The medicine bottle was nearly empty, and Deputy Thomas Bradshaw stood at the window in his jacket. It was the deep-green wool jacket the town issued, and it had faded in a quadrant above his heart, a pale place exactly the shape and size of his badge. He had not taken it off in four years. He slept in it some nights. It had become as much a part of him as the grain of his skin.

His sister Catherine held the bottle to the light.

"There is a little left," she said. "Maybe three doses."

"Then we will get more."

"With what, Tommy?"

He did not answer. He finished the cold coffee. He pinned the badge to the faded quadrant, where it had always sat, and the pale cloth vanished under the star. In the dark window his reflection wore the jacket as other men wear their bodies, casually and forever.

"I will see the doctor," he said. "He will carry the account a little longer."

"You said that last month."

"Get your sleep, Catherine."

He went out. The town of Morrow lay in the valley like a garment worn thin. The mill was closed. The grain elevator worked, and the diner, and the post office. The county had promised a highway, but the highway had never come. Poverty sat on the town the way age sits on a man's face, gradually, until it is the only face you remember.

He walked the main street to the sheriff's office. Sheriff James Whitmore sat at his desk, drawing on a pencil. He had been sheriff for thirty-one years. His own jacket hung behind him, old but not faded, because he seldom wore it. He had taught Thomas which doors to kick, which men to pray for, and how to keep both in the same week.

"Catherine's medicine," Thomas said.

Whitmore put the pencil down. "How far behind are you?"

"Two months."

"I can give you forty dollars."

"No."

"Take it. She is a child."

"She is seventeen."

"Still a child." Whitmore opened his drawer. Thomas put his hand on the drawer and closed it.

"I did not come for that," he said. "I came to tell you I will take the night shift at the elevator."

"The town pays you to be a deputy, not a laborer."

"The town hardly pays me at all."

Whitmore studied him. The old sheriff had pale eyes, the color of stones in a creek. "You are wearing yourself out."

"I am wearing my jacket out. It can be mended."

"Go home. I will make some calls."

Thomas did not go home. He went to the grain elevator and asked for work. The foreman, a man named Tillet, said he could sweep and sack for two dollars a night. He started that evening. He walked back down the main street in his jacket, and the faded quadrant lay warm over his heart.

That afternoon a county car came up the valley road. It was a clean black sedan, and it parked outside the sheriff's office like an omen. The man who stepped out was Edward Ashworth, the county examiner. He wore a blue suit and carried a leather folder. He had the walk of a man who had never carried anything heavier than a ledger.

Thomas was at the office writing a report about a stolen rooster. Ashworth did not take off his hat.

"Deputy Bradshaw."

"Mr. Ashworth."

"Sheriff Whitmore will please step in."

Whitmore came out of the back room. He looked at Ashworth, then at Thomas.

"Three hundred dollars is missing from the evidence locker," Ashworth said. "The Hopewell burglary money, sealed and logged, gone. Deputy Bradshaw, you had the key."

"Every deputy has a key," Whitmore said.

"Pardon, Sheriff. I am speaking to your deputy." Ashworth opened his folder. "The seal was broken on the fourteenth, at ten in the evening. Where were you on the fourteenth at ten, Deputy?"

"The elevator. Working."

"Can anyone say so?"

"Tillet, the foreman."

Ashworth wrote something down. "Very well. In the meantime, your keys."

Thomas unpinned his keys and set them on the desk. He did not unpin the badge. Ashworth looked at it and said nothing.

"Sheriff, I will need a word," Ashworth said.

Thomas walked out. The door closed softly. He stood on the boardwalk, and for a moment his legs did not know which way to carry him. He touched the badge on the faded quadrant. It was still there. Its weight was unchanged.

He went home. Catherine was sitting up in bed, the empty bottle on the nightstand.

"They will not give us more," she said. "I sent Danny Miller to fetch it, and he came back empty-handed."

"When did you send Danny Miller?"

"This morning. He said you asked him to fetch it."

Thomas had no friend who would fetch it. Danny Miller was the nephew of Deputy Frank Miller. The boy was twelve, and he lied about little things for the pleasure of lying. That was his uncle's blood.

"Finish your soup," Thomas said. But there was no soup.

He stood in the kitchen in his jacket while the evening came down the street like a curtain lowered in a theater. He worked the night shift at the elevator. His hands grew raw. The faded quadrant was the only warm thing on his body.

The days passed. The county did not clear him. The town heard about the three hundred dollars, and the way the town heard made it three thousand. Women stopped greeting him. Men let the door close before he reached it. Deputy Frank Miller smiled at him in the street and said, "Weather's turning, Bradshaw," and the meaning turned in the belly.

Whitmore fought for him. He went to the county seat twice and came back with nothing. Ashworth said the evidence was thin but the circumstances were enough. A man who had pawned his father's watch. A deputy whose sister needed medicine. Ashworth had read the pawn card, photographed, filed. By the time the review board sat, the file was fuller than the truth.

Catherine grew worse. Dr. Pearson came and listened to her lungs. His face made a private verdict.

"She needs the hospital at Mannock," he said. "There is a new physician there, and a machine that can help her breathe. But it costs."

"How much?"

"Sixty dollars to start. Likely more." Pearson looked at the bare walls. "I can drive her myself, if you find the money."

"I will find it," Thomas said.

He stood at the foot of her bed. She was asleep. Her breath came slow, with the sound of the tide going out. He could not lose her. She was the only one left of his blood. When their father died in the mill and their mother followed within the year, it was Thomas who stood at the stove, Thomas who sewed her dresses, Thomas who learned to keep a house and a temper and a uniform. The love he had for her was not a thing he owned. It was a thing that owned him. If they cut her out of him, he would be nothing but the jacket, hanging on a hook.

He went to Deputy Frank Miller's house. He did not knock. He walked into the kitchen, where Miller sat over a bottle of beer.

"You took the money," Thomas said.

"Get out of my house."

"Hopewell money. You had a key. You bought whiskey and you bought Catherine's medicine and you donated it to the church to look kind. You meant for me to be blamed."

Miller stood. He was a big man with a soft face and small eyes. "You are out of your head."

"I saw your boy at the pharmacy. He was telling Patricia Sowers that you bought medicine for a woman on the hill. There is no woman on the hill."

Miller's face reddened. "That is a lie."

"Where is the medicine, Frank?"

"It is at the church."

"Three hundred dollars of stolen money, and Catherine's medicine sits in a donation box." Thomas came closer. He was smaller than Miller, but he felt like the fixed point of a closing door. "You will come tell Ashworth."

"I will do no such thing."

"Then I will make you tell it."

Miller swung. Thomas took the blow on the side of the head and the room turned. He did not fall. He had been hit before, harder than that, in other towns, under other names. He caught Miller's collar and pulled him down onto the kitchen floor. They fought there among the spilt beer and the broken chair, the way animals fight, with hands and knees and the bone of the forehead. Thomas was not fighting to win. He was fighting to keep Catherine alive. Every blow he gave was a dose of medicine. Every blow he took was a payment he would make again.

He ended on top of Miller, his forearm across the man's throat. "Say it."

"I took it," Miller gasped. "I took the money. I meant to put it back. I put the rest in the ground."

Thomas held him there a moment longer. The ceiling was yellowed. The room smelled of yeast and blood. He let Miller up, and they went together to the sheriff's office.

Whitmore made Miller write the confession and sign it. Thomas stood in the corner in his jacket. The faded quadrant over his heart was damp with the sweat of the fight. He felt, for the first time in weeks, the world turning back toward him.

In the morning, Miller stood before Ashworth with a swollen eye and a raw throat. He said he had been beaten into confession. He said Thomas had threatened his boy. He said the signature was written under duress. Ashworth looked at the confession, at Thomas's bruised hands, at the honest face of a liar, and he chose what was easier to believe.

"Deputy Bradshaw, you will wait for the review board. You will not approach Deputy Miller again."

"It is understood," Thomas said.

Whitmore said nothing until they were alone. Then he put his hand on Thomas's shoulder.

"Frank Miller has been lying for forty years," he said. "The truth is a slow horse. It will come in. It always comes in."

"The truth is a slow horse," Thomas said, "and Catherine does not have the time."

That evening Dr. Pearson brought the word. Mannock would take her in the morning. The physician was skilled. The fee was the fee.

Thomas walked to the sheriff's office. Whitmore was still there, drinking coffee no better than the coffee at home.

"Tell me about Ashworth's offer," Thomas said.

"What offer?"

"Don't spare me. You came back from the county with something in your pocket."

Whitmore took a folded paper from his jacket and set it on the desk. Thomas unfolded it. It was a resignation, acknowledging the county's finding, exchanged for a closed file and a