The Comfortable Coffin by Richard S Prather

Author:Richard S Prather [Prather, Richard S]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Dion Henderson

First Man at the Funeral

We were up in the Erickson north forty with my old dog, and the Sheriff had just missed the prettiest double on quail you ever saw when the jailer came panting and wheezing through the sedge.

“Sheriff,” he hollered. “There’s been a death.”

“Not here there ain’t, dang it,” the Sheriff said, blowing smoke out of the barrels of his double gun. “I shot under the left bird and I was a mile behind the right one.”

“No, no,” the jailer hollered, even though he was right close to us by then. “I mean there’s a man dead.”

The Sheriff looked relieved.

“Well,” he said. “The way I’m shooting today, I’m better off back in town hunting criminals.”

“Hold on a minute,” the jailer was getting red in the face again, not from running this time. “I’m trying to tell you there ain’t any criminals. It’s just that old man Pembroke got flung from his horse and killed.”

The Sheriff took off his hat.

“There goes the last man in Andrew Jackson County,” he said reverently, “to own a good singles dog.”

“Amen,” the jailer said. “Doc thought you’d want to know right away.”

Being the game warden and something of a bird dog man myself, I had figured out by this time what they were talking about. There used to be a saying that you take a bird dog that was certain sure on hunting coveys of quail, and you catch his owner on the verge of starvation, you might buy that dog for money. But you take a dog that could mark down and find the scattered singles from a wild flushed covey, and the way you got that dog was to be first man at his owner’s funeral. Even then, the saying went, you might have to take on the support of seven minor children to get the dog away from the widow.

The Sheriff was safe enough there. Old man Pembroke didn’t have any widow, and no children. No anything, except a nephew who’d come down lately from the city. And that singles dog, of course. There hadn’t been much chance of anybody getting that dog before, because rich as he was, old man Pembroke would’ve been the last man in Jackson County to starve if famine hit.

“Let’s get back to town,” the Sheriff said.

We drove on in and stopped at Doc’s furniture store, which he was running when he wasn’t occupied with the undertaking business. Being the only undertaker around, Doc was the county coroner too, naturally.

“Poor feller,” Doc said, meaning old man Pembroke. “Probably put his horse over that log a hundred times. Probably got flung off twenty times out of the hundred, the way he rode. But this time he landed square on a rock and bashed in his head.”

“Right sad,” the Sheriff said. “You reckon I ought to go up and investigate, it being a violent death and all?”

“I reckoned you would,” Doc said, a mite tartly, “or I wouldn’t have been in such an all-fired hurry to tell you about it.

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