The man come in from the depot a little after eight with a paper under his arm and the word already on him.

You could see it before he said anything.

You get to a certain age, you know when a man's carrying news.

He set the paper down on the bar, took his gloves off one finger at a time,

and set it straight. Patsy's dead. Shot last night at his house. I was standing where I always stood,

end of the bar nearest the stove. I set the mug down careful, the way you do when you don't trust your fingers.

Around me, the room went quiet, the way a room goes quiet in a saloon, which is not all the way.

Somebody in the back kept talking about a horse. Somebody else laughed at something that wasn't funny. But the bar quit. Now I will tell you,

I had been on that same stool the night before. That was the thing that kept coming back to me all

morning. I had been on that same stool around nine o'clock, and Patsy had been behind the bar where Patsy always was.

Same apron, same magazine rolled in his back pocket because he liked to read between customers and the regulars knew to let him.

He had been in a mood all week, but not a dark mood.

More like a man settling a drawer. Fred come through about 9.30. He didn't

stop, didn't look up. He walked the length of the room like a man who had someplace else to be,

and he went out the back door, and that was the last I saw of him that night. Patsy watched him go, didn't say a word, wiped a glass that was already dry.

I am not telling you what that meant.

I don't know what that meant.

I am telling you what I saw.

The blue fox was never warm in the corners.

Long room, stove in the middle, nothing past the middle. But it was warm where I sat, spilled beer and wet wool and coal smoke, and underneath all

that the old bar smell a man gets used to if he has been drinking in Yankton one place or another for 20-some years.

The radio on the shelf above the bar was playing dance music out of Omaha.

...