Mankiller, Colorado

by William W. Johnstone

Or be dead before they had a chance to do anything else.

  When they got back to the sheriff’s office, Biscuits O’Brien was still asleep on the cot in the back room. Bo and Scratch got him up and forced him to drink black coffee until he was reasonably awake, if not sober. He refused to reveal where he’d had the extra bottle of whiskey hidden. Short of beating it out of him, the Texans didn’t know what else to do.

  Reuben and Simeon yelled complaints from the cell block, but Bo and Scratch ignored them. Bo left Scratch there to keep an eye on things and went to pay a visit to Edgar Devery.

  “You need to come down to the jail,” Bo began, and when Edgar started to shake his head, he went on, “Hear me out. Your boy Thad’s in a bad way.”

  “Is that wound in his arm festerin’ up?” Edgar asked with obvious concern in his voice. “Dang you, Deputy—”

  “His arm’s fine,” Bo cut in. “But he messed himself last night, and he needs some clean clothes.”

  “That ain’t my responsibility.”

  “He’s your son, and nobody else is going to take care of him.”

  “His sister will,” Edgar said with a scowl.

  “His sister? You’d send a man’s sister in to help him clean up after something like that?” Bo didn’t bother trying to keep the contempt out of his voice. “What kind of man are you, Edgar?”

  “All right, all right, damn it! Quit pesterin’ me. I’ll go up to the house and get him some clean clothes, then I’ll be down to the jail after a while.”

  “Thanks,” Bo said. “And I’m sure Thad will be grateful to you, too.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it. Boy’s as mean and surly as a bear with a toothache.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter,” Bo commented. “In fact, I haven’t seen any female Deverys.”

  “Yeah. Name’s Myra. She don’t come out much. Mostly she stays in her room on the second floor.” Edgar tapped the side of his head. “Poor gal ain’t quite right. She’d rather be shut up readin’ books and such-like. Seems sort of embarrassed about bein’ a member of the family.”

  From what he had seen of them so far, Bo would have said that Myra Devery might just be the sanest one of them all, if she felt like that.

  He wasn’t sure if Edgar would live up to his promise or not, but true to his word, the liveryman showed up at the jail that afternoon with some clean clothes, a handful of rags, and a bucket of water. Scratch patted him down to make sure he wasn’t trying to smuggle a weapon to the prisoners, then they let him go into the cell block. Scratch unlocked Thad’s cell and then relocked the door behind Edgar. When the liveryman called to be let out half an hour later, he said, “Ought to smell better in there now.”

  “We can dang sure hope so,” Scratch said.

  The one drawback to having Edgar come in and help Thad clean up was that he got to take a good look at the jail and its defenses, such as they were. Bo still expected an attempt to free the prisoners, maybe as soon as that night.

  However, the night passed quietly. The Texans took turns sleeping and standing guard, just as they had taken turns going across the street to the café for meals. Lucinda reported how everybody was talking about them and how there was a sense of law and order growing suddenly in Mankiller that the citizens had never experienced before.

  The next night, the Texans were summoned to one of the town’s saloons, where a couple of drunken miners were brawling. Bo left Scratch at the jail and answered the call for help, and as soon as he pushed the batwings aside and stepped into the saloon, silence fell like a hammer. The two men who’d been wrestling on the floor picked each other up and quickly started righting the tables and chairs they’d knocked over. They weren’t completely sober, but they weren’t nearly as drunk as they had been a few minutes earlier, either.

  “We’re sorry, Deputy Creel,” one of them said.

  “Yeah, don’t know what came over us,” the other miner added. “We got to arguin’ and just got carried away a mite.”

  “We’ll pay for any damages,” the first one offered.

  “Well…” Bo looked at the proprietor, who nodded his agreement to the suggestion. “All right,” he told the two men, “but next time find some way to settle your argument without causing any trouble.”

  “Yes, sir, Deputy, we sure will!” Both men nodded vehemently.

  Outside the saloon, Bo paused, grunted in surprise, and shook his head. A reputation as a town-taming lawmen nobody wanted to cross was one thing he’d never figured on having. It seemed to be pretty effective, though.

  Over the next week, he and Scratch found out just how effective. After the extraordinarily violent first twenty-four hours on the job, the next seven days were relatively trouble free. There were no murders, the first time in memory that an entire week had gone by without a killing, and only a few fights broke out that the Texans had to break up.

  The Deverys also seemed to be lying low. Jackson Devery didn’t make any more appearances demanding that his sons and nephew be released. The prisoners complained incessantly, but they seemed to be getting used to being behind bars. Edgar visited Thad a few times, which perked up the young man. He began to get some of his natural piss and vinegar back, which Bo wasn’t sure was a good thing.

  Thad’s sister Myra came to visit him, too. She was a pale, blond young woman who spoke in a shy half-whisper when she said anything at all and kept her eyes downcast. Her visits seemed to lift Thad’s spirits, too. Bo was convinced she was the person he’d seen peeking out through the curtains in the second-floor window of the old Devery house.

  With one of the Texans keeping an eye on him nearly all the time, Biscuits O’Brien had suffered the torments of the damned. He had been sick at his stomach, he’d had the shakes, he had been drenched in a cold sweat. But by the time a week had gone past, he was sober…and mad as hell about that fact.

  He was complaining about that very thing one afternoon when the office door opened and Lucinda Bonner came in. Bo and Scratch were straddling ladderback chairs, but they stood up instantly and nodded to her. “Ma’am,” Scratch said.

  “You boys are too polite,” Lucinda said as she waved them back into their chairs, but her smile said that she liked the attention.

  “That’s our Texas upbringin’,” Scratch told her. “My ma would’a kicked me from heck to Goliad if I didn’t stand up when a lady entered a room.”

  “Mine, too,” Bo agreed.

  “Well, that’s nice of you,” Lucinda said, “but you can sit down and relax. I brought something I want you to see.”

  She had a stack of papers in her hand. They looked like handbills of some sort, Bo thought, and as Lucinda held one up, he saw that he was right.

  The printing was big and bold and read:

  ELECTION, JUNE 5th

  COLORADO PALACE SALOON

  VOTE

  Mrs. Lucinda Bonner for MAYOR

  Dr. Jason Weathers • Harlan Green

  Sam Bradfield • Wallace Kane

  for TOWN COUNCIL

  Col. Horace Macauley for JUDGE

  VOTE for Progress

  VOTE for Law and Order

  VOTE for Mankiller’s Future!

  “Well,” Bo said as he looked at the handbill and thought about how the Deverys might react to it, “that ought to do it.”

  CHAPTER 24

  It didn’t take long, either. Lucinda paid a couple of local boys to nail the handbills up around town, and as soon as they started appearing, folks began to talk. It was like a tidal wave of sensation washed over Mankiller. Everybody was talking about the impending election, which was only a week away.

  Bo was in the café having a cup of coffee when the door opened and heavy footsteps sounded. The place was busy as usual, but silence fell as all the conversations abruptly ceased. Bo turned his head and saw Jackson Devery stalking toward the counter.

  Devery didn’t appear to be armed, but his face was flushed with barely contained rage, as usual. He slapped one of the handbill
s down on the counter in front of Lucinda, who had been talking to Bo. It was torn in the upper corners where it had been ripped down.

  “What the hell is this?” Devery demanded.

  “Keep a civil tongue in your head, Devery,” Bo snapped. “There’s no law against cussing in town, so I can’t arrest you for it, but I can give you a thrashing if I have to.”

  Devery sneered at him. “You could try.” He turned his attention back to Lucinda. A finger stabbed down on the handbill. “You can’t do this. It ain’t legal.”

  Lucinda was staying calm in the face of Devery’s anger, and Bo admired her for it. She said, “Actually, it is legal, Mr. Devery. Colonel Macauley, who, as you may know, is an accomplished attorney, has advised us that the citizens of a town have the right to call an election. All it requires is that the majority of eligible voters sign a petition requesting that an election be held.”

  “Petition?” Devery repeated. “What petition?”

  Lucinda reached below the counter and brought up a stack of papers which she set beside the handbill. “This one. People have been signing it all week. There are copies at the general store and the assay office, too. Once we had enough signatures, we could set the election date and candidates could declare.”

  The steady assurance with which she spoke took some of the wind out of Devery’s sails. Bo could see it. It didn’t take Devery long to recover, though.

  “I can hire lawyers, too,” he said. “I’ll sue you. This has got to be illegal. Mankiller is my town.”

  “You may own the land, but that doesn’t give you any sort of legal authority over the citizens. They have a right to determine their own local government. When Mankiller was awarded a post office, the State of Colorado recognized it as a town, which means everything about this election is legal, Mr. Devery.”

  “It won’t stand.” Devery thumped a fist on the counter. “It won’t stand, I tell you!”

  “Wait and see,” Lucinda said softly.

  Looking like fire and brimstone was about to explode from him, Devery turned and stomped out of the café. Stunned silence remained behind him for a moment, then the customers began to talk again, louder and more excited than before.

  Lucinda must have put quite a bit of effort into maintaining her control. She looked and sounded a little shaky now as she asked Bo, “What do you think he’s going to do?”

  “There’s nothing he can do to stop the election,” Bo told her. “From what you’ve told me and what you just explained to Devery, the law’s on your side. If he does try to interfere, the state could come in and arrest him. Might even get some U.S. marshals in here.”

  Lucinda shook her head. “He’s too smart to attract much outside attention to what he’s been doing. Not unless it was a last resort, anyway. But I can’t imagine that he’ll just allow this to happen without trying to stop it somehow.”

  Bo agreed with her. “We’ll just have to keep our eyes open,” he said. “When trouble comes, we’ll be ready for it.”

  Bo wasn’t ready for what happened bright and early the next morning, though. The sound of hammering drew his attention as he left the sheriff’s office to start morning rounds. He looked along the boardwalk and saw Luke Devery standing next to one of the posts holding up the awning in front of the assay office. Luke had a hammer in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other.

  “What in blazes are you doing?” Bo asked as he walked up behind Luke.

  Red beard jutting out belligerently, Luke turned to face him. “What’s the matter, lawdog? Can’t you read?”

  Bo could read, all right, and he didn’t like what he read on the piece of paper Luke had just nailed to the post. Somehow, the words on the hand-lettered notice didn’t surprise him.

  Vote JACKSON DEVERY For Mayor

  LUKE DEVERY

  REUBEN DEVERY

  SIMEON DEVERY

  GRANVILLE DEVERY

  For Town Council

  EDGAR DEVERY For Judge

  Vote for THE DEVERYS

  Founders Of Mankiller

  “You got a problem with that, Deputy?” Luke’s voice dripped scorn as he spoke.

  “Well…I’m not sure your Uncle Edgar is qualified to be a judge.”

  “He’s fair, and that’s all a fella needs. And speakin’ of fair, you don’t intend to give me any trouble over puttin’ up these posters when you let that Bonner woman have her handbills nailed up all over town, do you?”

  Grim-faced, Bo made a gesture of dismissal and said, “Go ahead. Put them up on the boardwalk posts all you want. But you’d better get permission before you nail one onto the wall of somebody’s business.”

  Luke grinned. “Don’t you worry. If I need permission for anything, I’ll get it.”

  Whistling a jaunty tune, he sauntered away along the boardwalk, pausing three or four posts farther down the street to take some nails from a pocket of his overalls and put up another poster. Bo looked at the first one and studied the writing, wondering who had done the lettering. It was nice work, and he suspected that Myra Devery was responsible for it. He wasn’t sure any of the others in the family had a delicate enough touch to produce something like that.

  By the time he got to the café to break the news to Lucinda, he found that she had already heard about this new development. Mankiller’s grapevine was working efficiently this morning.

  “Can the Deverys do that?” Bo asked. “Just up and run for election against you like that?”

  Lucinda smiled ruefully. “Any citizen of Mankiller can declare himself a candidate.”

  “Or herself,” Bo pointed out.

  “That’s probably the shakiest part of the whole proposition,” she admitted. “Being a woman, I’m not an eligible voter. However, if I’m elected and it’s set aside legally later on, the town council will have the power to appoint one of themselves as acting mayor until a special election can be held. That’s what Colonel Macauley says, anyway, and he knows more law than anybody else around here. So we’re going to carry on as planned. Now we just have to defeat Jackson Devery and his bunch.”

  Bo grunted. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Maybe more so than you think,” Lucinda said with a frown. “I don’t think anyone in town actually likes the Deverys, but there are people who’d like to curry favor with them. And there are plenty of people who are afraid of them. They might think it would be safer to vote for the Deverys. I wouldn’t be surprised if they did something to try to make more people feel that way before the election.”

  “Intimidate the voters, you mean.”

  Lucinda nodded. “Exactly.”

  “That would be against the law, wouldn’t it?”

  “I would think so.”

  Bo rubbed his jaw. “Let ’em try it, then. They might wind up with more trouble on their hands than they bargained for.”

  Bo had to get on with his rounds, so he said so long to Lucinda and left the café. As he walked along the street, he saw a number of people gathered around the handbills that Luke Devery had put up. The Deverys’ entry into the election campaign had stirred up a lot of interest.

  Other than that, the town was quiet this morning. Another night had passed without a murder. The citizens of Mankiller might be starting to feel secure and safe for a change. Bo hoped that if that were the case, it wouldn’t turn out to be a big mistake for them.

  When he returned to the sheriff’s office, he found Biscuits O’Brien saying to Scratch, “Tell me again how all that whiskey spilled on the floor in the Fan-Tan.”

  Scratch shook his head. “I ain’t gonna do it. You know good and well it’ll just give you nightmares, Biscuits.”

  “Yeah, I know. I can see it in my head. Haven’t been able to stop thinkin’ about it ever since you told me.” Biscuits shuddered.

  Scratch glanced at Bo, then looked again. “You appear to have somethin’ on your mind, pard,” he said. “What is it?”

  Bo beckoned for them to follow him as he started towar
d the cell block door. “You’re right,” he told Scratch. “Come along back here so I’ll only have to say it once.”

  Wearing puzzled expressions, Scratch and Biscuits followed Bo into the cell block. Reuben and Simeon immediately started to complain, but Bo held up a hand to silence them. Thad just glared from the cell across the aisle.

  “I’ve got some news for you boys,” Bo told the brothers. “You probably don’t know it yet, but you’re running for town council in the election.”

  “What?” The exclamation came from four people: Scratch, Biscuits, and the two candidates themselves. Thad was the only one who still didn’t say anything.

  “I said you’re running for town council,” Bo repeated. “Your brother Luke is, too. He’s out nailing up handbills all over town about it right now.”

  “But that ain’t possible,” Scratch protested. “They’re in jail!”

  Bo shrugged. “That doesn’t keep them from running. If they’re elected, I figure the new judge will dismiss the charges against them.”

  “What new judge?”

  “Their Uncle Edgar.”

  “That damn liveryman who tried to steal our horses?”

  “One and the same,” Bo replied with a nod.

  “But he can’t be a judge! He takes care of horses and mucks out stalls for a livin’.”

  “Evidently that doesn’t disqualify him. And I’m sure that if these two get elected, it’ll mean that the rest of the Devery slate won the election, too.”

  “The rest of the Devery slate?” Biscuits asked.

  “The old man’s running for mayor, and somebody named Granville Devery is running for the other spot on the town council.”

  Reuben said, “That’s one of our cousins. Uncle Lester’s boy.”

  “I don’t recall hearing about a Lester Devery,” Bo said.

  “That’s ’cause he’s dead,” Reuben explained. “Fever got him a little more’n a year ago.”

  Scratch grunted. “Sorry…I guess.” He looked around at Thad in the other cell. “I notice they didn’t put you up for election.”