fresh enough that he gathered eggs from the hen houses at a few of the places. He of course had the old familiars: bacon, salt beef and beans, but he did like chicken, just like a Baptist preacher man.
The old marshall had just went bloodshit it sounded, but there was more to meets the eye, and it would be the office's job to get the particulars on the there and what.
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