saved his life, for when he fell out of a boat I jumped into the water to rescue him. Rescue? This event never seemed to deserve such a description. But he was a nonswimming cowboy, a cripple when he was not on horseback. On the ground in boots and Western hat he looked injured in the knees, and when he toppled into the water—the bold bronze face with ginger tufted brows, the bent horse-disfigured legs—I went after him immediately because water was not his element. He was a dry-land man of the extreme type. Then why were we in a boat? Because Tigler was keen to catch fish. He was not so much a fisherman as he was intent always on getting something for nothing. And it was spring and the toobie-fish were running. The toobies, a biological antiquity related to the coelacanth of the Indian Ocean, lived in Volcano Lake, coming up from a great depth to spawn. Crowds of people, Indians mostly, gaffed them in. The fish were awkward, strange to look at, living fossils. They were cured in the sun and stank up the Indian village. Words like “pellucid” and “voltaic” can be applied to the waters of Volcano Lake. When Tigler fell in I was instantly afraid that I might never see him again, the Indians having told me that the lake was miles deep and that bodies seldom were recovered. So I jumped and the cold was electrifying. I boosted Tigler into the boat again. He did not admit that he couldn’t swim. He admitted nothing, he said nothing, but caught up the gaff and hooked in his floating hat. His cowboy boots had filled with water. Acknowledgments were neither asked nor given. It was an incident between two men. I mean, I felt it to be the manly silent West. The Indians would surely have let him drown. They didn’t want white men coming in their boats, filled with the something-for-nothing fever, and taking their toobies. Besides, they hated Tigler for price-gouging and cheating, and for letting his horses graze everywhere. Furthermore, and Tigler himself had said this to me, the redskins didn’t interfere with death but seemed simply to let it happen. Once, he told me, he was present when an Indian named Winnemucca was shot down in front of the post office. No one called a doctor. The man had bled to death in the road while men women and children, sitting on benches and in their old automobiles, watched silently. But at the present moment, high in the county building, I could see the late Tigler’s Western figure as if it were cast in bronze, turning over and over in the electrical icy water, and then I saw myself, who had learned swimming in a small chlorinated tank in Chicago, pursuing him like an otter.
From Kathleen’s letter I learned that he died in action. “Two fellows from Mill Valley California wanted to hunt deer with crossbows,” wrote Kathleen. “Frank was guiding and took them into the hills. There was a run-in with the game warden. I think you met this warden, an Indian named Tony Calico, a Korean War veteran. One of the hunters turned out to have a criminal record. Poor Frank, you know, loved to be a little outside the law. He wasn’t, in this case, but still there was a touch of it. There were shotguns in the Land Rover. I won’t go into the details, they’re too painful. Frank didn’t fire but he was the only one shot. He bled to death before Tony could get him to the hospital.
“It hit me very hard, Charlie,” she continued. “We were married twelve years, you know. At any rate, not to dwell on this too long, there was a big funeral. Quarter-horse people came from three states. Business associates from Las Vegas and Reno. He was very well liked.”
I knew that Tigler had been a rodeo-rider and broncobuster, winner of many prizes, and that he enjoyed some esteem in the horse world, but I doubt that he was dear to anyone except Kathleen and his old mother. The income from the dude ranch, such as it was, he put into his quarter horses. Some of these horses were registered under phony papers, their sires having been ruled off the track as doped or doctored. The hereditary attainder rule was very strict. Tigler was bound to try to get