Six-Gun Crossroad

by Lauran Paine

  “There’s no law against him hanging around town,” he told Johnny West. “As long as he doesn’t make trouble.”

  “Well, hell,” stated the husky range boss, “isn’t two killings trouble?”

  “Johnny, he didn’t make that trouble. Forrest and Vestal made it. A man’s got every right under the law, as I see it, to defend himself.”

  “All right,” said Johnny West, taking another approach to the same problem. “He’s not good for the town. Look at old Everett or listen to Ab Fuller. Go through the stores … the saddle shop, the emporium, the café, the smithy, they all say Logan’s poison around here.”

  Perc dropped his head and looked glum. He’d heard all those complaints first-hand, and still, Sam Logan didn’t bother folks. He sat and whittled, drank a little beer, and had his bedroll out beyond town somewhere in one of the old abandoned shacks.

  “He’s waiting for work, Johnny, that’s all. When someone hires him, he’ll pull out of town.”

  Johnny snorted. “Who’d hire him? I sure wouldn’t. I couldn’t. If I was going to die tomorrow unless I hired him on, I wouldn’t dass do it. Why, the way my riders feel right now, they’d blow a hole in him you could drive a four-up hitch through. And the other outfits … they’ve all heard about him. Perc, no one’s going to hire Logan. No one. Not if he sits around here for a year. He’s poison any way you look at him. You got to find some way to get rid of him.”

  Perc had remained non-committal. Johnny had gone back to Snowshoe after paying Doc Farraday for Vestal Johnson’s burial, and Sam Logan still sat and whittled and waited, seemingly unaware that everyone around him was to some extent or some degree involved in his two killings.

  Two more weeks passed and no one had hired Sam Logan. The kids around town adored him. He carved them wooden guns and miniature horses and stalwart Indians that he colored with the juice of chokecherries he got down near the creek east of town. Abner Fuller was at his wit’s end. He’d never actually suggested to Sam that he find some other place to sit and do his whittling. The bald fact was that Ab was not and had never been a really courageous man. He’d had a fight or two in his earlier years but never with guns and never with anyone at all if he could avoid it.

  He had gotten in the habit, however, when business was particularly slack, of going outside and standing near the bench where Sam loafed, to watch the carving. As he later told Perc Whittaker, he’d never in his life seen a man with so much natural talent in his hands.

  “It’s a real gift, Perc. He carved a cowboy sitting his horse with a wind at his back and I swear I could almost feel the cold blast on my own back, the way that fellow was hunched up and shivering.”

  “Shivering?” said Perc. “A carving, shivering, Ab?”

  “Well. You know what I mean. It’s so danged realistic you can feel that fellow shivering up there atop his head-hung horse. I tell you, Logan’s got a real gift in them hands of his.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the deputy, “he’s got a gift in his hands, all right.” Perc wasn’t thinking of carving, though. He was thinking how fast with a gun a man would have to be to put bullets into the heads of two men who were already drawing on him before he even went for his own gun.

  Then, on a golden Saturday in July with the first promise of real summertime heat in the air but with the air still as clear as glass and as fragrant as only cow-country air could be, one of those itinerant preachers rolled into Ballester with an askew stovepipe sticking up from the top of his wagon, and being drawn along by a pair of old pelters Noah must have had on the ark, they were so old.

  He had a big bushy beard the color of salt on pepper, a wild thatch of tousled hair to match, had to be in his late fifties, and had a pair of hard blue eyes that went through anyone he looked at. He said his name was Parson Jonah Reeves and his daughter’s name was Abigail, that he’d heard of the iniquities of Ballester, and had driven all the way from Wolf Hole, Arizona, to give battle to the devil in these parts, or, as he thundered to Perc Whittaker and Ab Fuller at the livery barn where he sought parking space for his rig, in these last days he would wrestle Satan for the salvageable souls in this den of evil and sinful iniquity.

  Perc had looked and listened and said nothing. Ab had shown Parson Reeves a spot near the community corral where he might park his outfit, then Ab had come back and had asked Perc just what in tarnation “salvageable souls” were? Perc replied that he thought Parson Reeves meant folks who hadn’t gone off the deep end and committed sins that couldn’t really be forgiven.

  Abner had thought that over and had then stated that in his opinion, although he didn’t know for a fact much about the degrees of sin, he felt reasonably certain that Parson Reeves had his work cut out for him in Ballester.

  Perc hadn’t felt disposed to debate the point. Those sky pilots came and went. Another one had passed through three years earlier, and he had almost gotten the folks to raise up a church. But in the end he’d said the offerings just didn’t quite suffice and had driven on—with the offerings.

  This one, though, struck Perc as being quite different from the run-of-the-mill. For one thing, aside from his piercing eyes and wild whiskers, he was as thick as oak and twice as strong. He wasn’t six feet tall but he weighed about two hundred and ten, had arms and legs like tree trunks, and when he spoke it was like distant cannon fire. He didn’t strike Perc as the type of man who’d always been a preacher. Unless Perc was very badly mistaken, there was a knife scar under his right ear that ran down his cheek into his beard, and one of his thick, brawny hands had a shiny place where the hair did not grow, exactly the shape of an old bullet scar.

  Abigail was quite different. She was small and sturdily put together with curves in places where most womenfolk didn’t even have places. She looked to be maybe thirty or a year or two under thirty. Her eyes were as blue as cornflowers, her hair was a subdued golden brown, and her lips were full and curving. Also, she wore a thin golden wedding band on her marrying finger, so she either had a husband somewhere or else she was a widow. But there was no mistaking one thing. Jonah Reeves was her pappy. Aside from their common solidness of build, their jaws and eyes and mannerisms were identical. Abigail was old Jonah’s daughter, all right, and that was a relief to Perc Whittaker because in Ballester the womenfolk, like womenfolk everywhere else, had a way of sniffing and probing and slyly gossiping. Nothing was sacred to them either, maybe with good reason, for men were men, even men of the cloth, and since they were married females, like Ab’s wife for instance, they had reason to know how it went with men. Healthy men anyway.

  The day after Parson Reeves hit town was a Sunday.

  Normally the menfolk congregated up at the Slipper in a comfortable atmosphere of tobacco and horse sweat and whiskey to play poker or gossip or drink. No stages passed through town on Sunday and until early afternoon only a few cowhands appeared in town, so things, ordinarily at least, were drowsy and peaceful and comfortable. Perc usually didn’t bother making a round of the town Sunday mornings. He had a room over at the boarding house where he sat around or read the week-old newspapers, or listened to the drummers who’d been caught in Ballester and couldn’t depart until the stage came through on Monday.

  The womenfolk sometimes met at someone’s house for an impromptu prayer meeting, after which they sewed and gossiped or went straight home to start preparing the big Sunday midday meal.

  It was all pre-ordained. Maybe some of it didn’t exactly jibe with the wishes or the desires of the people, but traditionally that’s how Sundays were spent in Ballester, had been spent for a long time, so no one ever really departed from this comfortable ritual. At least they hadn’t up to the time Sam Logan arrived in town, and for a few weeks after he’d arrived, until Jonah Reeves had arrived.

  Perc Whittaker was at the boarding house, talking to a beef buyer from Denver. There was a growing demand throughout the Midwest for grassed-out steers, the buye
r was saying. Since the slump of a few years back, which had broken the back of the Texas trade, few trail herds had been coming over the plains to Kansas and Nebraska, while at the same time, so the buyer stated, the emigrant settler growth of the same region had pushed up the beef demand until packers, slaughterers, and canners were sending commission men as far West as Utah, and even Idaho, for meat on the hoof delivered down in Kansas.

  All this was interesting. It was also soporific and Perc was on the verge of dozing off in his chair when Ab Fuller rushed in from the roadway, calling insistently for the law. Perc looked at Ab’s distraught face and heaved up to his feet, sure there’d been another killing.

  “He’s ruining the saloon,” Ab gasped. “Perc, you got to come at once, that bushy-faced old coot’s ruining the saloon!”

  Chapter Three

  Perc heard that unmistakable cannon-roll voice long before he and Ab got up to the Golden Slipper. “Be not deceived. God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap!”

  Ab also heard it. He said: “See, what’d I tell you. Perc, you never saw the likes of it.”

  Whittaker turned and reached for the batwing doors as he said: “Saw what, Abner?”

  “Look in there,” the liveryman whispered, hanging back to let Perc enter first. “Just look in there.”

  Perc stepped inside and halted. Behind him Abner kept saying in his fading whisper: “See. Look there. He’s ruined the place. See.”

  There stood the Parson Reeves in the middle of the saloon, his hair standing out in every direction, his frizzled big beard tangled, his coat off and his shirt torn, his huge fists balled up, and his fierce eyes sparking like pale lightning.

  There were at least ten men lined up down the bar with their backs to it and another ten, including three prone cowboys, scattered among the tables and over along the roadside wall. In his customary place, tilted up and nursing a 5¢ glass of beer, sat Sam Logan, looking as startled, as entirely unnerved, as everyone else who was looking. Even seasoned old saloonkeeper Everett Champion was not saying a word. Upon a nearby upended poker table the parson’s coat had been carefully folded and put aside. The day bartender was leaning across his counter with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands, but he hadn’t cocked the weapon and wasn’t holding it like he truly meant to use it.

  With those three sprawled range riders scattered like cast-aside dolls around him, Jonah Reeves thundered his denunciations and his scorching invective, raising mighty arms on high and rolling his fierce old eyes like a prophet of old.

  “And He cometh to this place of sinfulness and cast out the devils, and He departed and sent in His place His servant, Jonah Reeves, to smite the Philistine thigh and jaw, to bring down the idols in shambles, to put into the people His spirit and His tenderness.”

  Reeves dropped his arms. He turned and glared. He drew back a mighty breath and roared at them, driving them deeper into their awed silence.

  “And ye mock Him. Ye drink strong waters on His day and sit in lust with cards in your unclean hands. Ye smoke up this place with your filthy tobacco and ye squander His day in evil-doing. And He sent me to warn you. He will not be mocked. He shall not be mocked! Ye will listen to His word on the Sabbath and walk in His ways. Ye will lift up thine eyes from the evilness of your daily lives and praise Him unto the last man … in these last days!”

  Perc stood and looked. Everett Champion caught his eye and silently beseeched Perc to do something. Perc did. He walked forward and stopped a long arm’s distance away. It was hard to look into those flaming eyes, into that agitated face, and not feel like bracing into the older man’s towering earnestness.

  “And you,” Jonah Reeves thundered, pointing an oaken arm at Perc Whittaker, speaking in a roar that made the windows shudder. “What have you done to preserve His law? What have you done in this Sodom on the plains to exalt His way? I’ll tell you … nothing! Nothing at all! Well, Deputy, let me tell you … God has come to Ballester in Utah Territory. He came up out of the desert to you in these highlands, he dispatched His faithful servant, Jonah Reeves, to win you from your wickedness, to teach you brotherly love and prayer and humility. And Jonah Reeves will show you the way even if he has to take you by the scruff of the neck and the seat of your britches, for there be none so blind as those who will not see! Hereafter this saloon, this vipers’ den, this stinking hole of brimstone, will close on the Sabbath, and there will be prayer meetings in Ballester at my wagon until we can find a better place for His good works. You remember that. After this no saloon will be open for trade on His day!” Reeves paused to suck back another big breath before he could roar on.

  Perc spoke up: “Parson, what happened to these three cowboys on the floor?”

  Reeves looked down as though from a great height, as though he couldn’t recall immediately what had happened. Then he lost some of his irate stiffness, flexed his battered knuckles, and said: “Oh, yes, those men. Deputy, they attempted to dispute with His servant, Jonah Reeves. That tall one there with the Snowshoe brand burned into his vest … that one came at me full of strong waters and profanity to heave me out of Satan’s house. I cracked him alongside the ear. Them other two … they came at me together, the pair of them. I laid the first one down with a chop to the back of the head and crushed the second one’s wind out.”

  Everett Champion at long last found his voice. But even so he didn’t sound nearly as wrathful as he should have sounded, so Perc gazed curiously over across at him.

  “Perc, he downed ’em just like he said,” old Champion stated, jumping his gaze from Perc to Jonah and back again. “He didn’t have no gun on so they went to throw him out by hand.”

  “Doesn’t look like they did so good,” murmured Perc, eyeing the unconscious men. “What’d he hit ’em with?”

  “His fists,” a man over by the door said in quiet awe. “I heard the strike when he downed that first one … that long-legged Snowshoe man. I swear I thought he’d crushed the rider’s skull. Sounded like someone kicking a pumpkin. Soggy and sort of crunching like.”

  Perc lifted his head and steadily stared at Jonah Reeves. “Parson, you can’t go around fighting folks in this town. And look at that poker table and those chairs. They’ve all got busted legs. You’ll owe Everett for that.”

  Reeves raised his shoulders and expanded his powerful chest. He was taking in one of those big lungs full of air that seemed to characterize him just before he roared and bellowed and set the windows to rattling. Perc hurried to head him off.

  “Hold it, Parson. Wait a minute now. I’m not through. We’ve got laws in Ballester against disturbing the peace. Sunday in this town is a day of rest.”

  “But not reverence!” thundered the parson. “Rest and wickedness, Deputy, but not reverence and repentance!”

  “Well. What folks do with their free times is their own business so long as they don’t …”

  “Their own business! Hah, look around you, Deputy. Look at their dissipated faces, at their watery eyes, at the loose and lustful lips. Sin is amongst them I tell you! Sin and wickedness and immorality! Look at them, I say! Look at their wasted faces!”

  “Parson, tone it down a little. No one’s deaf in here.”

  “Deaf? You’re all deaf to the Word of the Lord. And you’re blind, too … but His servant, Jonah Reeves, has arrived amongst you to wrestle with the imps of Satan for your battered souls. Never fear, boys, from this Sunday on we’ll join in the good fight.” Reeves turned, caught up his coat, flung it high around his head once like a saintly banner, and turned to march majestically on across the room toward the door. “Repent,” he rumbled. “Repent, sinners. Take heed of your evil ways! Look ye to His servant, Jonah Reeves, for your eternal salvation. Raise up thine eyes on high to His mansions in the sky. Meet next Sunday at my wagon and get your absolution.”

  He passed on out into the balmy afternoon sunlight and Perc, mov
ing closer to look past the doors, saw Abigail come up and stop. “Father,” she said, “supper’s about ready.”

  “Yes, child, yes,” Jonah said, rolling down his sleeves and throwing the coat across his massive shoulders. “I’ve a good appetite. Verily I tell you, Abbie, I’ve need for meat and potatoes. In this town the devil lurks everywhere. It’s going to take a long time to heave him out. I’ll need my strength and my convictions. Come along now, let’s go tell Him the good word … that we’ve arrived and have joined battle with Mephisto.”

  They walked away down through the dozing golden-lit roadway side-by-side, turned in over at Ab’s barn, and passed around toward the public corral.

  Abner touched Perc’s arm. “None of these boys is named Mephisto,” he said. “That one’s named Clark, that one’s called Jerry Something-Or-Other, and that big one’s a Rainbow rider but I can’t quite lay my tongue to his name. It’ll come to me, though, in a …”

  “What,” asked Perc of the roomful of stationary and stunned men, “exactly happened in here?”

  It was Sam Logan, back there in his gloomy place upon his tipped-back chair, who answered first. “He came through those spindle doors like a bravo bull, his arms up and his eyes looking wild and his whiskers standing straight out in front of him. He let out a bawl you could’ve heard to Salt Lake City and upended that poker table, scattering cards and chips and men like tenpins. He started over to clean out the bar, too, I think, but that long-legged cowboy there turned and rushed him. That old devil rolled clear of two punches and laid bone up against that cowboy’s head like he was pole axing a steer. Down that one went. The other two rushed him next.” Logan shook his head. “Damnedest thing I ever saw.” He added nothing to that.