“You head back or I’ll head back. The pair of us ain’t going forward,” I said.
“I wish you were more forward, Sheriff,” she said.
She was sitting her saddle and smiling at me like a cat that just gulped a mouse. I just don’t know how to deal with ballsy women.
“Oh, all right,” I said, feeling grouchy. The best I could say for her was that she was different away from her pa. Around him, she was mean and always lookin’ down her nose at me. Here she smiled some when she looked down her nose at me. This Queen Bragg was a lot more pleasant to be around than the version of Queen when her old man was lording over her.
“Well, you show me the stuff, and then go hightail out of here,” I said, not wanting to surrender easily.
I pulled the wire gate shut and dropped the loop to secure it. I sure didn’t know whether this was a good idea, her along with the sheriff on T-Bar Ranch land. There wasn’t no one in sight; just a lot of grassy hills, greening up in the spring, and blue sky, and puffy white clouds that could betray a feller and dump snow or ice or cold rain in a moment.
I guessed we wouldn’t see anyone, what with all but two or three of them T-Bar men in town. But I pulled my badge from my pocket and pinned it on my coat. That badge could put me there on the ranch proper. But I didn’t have no badge for her.
It sure was quiet. The wind had slowed to a whisper and the midday sun had warmed things into a fine day. I didn’t see one steer or cow or calf or bull. Nothing but a golden eagle, wings spread out to every last feather-tip, patrolling for mice or rabbits.
We began to ride among T-Bar cattle, grazing peacefully, their brand burned into their left flank. Crayfish wasn’t much interested in breeding up, so his cows were a motley bunch, every color I could think of and then some, and showing a lot of horn, like there was some Texas longhorn in the lot.
We rode onward, and then hit a bunch of young stuff, yearlings mostly, and this bunch interested me because it had a Two Plus brand burned into their left flank, instead of the T-Bar. I steered Critter close to have a look, and sure enough, the brand was one I’d never seen, and I could see how easy it was to turn a T-Bar into a Two Plus with a running iron. But there the bunch was.
“I guess I’ll have to look in the brand book to see who owns those,” I said. “Maybe Crayfish does.”
“Maybe he didn’t but does now,” she said.
“What do you mean by that.”
“They’ve been mavericked. You can call it the Two Plus if you want. I’ll call it the Double Cross.”
That sure was a revelation.
“I guess I’ll look for some answers,” I said.
“Now I’m going to take you to the cemetery,” she said.
“What’s there?”
“You’ll see.”
She took the lead, riding toward ranch headquarters located in a broad gulch a mile ahead. We still didn’t see a soul, what with all them boys in town. But long before we reached the ranch buildings, she turned into a side gulch, and we followed it completely out of sight of the main buildings. It was a brushy gulch, and we scared up deer and skunks and various critters, working through red willow brush and whatnot. The gulch divided into three branches, and she took the rightmost one, which wound deep into grassy hills.
I sure got to wondering where she was going, and how she knew to come to this silent notch in the foothills, but she kept right on until she suddenly stopped.
There, on a clay flat, were four long mounds, that sure looked to me like four graves. They weren’t marked, and one of the mounds was pretty much disintegrated from flash floods running over it.
“Dig,” she said.
But I didn’t have a shovel.
SIXTEEN
There sure wasn’t a shovel anywheres except maybe at the T-Bar headquarters, and I wasn’t planning to borrow one there. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to itch.
“How do you know these are graves?” I asked Queen.
“What else would they be?”
“Ranchers bury lots of critters.”
“No, we mostly drag dead horses or dogs or sheep into brush and let nature take care of itself.”
“I don’t know of anyone come up missing. Them cowboys come and go, riding the line, and I don’t know of any one that’s gone and got himself killed.”
“Not cowboys. Women,” she said.
“Now what the devil are you mouthing about?”
“Women in those graves. The ones who vanished from the Red Light District.”
There were some of those. A few of them fancy ladies had up and vanished, and the madams told me about it. But mostly everyone figured they got hooked up with some cowboy promising to marry them and live in eternal bliss forever, and so they just took off.
“There were a few,” I said.
“Crayfish Ruble’s women.”
Crayfish Ruble was a veteran of every parlor house in town, and I’d heard a thing or two about him and the girls. He had favorites, and once I heard he’d bought one from a madam and hauled her off. That’s the last anyone saw of her.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“It’s common knowledge,” Queen said. “And here’s where they ended up.”
“You got proof?”
“Sheriff, I know things without what you call proof.”
I wasn’t following all this very well. “What’s this got to do with your brother?”
“Crayfish.”
I sure wasn’t following her logic, if that’s what it should be called.
“I ain’t gonna borrow a shovel from the T-Bar. I’m not sure I’m even gonna dig around here without some good reason.”
“I knew you’d say that,” she said.
She was making me itchy again. “Let’s get out of here.”
She was smiling at me, as if she knew exactly what I’d do next. I ignored her and steered Critter down the gulch, wanting to get off of T-Bar range and then get shut of her. I was getting tired of uppity local aristocracy. She was worse than Admiral when it came to lookin’ down a long nose at me.
We rode out, our backs to the wind, and watched the new grass weave in the blustery wind. The farther we got from that burial ground, the better I felt. Them graves were probably real old, not fresh, and probably went back to Indian times. She kept grinning at me, sort of out of the corner of her eyes, and I didn’t feel much like jabbering with her, so we just rode across big pastures with cattle like tiny black dots here and there. It sure was big country, the kind that lifted the heart and made a man feel complete. I opened the gate at the fence line, and she rode through and I closed it behind us. We were on Anchor Ranch land then, and the funny thing was, she sort of shrank down, like it was her pappy’s land and she was back under the thumb of her master. I watched her. She even rode different on that blooded horse. I thought maybe she’d turn mean on me, but she just rode quietly until we got to the place where the road to her headquarters turned off.
She turned to stare at me. “He’s innocent. Time’s running out. Please try to save him.”
She reached across and placed her hand on mine, where I was holdin’ the reins, and just pressed for a moment. It sure was nice and made me almost forget she was Queen Bragg, snotty daughter of Admiral Bragg, and was confessing to smuggling jailbreak tools a while before. Then she steered the blooded horse up the road to her place and left me there.
I was sort of wondering whether she really liked me, or if she was just using some of that female stuff to try to help her brother. I decided it wasn’t me. She was just tryin’ to spring King. If King got loose of the hanging, Queen’s nose would be back up in the air whenever Sheriff Pickens rode by.
Still…I figured I’d better put her out of mind. My ma, she always warned me not to believe anything a woman under eighteen said. I plumb forgot how old Queen was, but just to be cautious, I’d start calling her seventeen.
The bad thing about all this was how I kept wondering whether Kin
g had killed them three T-Bar men after all. The doubts just kept sneaking up in my head, and when I thought that King had been tried fair and true, and had him a good lawyer, and there was two witnesses saw him do it, and when he hadn’t no defense except he was looking for trouble, drinking, and didn’t remember much, why, that should be enough. The court had spoken. The sentence had been given. And in a few days now, the gallows would go up in the courthouse square.
But that whole thing was clawin’ at me, and I didn’t know what to do next.
Critter, he settled into a slow walk back to Doubtful, not wanting to get penned in a box stall again, and when I put my heels to his ribs, he snarled at me, farted, and slowed down all the more. Well, I hated to put him back in prison. I run a jail, and get to see how bad it is for people caught inside of one, helpless and hurting. Maybe some deserved being in there, but I never did like to take freedom away from anyone. I guess I’m just softheaded. If I had a harder head, I’d just say get in there, you crook, and suffer for what you done.
I penned up Critter in Turk’s livery barn after brushing him down, and he snapped at me with those big buck teeth of his, getting a nip into my shirt.
“Better luck next time. I was ready for you,” I told him.
He just clacked his teeth and laid his ears back, but I closed the stall door and left him to repent for a day or two.
I checked in at the sheriff office and jail, and Rusty said all was quiet, so I patrolled the town, finally landing in the Sampling Room, thinking maybe to talk to Mrs. Gladstone. She’d served King his drink just a little before he left and kilt three men, so maybe I ought to just find out what he was tossing down his parched throat.
She was in there all right, but she had no customers since Anchor Ranch men were steering clear of town, with all those T-Bar men everywhere. I guess Admiral Bragg didn’t want to pick a fight and was keeping his crew out at the ranch.
Her place, the Sampling Room, had always been a little different. It was the cleanest saloon in Doubtful. The glass shone. The floor was shiny and waxed. The spittoons were emptied daily. Like the rest on Saloon Row, she had an outhouse on the alley, but she limed it regularly, and it didn’t stink the way the others did, all summer long. She had put them pen and ink drawings of thoroughbred horses on the walls, along with etchings and such like. And she’d gotten mail-order furniture in, some chairs that were almost comfortable. There even was a brass rail at the bar, like a proper saloon in the cities. It was too fancy for me, but some people liked that sort of place, I guess. I always got a little itchy in there, like I didn’t belong in a saloon like that.
She eyed me from a rocking chair, where she was sitting in a shaft of sunlight, knitting a scarf.
“You’re the first person I’ve seen today,” she said. “My customers seem to be staying away from town.”
“They don’t want trouble, ma’am.”
Her needles were clacking away. I could never figure out how anyone knit anything. I’ve tried to watch them hands at work, makin’ little knots of yarn, the fingers going here and there. It sure ain’t men’s business for sure. But them scarves were welcome, and she gave them away to people she cared about. I sometimes wished she’d knit one for me, but I guess I wasn’t a regular customer.
She rose. “What can I pour you, Mr. Pickens?”
That was another thing. She always called me that. It didn’t matter that I don’t like either my front handle, Cotton, or my rear handle, because that’s what she set her mind to calling me.
“Some red-eye. I’m done for the day,” I said.
She frowned. “I’m sure you wouldn’t sip on duty.”
“I’m always on duty, ma’am.”
“Well, it’s your prerogative,” she said.
There was another of them big words no one ever taught me. “My what?”
“Your choice, your privilege. You are privileged to do what you wish.”
“I never heard that one before. Where’d you get a carpetbag full of words like that?”
“I was an English teacher in the Minnesota Normal School before I came here.”
“English? You?”
“This is better. I earn a living here. Don’t ever go into English, Sheriff. People who work with words don’t get a wooden nickle for it. People who write starve. People who teach reading and writing and spelling can’t make ends meet.”
“So you came out here?”
“Mr. Pickens, I make three times more money running the Sampling Room than I did teaching English to students who intended to be teachers. And in the Sampling Room I serve a better class of customers.”
I got to chewing on that for a while. I thought maybe to chew some tobacco too, but thought better of it. The Sampling Room had its own ways, and I was probably crosswise of half a dozen of them.
She set the bottle of red-eye on the bar, along with a tumbler.
I poured two fingers, being real careful not to get too enthusiastic.
She watched me with approval. At least she’d sell one drink this slow day.
I sipped, wheezed, let that first firewater slide down and start some trouble in my gut, and then sipped again. You had to ease into red-eye, and not take her all at once. Once it numbed your tongue and throat, then you could swaller a little more, but only after it scoured your stomach and started south from there. It took skill to drink red-eye whiskey, and not many fellers ever got the hang of it. It you took it too fast, it’d make you crazy, and if you took it too slow, it would poleaxe you.
She studied me to see if I measured up. I’d just flunked her English lesson, and was fearful I’d flunk whatever else was coming along the pike. But she sort of smiled. She had a lovely smile, even if she was sort of too soft for me. I prefer women who ain’t too soft-lookin’. My ma, she always told me to mind my knitting, and I never did understand that until now. But Mrs. Gladstone was a real pleasant lady, maybe twice my age, and maybe I’d come to like her some as soon as she stopped scaring me.
So we sort of hung there at the bar, she behind and me in front, with a boot on the rail.
“Is there something you wished to see me about, Mr. Pickens?”
“Well, ah, yes, ma’am. I want to talk about King Bragg.”
She sighed. “I can’t bear it. Talk about anything else. The sands of time are running through the hourglass.”
I could never understand talk like that. I’d just say he was gonna croak pretty quick, but she got it all tied up with sand and hourglasses, and I never got the hang of that way of talking.
“I’m sort of looking into it a little,” I said. “Do you remember how he was acting around here—before he, ah, got himself in trouble down the street?”
“He was always a little youthful and impetuous, Sheriff. And he was that evening.”
I figured I’d just pretend to know what that word impetuous meant. I wished she’d talk plain English.
“Was he drunk as a skunk?”
She eyed me real patiently. I don’t think I had said that in any way she approved of.
“He had sipped one ale, Mr. Pickens. Just a little ale, made in Wisconsin and shipped clear out here. I keep a little on hand for him and his father.”
“That’s all—some ale?”
“It’s a very gentle drink, Sheriff.”
“Why did he leave here and go over there to the Last Chance?”
“A man pushed him into it. A gentleman came in and told King Bragg that the cowboys over at the Last Chance were saying bad things about him and his family and the Anchor Ranch, and if he wasn’t a coward he’d come and settle their hash.”
“Someone goaded him into leaving here?”
“Goaded is a good word, especially coming from you, Sheriff. Yes, a sort of heavy gentleman came in, goaded him, and finally King drained his ale and stepped out into the dusk.”
She wiped her eye. “I didn’t want him to go. I knew something bad would come of it. And it did. That was the last I saw of the young man.”
“Why yes, I knew him slightly. It was the T-Bar foreman, Plug Parsons.”
SEVENTEEN
I found Judge Nippers in his office, nipping a little amber stuff from a flask.
“Come in, boy, and join the party,” he said.
He handed me the flask. “I’m on duty,” I said.
“Well, so am I. A little hooch improves duty.”
He sure was an ugly cuss, who reminded me of a bullfrog, except bullfrogs look nicer and got no hair. Nippers had hair going in the wrong direction all the time, which he oiled down with lamb fat or something. It sure made the top of his head look slippery, which is probably how his mind worked too. I never met no one with such a slippery mind as Judge Nippers. He made most of the county lawyers look like virgins.
I took the flask, since he was wavin’ it before my eyes like I had some duty to perform, and sipped a little. It sure wasn’t red-eye; it was something smooth and fine. He must have got it sent to Doubtful, because there wasn’t stuff like that served in any saloon I knew of.
“You’ve come to talk about the hanging,” he said. “You’re going to tell me you’re not up to pulling that lever and sending that brat to his fate. You’re going to tell me to bring in a professional hangman.”
“Well, it crossed my mind,” I said.
“You don’t enjoy hangings.”
“Well, it ain’t high on my list of pleasures.”
“It beats having a woman, but isn’t as good as a satisfying trip to the outhouse. A good trip to the outhouse is the most underrated event on earth.”
I sure didn’t know how to talk to a judge talkin’ like that. He nipped another sip from his flask and smiled, revealing yeller teeth between crusty lips.
“You nip your way through a trial?” I asked.
“A good nip improves the sentence. I never lay a sentence on anyone until I’ve refueled a little.”
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