Lawson felt the sun sinking. Always it was so, and never could he explain to Father Deale what that sensation was. Even wrapped like a mummy in his black curtains and hidden under bedsheets or sometimes under the bed or in a closet, he felt the sun sinking. With his eyes closed and his body in its state of sleep, he sensed the change of light in the hours, and then in the evening when the sun had almost gone he quickly came fully and often hungrily awake. So it was, on this first night in St. Benadicta. The man in the black Stetson and the black suit with the white shirt, the crimson waistcoat and the gunbelt that holstered two backward-facing Colt pistols could never have been taken to be what he really was. When he walked down the stairs of the boarding-house and onto the dirt street—the only street—of St. Benadicta, the sun was nearly a memory and stars had begun to sparkle in the sky. No one would have thought that indeed he had secured a room early this morning and had slept not in its rather moldy bed but in its much more moldy closet, away from the broken shutters that allowed in a little too severe a sun for the gentleman’s comfort.
