by Lauran Paine
Abner Fuller stepped through the doorway. “You say something?”
Perc didn’t answer Ab. He stepped forth and went hiking on up toward the saloon. Ab called out for him not to forget that Johnny West wanted to see him. He turned and glared at Fuller, then hiked onward again.
Men were beginning to congregate inside the Slipper as usual. Also, as usual, Sam Logan was over there in the shadows on his tilted-back chair nursing his 5¢ glass of beer. There was the customary loud talk and laughter, so two days after it had happened, Parson Reeves’s performance had been all but forgotten. At least the men were no longer discussing it, and that was a relief because Perc was sick of discussing it, too.
Chapter Five
To get to Snowshoe’s headquarters ranch was a six-mile ride. Unless a man started early enough, he’d get caught out in the prairie by the burning sun. Perc had, in times past, made this ride too many times as a Snowshoe cowboy to make that mistake. He’d left Ballester an hour before sunrise and arrived at the ranch a half hour after the men had eaten, been detailed to varied chores, and therefore the yard was just about empty when he rode in.
Just about. The man who did the cooking at Snowshoe’s headquarters was also the sometime hostler at the barn and corrals. It wasn’t customary, but then, as was noted around town, Johnny West ran the Snowshoe thriftily and efficiently. If the cocinero finished his cook shack duties and had a little idle time on his hands, he was sent out to drive in fresh horses. And if he didn’t like that addition to his ordinary work, he could quit. Most cow-outfit cooks would have quit, too, but sooner or later one came down the pike who needed the work badly enough.
The man saddling up in front of the barn was a wizened, scanty-thatched individual known only as Boots. He’d been the cocinero and hostler around Snowshoe for several years now. He knew Percy Whittaker and Perc knew him. Boots was one of those periodic drunks. He might go four months without so much as stepping a foot inside the Golden Slipper. Then he might ride into town in the middle of the day without saying a word to anyone, belly up to Ev Champion’s bar, and drink. Drink all that day and maybe all that night. Flop into an empty horse stall over at the livery barn, sleep himself halfway sober, and head straight for the bar and start that steady drinking again. Usually, if folks left him alone, Boots gave no one any trouble. But twice since he’d hit the Ballester country, Perc had jugged him for disorderly conduct—fighting. He hadn’t done it because old Boots was likely to hurt anyone. Boots was in his sixties and didn’t weigh one hundred and forty pounds with lead in his pockets. It was to keep someone from hurting old Boots that he’d locked him up.
Johnny had once said to Perc that anyone was entitled to let off steam once in a while. This had been after the second arrest when Johnny had taken a day off to drive into town, pour old Boots into the back of the ranch wagon, and solemnly drive back home with him.
Johnny didn’t hold it against Boots and Boots didn’t hold being jugged against Perc Whittaker. It was a loosely understood agreement between all of them, so when Boots saw who the visitor was who’d come riding in from the direction of town, he left off rigging out his horse and said: “Wait here, Deputy. Johnny’s in the cook shack, havin’ a cup of java. I’ll fetch him.”
Perc swung down, watered his horse at the trough, and gazed around the empty, dusty ranch yard. A door slammed across the way, and Johnny and Boots came walking over. Perc looped his reins so the horse could sip at his leisure and waited. There was a little thin shade in front of the barn.
“Tried to find you in town yesterday,” said West, on coming up.
“So Ab told me. I can guess what it’s about.” Perc thumbed back his hat. Sometimes it got tiresome making excuses, but it was part of his job, the biggest part, it seemed. “If it’s about that rider of yours getting knocked out in the Slipper day before yesterday, Johnny, I’ve got a sort of promise it won’t happen again. That preacher just took everyone by surprise, me included.”
West lowered himself to the edge of the water trough and looked wryly up at Perc. “Tell him, Boots,” he said quietly. The cocinero came close in a crabbed little walk and screwed up his face at the taller deputy sheriff. “You ever heard of a feller named John Reed?” he asked in his piping voice.
Perc nodded. He’d heard plenty about a man named John Reed. Stage robbery, bank robbery, payroll robbery, ten years in Fort McHenry for making off with an Army quartermaster’s payroll—wagon and all. Five years in …
“Well you got him in your town, Deputy. Jonah Reeves he calls himself now. But I don’t forget faces and all that beaver hair don’t change a blamed thing. He’s got a scar from below his ear down across his cheek into them whiskers. I was there the day he got that, Deputy. He tried to break away from a cavalry escort taking him to Fort McHenry. I was on the horse next to the captain that run him down and swung that saber that laid his face open. I’d know that feller anywhere on this lousy earth. He’s calling himself Parson Reeves now, but that’s not his real name. He’s John Reed, the outlaw!”
Johnny West kept looking up at Perc. Old Boots hitched himself along into the shade and also stared. Perc reached up, lifted his hat to let a little cool air pass across his sweat-matted hair, then slowly re-settled the hat upon his head. He was trying to recall the last thing he’d heard or read about John Reed, the notorious highwayman. He thought it had been a small item in a newspaper about Reed being released from prison a couple of years back.
“Well,” said Johnny West, near to grinning at Perc’s long expression.
“Well what?” Perc asked.
“What you figure to do about him?”
“Find out first whether he’s still wanted or not, I guess.”
“That’s logical,” Johnny opined, and stood up off the edge of the trough. “But if he’s not wanted … what then? Listen, Perc, first it was that Sam Logan, now it’s old John Reed. You’ve been too easy in town. Folks aren’t going to like it when they find out who else is making Ballester their headquarters. They’re going to start saying you’re shielding men who’ve got no …”
“Shielding? I’m not shielding anyone,” growled Perc, irritated. “If Reed’s served his time, then that’s the end of it.”
“Maybe,” agreed West pleasantly. “But Perc, old dogs don’t learn new tricks. John Reed’s notorious in a dozen states and territories. He wasn’t a young man when they threw him into prison the last time. Ever since Boots recognized him last Sunday in Ev’s saloon, I’ve been thinking. Why would a man like Reed grow a big bushy beard and get himself up as a preacher, which would be the best disguise in the world for a man like him, unless he had something in mind like maybe blowing safes or something like that?”
“What safes?” Perc asked, still irritated. “Ev’s got a safe and there’s one at the general store. There’s never more than a couple hundred dollars in either one of them.”
“Sure. Maybe that’s right, Perc. But Reed wouldn’t know that.”
Boots took his boss’ side by saying in his piping voice: “Deputy, I’ve been doin’ a little calculatin’, too, and I come up with something else. Why don’t Logan push on? He knows by now no one’s goin’ to hire him on. I’ll tell you … because him and John Reed are in this together, that’s why.”
“In what together?” snarled Perc, turning on the cook.
Boots snapped his lips closed in the face of Perc’s anger and looked pleadingly at Johnny West for support. He got it. West looked Whittaker straight in the eye and said: “No one who is that fast with a gun is a commonplace rider, Perc. Logan’s a killer, an experienced gunfighter. Even without that mother-of-pearl on his gun he’d still be recognizable as a gunfighter. What’s the matter with you anyway? Does he have to wipe out half the town before you start using your head?”
Perc’s irritability turned to solid disgust. Not with Boots and Johnny West particularly, but more with himself. It perhaps wa
sn’t his fault he hadn’t seen Jonah Reeves as anything other than one of those fire-and-brimstone old itinerant ministers, but what West had just said about Sam Logan was undeniably true. Logan was too good with a gun to be a common, everyday cowboy. He turned, released his horse’s reins, hauled the beast over, and stepped up across him.
“What’re you going to do?” Johnny West inquired, looking up. “Wait until this evening, Perc, and I’ll fetch in my crew. No point in getting yourself killed just because you made a mistake. We understand. Besides, it could’ve happened to anyone.”
“You stay out of town tonight,” Perc said, giving West a hard glance. “If there’s one thing I don’t need it’s a bunch of Snowshoe men hooting and rooting through town.”
He rode out of the yard with the sun holding to one high position in the faded July sky as though it, too, were now his enemy. It burned down across his shoulders and back until just before he got into sight of town again, then it reluctantly began to sink lower down the smoky heavens.
Made a mistake! When he’d worked for West as a rider, he’d had a lot of respect for his cow savvy. It seemed that having cow savvy didn’t necessarily ensure that a man had any other kind of savvy. In fact, he told himself a trifle resentfully, maybe that ensured that he didn’t have any other kind.
He hadn’t made any mistake. Sure, Sam Logan was deadly with a gun, faster and more accurate than ordinary range riders were. Maybe he even was a gunfighter like Johnny had said. But he hadn’t killed Banning and Johnson as a gunfighter; he did those two killings in self-defense. If Johnny wanted to think otherwise, that was his privilege—but two inquests had proved Logan had been justified.
As for Jonah—or John Reed, rather—that was something else again. But it irritated him that old Boots had recognized Reed and had gone to West instead of to him. Now, West was feeling full of righteousness and condescension, and that made Percy feel irritable all over again, made him feel as though he wasn’t capable of doing his job and West knew it, which wasn’t true.
He got into town with dusk settling, swung down.
Ab Fuller stepped forth to take the reins and said: “Well, was I right about what he wanted?”
Perc glared and said: “Go to hell, will you.”
He went across to the café, ate a big meal, shunned the easy conversation that filled the place, and afterward walked over to his office at the jailhouse to take down his musty stacks of posters and go through them until he found a good picture of John Reed—without the beard and with his hair cut. Reed had been much younger when that picture had been taken but the eyes were the same, unflinching, tough, fierce, and piercing eyes.
He folded that poster and pocketed it, made a smoke, and went outside to stand a while in the coolness of early evening while he tried hard to recall what it was he’d read about John Reed a year or two back.
Ballester had no telegraph office. Its only constant link with the outside world was the stage line. He decided to write a letter to the sheriff over at the county seat in the morning, requesting all the up-to-date news on Reed, and send it along in the personal care of the stage driver.
He killed the smoke and went hiking northward up as far as Ab’s barn. There, he cut inside and went all the way through out into the back alley. The Reeves wagon was barely visible where a slit of orange lamplight glowed past the back door, up beside the community corral. He started in that direction. He’d been willing to let things slide before, after his earlier talk with Abigail, but not now. Now things were different and whatever was to be done he’d do his own way.
“Hey, Percy,” someone said softly, and stepped out of the alleyway shadows toward him. “It’s Doc.”
He waited until he recognized Farraday, then gravely nodded. “You lose something back here?” he inquired.
Farraday smiled and shook his head. “Just coming back from a house call. A case of whooping cough.”
“Oh.”
They stood eyeing each other for a while before Farraday said, making his voice soft and his words very slow: “I heard a rumor today about your friend Logan, Percy.”
“My friend, hell,” snarled Perc.
Farraday’s eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me,” he murmured. “I didn’t know that was a sore subject. I didn’t mean anything, just a phrase.”
“What did you hear about him?”
“There were some men passing through on their way up north. They stopped at the Slipper for a cool drink and saw him there. They told Ev Champion that he was some kind of a gunman.”
“What does that mean,” growled Perc, annoyed all over again. “How is a man some kind of a gunman? He’s either a gunman, or he’s not.”
“Percy,” said Doc Farraday, beginning to stiffen a little toward the deputy. “All I’m doing is passing something along I heard today in the belief that it may be of some use to you. That’s all.” Farraday paused, then said: “One thing is obvious to me, too, and it should be just as obvious to you. Sam Logan’s hanging around Ballester can’t bring any good and it might bring more bad. More killings. Good night.”
Farraday walked on and Perc twisted to gaze after him briefly, then he straightened around, considered the light coming from the Reeves wagon, lifted his shoulders high, dropped them, and turned off to the right, heading over toward the empty plot of ground between the corrals and Fuller’s barn where he could cross on through and emerge upon the main roadway. Over in that direction the lights—and sounds—of the Golden Slipper were noticeable. He’d have a talk with Everett Champion first, then he’d have a talk with Sam Logan. Finally he’d go have a talk with Jonah Reeves or whatever his name was.
The irritability lessened in him but did not entirely atrophy. Again, though, he was annoyed with himself. He should have braced Logan long ago, should have run him out of town as everyone had urged him to. Now when he did it, the heads would nod and the gossip would start. He could almost hear it. Took Whittaker long enough. He sure isn’t very smart, letting two like that settle in our town. Well, what can you expect from an ex-cowboy who’s never had any real lawman training?
He stepped up onto the far plank walk and strode past some idling range riders by the Slipper’s hitch rack without even looking at them. The cowboys fell silent, raised their eyebrows at one another, turned, and swiftly moved to follow Perc inside. From the look on the deputy’s face, it seemed like there might be fireworks.
Chapter Six
Everett Champion took Perc down to the far end of the bar and said there had been a couple of floaters in earlier and they had told him they’d known Sam Logan down in Arizona. Champion couldn’t recall the name of the town exactly and Perc said that didn’t matter. What he specifically wanted to know was what those drifters had said about Logan.
“They said,” confided Everett, dropping his voice until Perc had to lean over to hear him at all, “Logan had quite a reputation as a gunfighter in Arizona and over in New Mexico.”
“That’s all they said?”
Champion nodded. “What more’d they have to say, Perc? He’s already killed two men in Ballester.”
“And been cleared by a court, Everett,” growled Perc, straightening up off the bar. “I’m going to have a talk with him.”
Champion moved quickly and caught Perc’s sleeve. “Don’t you mention me in this at all,” he begged. “I never said anything against him … especially.”
Perc pulled free. “Quit worrying,” he insisted, and walked away.
Where Logan had staked his claim over against the dingy northward wall, a man commanded not only a perfect view of the saloon’s full length but he also could see anyone entering the place before they could see him. Just coincidence, Perc told himself, and grimaced. It was the same kind of coincidence when a lion is found lying on an outstretched oak limb above a deer run.
He took a chair and spun it, dropped down next to Logan, and exchange
d a civil little nod with the shorter, older man. The room was noisy and smoky, men moved restlessly along the bar and out among the card tables. Riders were still coming in from the ranches and an occasional townsman passed them at the door homeward bound. It was, all in all, a pleasantly masculine scene and Sam Logan, tilted back in his chair, seemed to be enjoying it even though no one spoke to him and only a few men nodded as they moved past him.
Perc watched the noisy confusion for a moment, then said: “Sam, when’re you going to give up?”
Logan turned and carefully studied Perc’s features. He understood at once and said: “Pretty soon, Deputy, pretty soon. It’s a good little town and the range is rich, but living on four bits a day and being down to your last eleven dollars skunks a man. I’d sort of figured maybe they’d look at things the way they really happened and someone’d take a chance and hire me. They aren’t going to, though, are they?”
“It doesn’t look like it. I’ve been waiting for that, too.”
“The townsmen seem to be getting edgy about me hurting business.”
“Something like that, Sam.”
“And you? What’s your stand, Deputy?”
“You’ve figured that out, Sam. If I’d been contrary, I’d have talked to you long before.”
Logan nodded, sipped from his carefully hoarded nickel glass of beer, and looked solemn. “Care for a drink?” he eventually asked. When Perc shook his head, Logan said: “Tell ’em to rest easy, Deputy. I’ll be pulling out pretty quick now.” He looked down into his glass, considered the last big mouthful of brew, threw back his head, and drained it off and afterward smacked his lips. “There were a couple of boys in here today who looked familiar to me. They talked to Champion … isn’t that it?”
Perc side-stepped a direct answer, saying only: “If they looked familiar to you, it’s possible you looked the same way to them. This time of year a fellow can meet old friends any time, Sam, any place.”