The Man Without a Gun

by Lauran Paine

  The first man across the road was the Sundance Kid. The second was beanpole-like Calabasas Kid. They both held cocked guns. Sundance pushed the ashen-faced, uninjured railroader aside and flopped Joshua Logan over with his boot toe. Then he sighed and holstered his gun.

  “Just a mite rusty,” he said. “Just a mite.”

  A man with a bowler hat pushed through the gathering throng. He went up to Jack and halted, looking down for a gun belt. There was none. On either side of the big man stood Tex Connelly and the left-handed deputy sheriff. Both were ejecting spent casings and replacing them with loaded ones. The warden’s face crinkled in bewilderment. “I’d have sworn it was you who shot him, Swift. I was watching from the hotel doorway.”

  Will Spencer looked down his nose reprovingly. “Now just how in hell could Swift have killed him when he isn’t even wearing a gun?”

  Tex Connelly pushed his weapon toward the man in the bowler hat. “Take a look, mister. Go ahead, smell it. It’s been fired...one shot. Smell the deputy’s gun, too. It’s also been fired. You’ll find two slugs in Logan. One from his gun...one from my gun.” Tex dropped the gun into his holster. “You’ve got to be hit on the head to get an idea, mister?” He turned away, saw Hoyt Farmer talking to Sundance and Calabasas at the edge of the plank walk, and sauntered toward them.

  The warden removed his hat, scratched his head, put his hat back on, took Jack by the arm, and steered him away from the growing crowd. When they were twenty feet off, he said: “All right, Swift, I’ll admit I came up here to make plumb sure you didn’t break the law. I’ll swear on the witness stand under oath you didn’t have a gun on you. Now then...just exactly how did you do that?”

  Jack ordinarily would have smiled at the older man’s perplexity. Right then, the vision of Joshua Logan’s look of astonishment was still too vivid, after he had been hit.

  “I didn’t have a gun, Warden. I haven’t packed one since I came to Herd...except for a couple of hours tonight...and the deputy took that one away from me.”

  “Never mind that. How...?”

  “The deputy is left-handed.”

  “I saw that.”

  “He and the other feller are about my size. They were standing close beside me. My fingers were within inches of both their holstered guns. When Logan went for his gun, I drew both of theirs and shot him.”

  The warden looked past Jack where the deputy was talking with Hoyt Farmer and Tex Connelly. He wagged his head and said: “God damn!”

  Jack left him standing there, went around the crowd to the edge of the walk. There Sundance threw him a mirthless smile. Will Spencer studied his face in silence and Hoyt Farmer didn’t look at him at all. Jack thought the sheriff looked older than his years. A hand brushed his sleeve lightly. He looked around. It was Buck. He jerked his head and moved away. Jack followed him. The old man screwed up his face.

  “You’d better get down to Amy’s, son. She’s fit t’ be tied for worryin’ over you.”

  “I reckon,” the big man said, and turned away from the crowd, heading south through the dark dust of the roadway.

  It was over. All over.

  the end

  About the Author

  Lauran Paine who, under his own name and various pseudonyms has written over a thousand books, was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a young age and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeos, and even motion pictures where he served as an extra because of his expert horsemanship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s, Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even, for a time, worked as a professional farrier. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the previous century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday-night brawls.” He served in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that all of his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States. Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity, an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact. Adobe Empire (1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melancholy, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels like The White Bird (1997) and Cache Cañon (1998), he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting Nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life.