by Gene Shelton
LX Ranch
December 1882
Jim found Bill Moore where he could usually be located when the wind was raw and the rain cold—seated behind the long table near a roaring stove, shuffling papers. The LX foreman glanced up as Jim stepped into the room and shook the raindrops from his hat. Moore nodded a greeting, but there was no welcome in his eyes.
“Thought you were out tracking strays, Jim. Find any?” Moore’s tone was guarded.
Jim shook his head. “Found some. Maybe a dozen head. Rain washed the trail out a few miles this side of New Mexico. They weren’t strays.”
“Rustlers again?”
“Cattle don’t drift northwest with the wind in their faces.” Jim flexed his aching fingers. They had been stiff and achey in cold weather since the long, hard winter of the Pecos River War.
“Damn nesters,” Moore growled. “Steal anything that’s not nailed down or too hot to pick up.” He waved toward the stove. “Coffee?”
“No. I’ll be drawing my time now, Bill.”
Moore’s eyebrows lifted. “Now? You still have two weeks before you get to be sheriff. That’s half a month’s wages.”
“That’s the way I want it.”
Moore shrugged. “Hate to lose a good hand.” He reached for the cash box, scribbled a notation on the pay ledger and counted out two week’s wages. Jim tucked the money into a pocket.
“I’ll get my stuff out of the bunkhouse and be on my way in a few minutes,” he said.
Moore nodded. “Jim, you have any idea who’s behind the sleepering and rustling up on the north side?”
“I have my suspicions,” Jim said, watching the LX foreman’s eyes. Moore averted his gaze, but not before Jim glimpsed the worry behind the eyes.
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Nothing to tell. Suspicions don’t make proof. Last time I looked you couldn’t jail a man—or hang him—on suspicion alone.”
“I suppose as sheriff you’ll keep looking into these things,” Moore said. It was a question as much as a statement.
“Bet on it, Bill. On any ranch, no matter the size of the outfit. Whoever it is will make a mistake one of these days and I’ll bring them in. Upright in the saddle or face down over it, depending. See you around.”
Jim turned on his heel and strode through the door. He pulled his hat down tight against the wind. The rain had picked up. Within the day the whole of the Texas Panhandle would be soaked. If the temperature fell much more, they’d be looking at ice.
An ice storm was harder on livestock and men than a flat-out blizzard. And now that damned drift fence stretched across the northern Panhandle from the New Mexico line all the way to Adobe Walls. Dead cattle would be stacked against it like chunks of ice for miles if this weather got worse.
A sudden realization pushed Bill Moore and the drift fence from Jim’s mind and brought a smile to his chapped lips. He didn’t have to ride drift this winter. And for the first time in four years, he was going to be home with Hattie for Christmas. He quickened his step, anxious to gather his gear and head for home.
NINE
Tascosa
January 1883
Oldham County Sheriff Jim East sat behind the cluttered desk in the cramped two-room adobe that doubled as single-cell jail and office, and surveyed his inheritance from Cape Willingham.
On the surface it wasn’t much. One homemade badge. A battered pine desk scarred by spur rowels. A sawed-off double barrel ten-gauge shotgun. A potbellied stove with a diminished stack of firewood. A disorganized collection of papers that were supposed to be case records, official complaints and wanted notices, so jumbled that it would take weeks to restore them into something that resembled official files. Cape may have been a good sheriff, Jim grumbled inwardly, but he sure wasn’t much for paperwork.
The inheritance included a half-dozen cases of cattle rustling still under investigation, two complaints of theft of other property, and several reports of lesser crimes still to be checked out.
Cape Willingham’s legacy also included two men. One was a young cowboy awaiting trial for murder. He sat now on a cell bunk, singing an Irish tune in a clear and pleasant tenor voice. The second man stood before Jim’s desk, a scowl on his sun-browned face.
“You wanted to see me, East?” Henry Brown’s tone was as contemptuous as the expression in his eyes.
“I did, Brown,” Jim said. “You won’t be needed here anymore.”
Brown’s jaw muscles clenched in anger. “You firing me?”
“Let’s say I’m offering you the opportunity to resign, Constable.”
“How come?”
Jim sighed. “Because, Brown, you’re dog-ass mean. I don’t hold with pistol-whipping drunks and unarmed men. I don’t hold with shooting a man who could be talked into giving up. I don’t hold with slapping a woman around, even if she is a Hogtown whore. You’ve done all that. You’re not doing it in this town any longer, at least not under the protection of that constable’s badge.”
Brown leaned forward and shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet. His fingers twitched near the butt of the Colt at his belt. Rage flamed in his squinted eyes.
“Touch that gun, Brown, and I’ll be on you like a rooster on a cricket,” Jim said.
Brown stared at Jim for several heartbeats. The cowboy in the cell had stopped singing. Jim knew the conversation would be clearly audible to the man in the jail cell. The silence grew as heavy as the tension.
A flicker of caution tempered the anger in the constable’s eyes. “You think you’re stud hoss enough to do that, East?”
Jim shrugged. “One way to find out.” For a moment Jim thought Henry Brown was actually going to make a move for his gun. Then the constable spat a curse. “You can go to hell, East. I ain’t workin’ for no lace-pants cowboy playin’ sheriff.” Brown lifted his hand from the gun butt, reached into a pocket and tossed a scratched and tarnished badge onto Jim’s desk. “I quit.”
“That’s the best decision you’ve made in months, Brown,” Jim said. “What you do from here on is your business unless you break the law in Oldham County. Then it’s my business. I don’t think either of us wants that.”
Brown glared at Jim for a moment, but the bluster was gone. “The hell with it,” Brown muttered. “I was gettin’ damn tired of this town anyway. There’s places in Kansas need a good lawman.”
Jim watched as the former constable spun on a heel, yanked the door open and slammed it behind him. He sighed in relief, lifted the cocked Colt from his lap, lowered the hammer and dropped the weapon back into its holster.
“Sheriff?”
Jim rose and strode the few feet to the doorway of the cell in the adjoining room. Ed Norwood leaned against the bars, a grin on his boyish face.
“What is it, Ed?”
“Just wanted to thank you on behalf of the citizens of Tascosa,” Norwood said. “That Brown was bad medicine. Hell, I killed a man, sure enough, but at least I had a reason. Brown just did it ‘cause he liked it.”
“I know that, Ed,” Jim said. “I’m going to leave the office for a spell. You need anything?”
“If you can spare a cup of coffee. And maybe a deck of cards? Gets kind of boring in here with nobody to talk to.” The young face suddenly brightened. “Say, Sheriff, maybe you could arrest two, three others? Then at least we could have a poker game or something back here.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” Jim found a tattered deck of cards in a desk drawer, filled a tin cup and returned to the cell. “Last of the coffee, Ed. It might be a little strong,” he said.
Norwood’s grin widened. “Maybe I’ll pour some of it on these bars and see if they melt.”
Jim paused in the small office, glanced at the double shotgun and his Winchester on the pegs along one wall, then decided to leave both. No sense in making my first tour carrying more guns than the Tenth Cavalry , he thought. He strode through the door into the raw north wind. Bits of paper and last fall’s tumbleweeds
swirled along the street. The town was all but deserted at this hour.
Tascosa still suffered the pangs of last night’s New Year’s celebration hangover. Jim suspected things would liven up a bit as the day wore on and people who still had money left would start looking for the hair of the wolf that bit them the night before.
As he walked he made a mental note to follow up on the investigation of the killing that had put Ed Norwood behind bars. It had been a revenge killing; Norwood’s brother was shot in the back of the head and robbed some time back, in the bed of a girl named Ginny who worked Captain Jinks’ Saloon in Hogtown. Willingham’s notes indicated that bartender Johnnie Maley might have been behind the robbery. There was no solid proof of Maley’s involvement in the killing, but it was worth a closer look, Jim thought. Ed Norwood had sent Maley to Boot Hill with a forty-five shortly after his brother’s death.
Maybe, Jim thought, Cape had overlooked some solid evidence. Norwood was a happy- go-lucky kid, well liked by everyone who knew him. He didn’t seem the sort of man who would kill another in cold blood unless he was sure he had good reason.
All was quiet along Main and McMasters, the stores and saloons not yet open for business. Hogtown also slept as it nursed its hangover.
The bitter north wind slapped at Jim’s coat and pushed against his hat as he made his way back to the office . At least I’m not out in this chasing a bunch of cows, he thought. If there 1 s a colder place anywhere than on horseback in the middle of a Texas Panhandle winter I don’t know where it is and I don’t want to find out.
Back in his office Jim stoked the stove with cottonwood limbs from the bottom of the woodbox. The limbs sat for a moment on the glowing coals before small tongues of flame licked up from the dry wood. It would burn hot and keep the chill at bay, but it would also burn fast. Jim found a nicked axe in a corner and strode to the woodpile in back of the jail.
The main thing he had found so far, he thought as he swung the dull axe, was that early-morning foot patrols in Tascosa didn’t accomplish much. The town was dead as last year’s Christmas goose until the sun was a couple of hours over the eastern horizon.
Tascosa was still growing as fast as a yearling colt. The population had nudged past three hundred. The town had five saloons. Jess Jenkins had a share of one bar in Upper Tascosa, but it was his Emporium in Hogtown that drew most of the cowboy traffic. Jenkins was the unofficial boss of Hogtown and one of the most influential men in all of Tascosa. Jenkins was emerging as a leader in the cowboy and six-cow rancher faction against the big men in the rift that grew deeper by the day. Jim made a mental note to call on Jenkins soon. The man could be either a problem or an asset if trouble came.
New adobe buildings sprouted when weather permitted. The girls who worked the saloons now lived in a cluster of small houses in the flats behind the bars and two major mercantile stores. When the weather was decent, freight wagons rolled in an almost steady stream from north and east into the town. The stage from Dodge usually carried at least one new resident into town on each trip. Not all of them were outstanding citizens. Add to that the cowboys coming into town on weekends to “wet whistles, deal pasteboards and dip wicks”—whiskey, cards and women to those who didn’t speak the slang of the range—and Jim East knew he was in for a busy time.
He finished chopping a supply of firewood and restocked the kindling box in the jail. Next order of business , he promised himself, is to get a deputy y somebody dependable and with a good head on his shoulders.
Jim glanced up at a timid knock on the door.
“Come in,” he called.
An aging Mexican stepped into the room, a battered sombrero in his hand. He wore open-toed sandals and a coat with more holes than cloth despite the icy bite of the wind. “Señor Sheriff, I hate to bother you on your first day, but there is a problem …” His voice trailed away.
Jim waved him toward the stove. “Warm yourself, friend,” he said. “The reason I’m here is to help with problems. Tell me about it.”
The Mexican bowed his head as if in shame. “My name is Jose Cantos. The problem is a small thing to anyone but myself and my family,” he said. “Last night, one of my hogs was shot and killed. I had but four sows and the one boar. The boar is now dead, and without him I can make no more pigs. With no more pigs I cannot feed my family.”
Jim ran a hand across his jaw. “This is not a small thing, Señor Cantos. Not when a man’s means of supporting his family is threatened. Did you see the man who shot your pig?”
The Mexican nodded warily. “Yes. It was the man called Gough. The one known as the Catfish Kid. He and some friends were making bets on how well he could shoot.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“He is with the woman in red from Señor Jenkins’s saloon, the Emporium. She is called Frog Lip Sadie.”
Jim tugged his hat down on his head and nodded to the Mexican. “Come with me, friend. I can’t get your dead hog back, but maybe I can help you buy a new one.”
Ten minutes later Jim East pounded on the wooden door of a two-room adobe shack in Hogtown. He heard the muttered protest inside and banged again on the sagging portal. The door swung open. J. B. Gough, the Catfish Kid, stood in the doorway clad only in his longhandles. Over his shoulder Jim saw Frog Lip Sadie pull the blankets up to her chin. “What the hell do you want, East?”
“This man Cantos says you killed one of his pigs last night. That right, Catfish?”
Gough scratched an armpit. “What the hell difference does it make? Just a damn pig and a Mexican.”
Jim leveled a steady glare at the Catfish Kid. “The difference is that pig meant a lot to this man. You destroyed personal property.”
“So?”
“So you pay this man for the pig or I lock you up, Catfish. It’s that simple.”
Gough’s bloodshot eyes went wide. “Ah, hell, East. We were just funnin’ some. You can’t hold that against a man.”
Jim held out his left hand, palm up. “I sure can, Catfish. Pay up or get dressed. I figure that hog was worth about ten dollars.”
“Ten dollars! My God, man! Are you out of your mind?”
Jim glanced at the frightened Mexican standing nearby. “That all right with you, Señor Cantos?” The Mexican bobbed his head up and down. “What’ll it be, Catfish? Pay for the hog or be the guest of the county for a few weeks?”
Gough’s face turned red, then almost purple, beneath the beard stubble. “East, are you serious?”
“Try me if you think I’m not.”
Gough sighed in disgust. “Oh, the hell with it.” He strode to his pants draped across a chair, fished a ten-dollar gold coin from the pocket and tossed it to Jim.
Jim handed the gold piece to Cantos, then stared hard at Gough and gestured toward the hog farmer. “Remember this man’s face, Catfish.” Jim put a hard edge on his voice. “Pray for his continued health, because if anything happens to him, his family, or his pigs, I’m coming straight after you. You’ll pay a lot more if I have to do that.”
“You threatening me, East?”
“No. I’m making you a promise.” He glanced past Gough’s shoulder and tipped his hat to the wide-eyed whore. “Morning, ma’am,” Jim said. “Hope you have a fine day.” He turned away from the sputtering Gough. “Come along, Señor Cantos. You can buy another pig now and have a few dollars left over to pay for your troubles.”
Tascosa
February 1883
Jim East half dragged and half carried the drunken teamster through the blinding snow, kicked open the door of the office and shoved the big man toward the jail cell.
“Brought you some company, boys,” he said to the three men inside. Two of the three were suffering the agonies of the damned from their sins of the night before. God must have made hangovers when he decided whiskey was a mistake , Jim thought.
Ed Norwood looked up and grinned. “Sheriff, I don’t plan to ask you to bring me anymore company.” he said. “Got to where it’s d
ownright crowded in here all the time.”
Jim turned the key, opened the cell door and pushed the teamster inside. “Quit complaining, Ed,” he said. “Play poker with these guys for a change. You already got seventy cents of my money.” He locked the cell and strode back into his office.
Wrestling drunks, breaking up fights and collecting payment for dead pigs, Jim mused, wasn’t exactly a glamorous and exciting job. He nursed a shiner that would have taken first prize at anybody’s county fair courtesy of a cowboy whose speed with a fist Jim had underestimated. It wasn’t a mistake he would make again. The toothmarks on his arm had almost healed, and he just hoped the whore who had bitten him during that saloon brawl in the Emporium didn’t have hydrophobia. He had thought about hauling her in for assaulting an officer of the law, then realized that he had only one jail cell and it was full of men. She probably would make more money in the lockup than her fine would cost. So he let it drop.
Jim was learning fast about this job of being sheriff. For one, winter was a bad time for men who carried a badge. People didn’t have much to do except drink, fight, gamble and carouse. The fall roundups were over. The last trail drive had gone through months ago, and cowboys who had jobs during the summer were now out of work and generally broke—or heading that direction in a long lope. A few hands who had ridden for the smaller ranches were now without jobs. They had been cut loose by the LS, the LX and other big spreads that had forced out the little men and taken over their grazing lands.
It was bad enough without the blizzard that had howled down from the north two weeks ago and showed no signs of letting up. Wind-whipped snow piled up in drifts that touched the sod and pole roofs of Tascosa’s one-story adobe buildings and closed all the roads to freight traffic. Supplies were running low. A few of the less scrupulous merchants had doubled or tripled prices on the smattering of staples available. That grated on Jim, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. They weren’t breaking any laws.