The deputy asks the obvious questions

Deputy Sheriff Horace Quinn rides out with Julius Euskadi to look into the rumour that Adam Trask has shot himself. Adam, grey and shrunken in the four-poster, sticks to the story that he was cleaning the gun, and Horace dismantles it question by question — a cavalryman, a cocked .44, a rod through the shoulder — until Adam will say only that his wife has gone away, that he does not know her name or where she came from, that she is beautiful and has a scar on her forehead, and that he promised not to ask. Then he weeps. Horace deputises the unwilling Julius to sit with him, takes a description from the Hamiltons, and catches a freight to Salinas. The sheriff hears him out and supplies the answer: a woman came into the county on Sunday and went to work at Faye's new house. He seals it between the three of them for the boys' sake. Samuel, told the wells are cancelled, tells Adam to act out being alive until it is true.

Told almost entirely from outside Adam, by two men with no stake in him, so the reader watches his story collapse under ordinary police questions. The sheriff's decision is the chapter's argument about how a county works: the truth is established, then buried, because the alternative costs more. Samuel's advice is offered as a giver's present, and refused.