Free The Nail and the Oracle by Theodore Sturgeon

swung around to look at the people again. He didn’t think any of them looked as if they wanted to stop him. Some followed him and Brannegan up to Miz Appleton’s, but he didn’t mind that.
    He shoved Brannegan up the porch steps with his grip on the arm and also with the end of his gun. He hit the door with Brannegan and heard the latch break; he hadn’t meant to do that. Miz Appleton and the other woman screamed.
    “Is this the one?” he asked, and they screamed again. He dragged Brannegan to the door and let go of his left arm and pulled his back hair until his face tipped up. Then he hit Brannegan with the ring on the cheekbone, and again on the chin, sending him flying down into the crowd. Down there he saw the little old man from the livery, clasping his hands together over his fat stomach and jumping up and down in glee. He called him.
    “Here,” he said when the old man had climbed the porch. He handed him the ring. “Give this back to him.”
    “How?” asked the man, taking the ring and loving it.
    “It’s your deal,” said Macleish, and went inside. He never did find out how the old man dealt it.
    He slept well, and departed in the morning before Miz Appleton was up and about. He left her the gold twenty dollars he had been given the night before. In the livery, he liked the looks of his horse. Somebody had bothered to curry him. Macleish saddled up and went to buckling the bags and fixing the blanket roll, and by the time he was finished there was a bug-eyed stable boy yawning down from a little cubby in the mow, who said “Gosh.”
    “Gosh what?” asked Macleish.
    “You’re the fellow cleaned out the saloon last night, gosh.”
    “You tell the old feller,” Macleish said, embarrassed, “my horse is happy anyhow. Got it?”
    “Your horse is happy anyhow,” nodded the boy. Macleish gave him money and mounted, and rode downstreet.
    When he passed the other hotel, a woman called. “Mister.”
    He reined in. The girl with all the hair came running out into the middle of the street. She was all dun-colored in a cape and hood thrown over what was probably night clothes, and no makeup. She said, “I didn’t know. I—I had to do what he said.”
    Macleish asked her, “Did you?” and rode on. He saw her lift her hand slowly and bite it.
    A little way on, down where he hadn’t been yet, a man called out to him and he stopped again. The man had a star pinned to his shirt. He said, “Look, I got two men bedded up back of the doctor’s office, one with a broken arm and one with a cracked head. I got two more locked up in the jail.”
    Younger Macleish asked him, “Why?”
    “Look, I can’t hold them ’less you make a complaint.”
    “I don’t complain.” He lifted his hand to snap the lines and go, but the man said: “Look, were you thinkin’ of maybe settlin’ in hereabouts?”
    “No,” said Younger Macleish.
    He rode out.

Assault and Little Sister
    Trembling in the bed, Little Sister cried aloud: “They
want
him to!” ‘They,’ of course, meant the police … the newspapers … oh, everybody. ‘To’ meant the—the horror she must go through—again! That’s the word, Little Sister:
Again!
—if he came back.
When
he came back. “Oh-h-h …” she moaned. But nobody answered. Nobody was there with her.
    Nobody was there
yet
.
    What was that?
    She lay in the dark little room staring at the moon-dappled window, and held her breath. Surely something moved out in the hall? Something was
breathing
out there?
    Call out, then. It—could be Peter Poteen, Detective Poteen guarding her after all. He—he could have thought it over, and—
    But then, it could be
him
. It could be—the terribly feared one.
    Or even, she thought—and her flesh crept cold, crept needly with speckles of cold—a new one. The papers were full of them and word got around, and some men found the victims especially attractive.
    Pain banded her chest with the held breath, but still she held it,