Dallin sighed and said solemnly, “I never figured it’d get me a hangrope.”
* * *
A bad taste filled Slaughter’s mouth as he surveyed the people who had crowded into the outer office. Stonewall and Dallin stood to one side. The deputy was grim-faced and held the shotgun pointed in Dallin’s general direction.
Dallin looked scared . . . and if he had really done what he was accused of, he had every right to be.
Little Ed McCabe and his wife stood in front of the desk that Burt Alvord normally used. Mrs. McCabe had an arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Jessie was pale and kept her head down. She avoided looking at anybody as if she were ashamed.
McCabe opened his mouth to say something, but Slaughter stopped him with a raised hand. “Just hold on a minute. I want to hear from Miss Jessie before anybody says anything else.”
“She don’t want to talk,” Mrs. McCabe told him with a shake of her head. “She’s too upset.”
“Maybe so, and I’m sorry if this is going to upset her even more, but once your husband and his hands started shooting off guns in the middle of my town, they made this my business. And I intend to get to the bottom of it.” Slaughter leaned forward and rested his hands on the desk. “Jessie, can you hear me?”
“I . . . I hear you, Sheriff,” the young woman replied in a tiny voice. She was seventeen or eighteen, a pretty girl with long, straight, dark brown hair.
A lot of girls were married by the time they were her age and maybe had a child or two of their own, but Jessie still lived at home with her parents. She’d had a couple older brothers. One had died of a fever, and the other was killed when a horse kicked him in the head. Jessie was the only child the McCabes had left.
Slaughter couldn’t blame them for being more protective of her than they normally would have been.
“Jessie, you’re going to have to tell me what happened,” he said as gently as he could. “Did Dallin Williams do something to you?”
“I never—” Dallin began, but he fell silent when Stonewall dug an elbow into his side.
“You’ll get your chance to talk,” Slaughter snapped. “I’m speaking to the young lady now.” He turned back to her. “Go ahead, Jessie.”
“I . . . I don’t like to talk about it, Sheriff.”
“I’m sure you don’t, but unfortunately that’s the way the law works. You have to tell us what’s wrong before we can do anything about it.”
Jessie swallowed hard. Without lifting her head, she said, “He . . . he forced himself on me. Dallin . . . Mr. Williams, I mean. He made me . . . do things with him . . .”
Slaughter glanced at Dallin. The young cowboy looked like he was about to explode from the urge to deny the charge.
“Did this happen today?” Slaughter asked.
“No, sir,” Jessie replied with a slight shake of her head. “It was . . . a while back. A couple months ago.”
Slaughter frowned. “If that’s true, why didn’t you tell anybody until now?”
“I was ashamed. I didn’t want to tell. And he said . . . he said he’d get me back if I did.”
Despite the warning glares from Slaughter and Stonewall, Dallin couldn’t contain himself any longer. He flung his hands in the air in obvious exasperation. “I never did! I never touched the poor gal, and I sure as hell never threatened her!”
McCabe turned toward him, fists clenched, and growled, “Shut your lyin’ mouth, you—”
“Quiet down, both of you,” Slaughter ordered.
When McCabe subsided except for the murderous glares he continued to shoot toward Williams, Slaughter asked, “Why did you come forward now, Jessie?”
Mrs. McCabe said, “She had to, Sheriff. She . . . she couldn’t hide it anymore.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She’s in the family way.”
Dallin made a frustrated sound and shook his head as he gazed up at the ceiling in evident disbelief. “So now I’m gonna be a daddy?” he asked when he looked down again. “Well, somebody best call the preacher, ’cause we got us a pure-dee miracle here!”
There was no holding McCabe back this time. He roared and launched himself toward Dallin, swinging a big fist at the cowboy’s head.
The punch didn’t find its intended target. Stonewall tried to get in between the two men, and McCabe’s knobby fist crashed into his jaw, instead.
The powerful blow drove Stonewall back against the cowboy. As both men staggered from the collision, Dallin reached around Stonewall, grabbed the shotgun, and tore the weapon out of the startled deputy’s hands.
The move didn’t take Slaughter by surprise. His Colt slid smoothly from its holster as he drew with impressive speed. Before Dallin could raise the shotgun, Slaughter had the revolver’s sights lined on the young cowboy’s face. The Colt’s hammer was eared back, and Slaughter’s thumb was all that kept it from falling.
McCabe blanched since the shotgun was pointing toward him and his family. Mrs. McCabe screamed and wrapped her arms around Jessie to shield her daughter with her own body.
“Don’t do it, Williams,” Slaughter warned. “That shotgun comes up another inch, I’ll blow your brains out.”
Dallin hesitated. “What does it matter, Sheriff? I’m fixin’to be railroaded into a hangin’ anyway.”
“What matters is that if that scattergun goes off in here, you’ll kill some innocent people for sure,” Slaughter said. “Whatever else you’ve done, I don’t think you want that.”
“I didn’t—” Dallin stopped short and sighed. He lowered the shotgun until it pointed toward the floor. “You’re right. I don’t want to hurt nobody.”
“Stonewall, get that gun,” Slaughter ordered.
When Stonewall had the shotgun again, the sheriff went on, “Now take him back to the cell block and lock him up.”
“What happened to me gettin’ to have my say?” Dallin wanted to know.
“That was before you grabbed that shotgun and nearly got somebody killed. Now get him out of here, Stonewall.”
Once Stonewall had escorted the still-complaining Dallin Williams out of the office, Slaughter continued. “I’m sorry to hear about your, ah, situation, Jessie.” He wished that Viola was there. She would know what to say to Jessie McCabe. Viola always knew just the right way to handle delicate problems.
He, on the other hand, was just a man, and a rather blunt one, at that. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me more about what happened. That’s a mighty serious charge you’re making against Williams. I mean, are you sure he’s the only one who could’ve . . .”
“What are you sayin’, Sheriff?” McCabe demanded. His face looked like he was about to cloud up and rain again.
“I’m not saying anything,” Slaughter replied. “I’m just trying to find out the truth.”
Mrs. McCabe said, “Jessie, you tell him. You tell the sheriff just what you told me.”
Jessie looked like she would have rather been almost anywhere else, but she drew in a deep breath and said, “A couple months ago, not long after Dallin came to work for my pa, I was in the ranch house by myself one day. Pa was out somewhere on the range, and Ma had come into town. Dallin showed up. He said Pa had sent him back to fetch a roll of wire. They were fencin’ off a waterhole that had gone bad to keep the cows from getting to it.”
“That’s the God’s honest truth, Sheriff,” McCabe said. “I remember that day.”
“Hold on,” Slaughter told him. “What happened then, Jessie?”
“Well, Dallin came in the house—”
“Why would he do that? The wire he’d been sent to fetch would be in the barn, wouldn’t it, not the house?”
“Well, sure,” she admitted, “but he told me he wanted to see me. He had been, well, courtin’ me, I guess you’d say, ever since he went to work for my pa. I told him that I wasn’t interested, but he didn’t seem to take no for an answer.”
That fit with what he knew of Dallin Williams’ reputation, thought Slaughter. The young cowb
oy was persistent when he went after a woman.
“What did you do when he came in the house?”
“I told him he needed to get on about his business,” Jessie replied with the first trace of fire that Slaughter had seen in her. “He said his business was getting to know me better. I told him I already knew him as well as I wanted to. That’s when he . . . he got mad and took hold of me and . . . and laid me down there on the rug right in front of the fireplace and had his way with me!”
The words came out of Jessie in a rush, and then she put her hands over her face and started to sob. The sounds were wracking in the silence that gripped the office.
Chapter 5
Just on the other side of the door leading to the cell block, which was open a couple inches, Stonewall stood holding the shotgun.
A few feet behind him and to his right, Dallin was inside one of the cells, pacing back and forth, waving his hands around, and muttering to himself in agitation. He was the only prisoner at the moment. After a few moments, he stopped his pacing and gripped the iron bars so tightly that his knuckles stuck out and turned white.
While Jessie McCabe was answering the sheriff’s questions, Stonewall listened through the gap and relayed her statement to Dallin in a whisper that the people in the office couldn’t hear through the thick door.
Then, like Slaughter, Stonewall stood there in an uncomfortable silence as Jessie sobbed.
“Stonewall!” Dallin said urgently under his breath. “Stonewall, you got to hear me out!”
Stonewall used his foot to ease the cell block door up until it was closed except for a tiny crack. He turned toward the cell and glared at Dallin. “Why should I listen to you? Any man who’d stoop low enough to do such a thing—”
“But that’s just it! I didn’t do it!” Dallin insisted. “This is the first time I even heard when I’m supposed to have done it.” He pressed his face against the bars like he wanted to crawl between them. His eyes were wide and staring, like those of a trapped animal.
“Listen, I remember that day, all right? It’s true that Little Ed sent me back to the ranch headquarters to fetch a roll of wire. That’s what I done. I drove the buckboard right up to the barn door, went inside, got the wire, heaved it onto the back of the buckboard, and left. That’s all I done. I never even went close to the house, let alone set foot inside it!”
Stonewall frowned in the gloom of the thick-walled cell block. If he didn’t know better, he’d say that it sounded like Dallin was telling the truth.
And yet Jessie McCabe had sounded like she was telling the truth. The important question was why would any girl make up such a degrading story if it wasn’t true?
Stonewall’s brain worked quickly as he thought about the implications of Dallin’s claim. After a moment he asked, “Did you take the wire right back out to that waterhole Mr. McCabe wanted to fence off ?”
“Why? What does that matter?” Dallin asked with a puzzled frown.
“Well,” Stonewall said, “if you went back right away, Mr. McCabe might realize that you didn’t have time to, ah, do what his daughter’s accusing you of.”
“Say, that’s right! Lemme think . . . Doggone it, Stonewall, I just don’t know. That was a couple months ago. I remember puttin’ the wire in the buckboard, but after that . . .” Dallin suddenly looked crestfallen. “No, I don’t reckon I did go straight back, now that I think about it. Well, I did, meanin’ I didn’t go nowhere else, but it took me a while to get there because the harness on the buckboard team snapped and I had to stop and fix it. Little Ed, he’s a believer in gettin’ ever’ penny’s worth of use outta his gear. He’ll hang on to somethin’ until it’s plumb wore out, like that harness.”
“Did you tell him what happened when you got back with the wire?”
“Sure I did,” Dallin replied with an emphatic nod. “I didn’t want him thinkin’ I’d been lollygaggin’ around. He wouldn’t have took kindly to that.”
Dallin’s story made sense and sounded believable enough, thought Stonewall, but if he was really guilty of attacking Jessie McCabe, he might have made up the whole yarn about the broken harness to cover his tracks.
“I’ll tell Sheriff Slaughter what you just told me, after the McCabes are gone,” Stonewall said. “I’m sure he’ll want to talk to you some more about it.”
“I appreciate that, Stonewall. I’m bein’ railroaded here. You know that.”
Stonewall just grunted. He wasn’t sure what to believe. Even though he didn’t really consider Dallin Williams a friend anymore, he hated to think that Dallin might have done the awful thing he was accused of.
Luckily, if there was anybody who could get to the truth of the matter, it was John Slaughter.
* * *
Slaughter suggested Hallie McCabe sit down with Jessie while the young woman pulled herself together. With an arm around her daughter’s shoulders, Mrs. McCabe led her to the old sofa pushed up against one wall.
“Ed, you come with me into my private office,” Slaughter said. “We’ll talk some more about this.”
“I don’t see why we need to do any more talkin’,” McCabe said as he glared at Slaughter. “You got the son of a buck locked up. All we need now is a gallows.”
“Haven’t you forgotten something?”
McCabe frowned and shook his head to indicate that he didn’t know what Slaughter was talking about.
“A trial,” Slaughter reminded him. “There’s no need for a gallows until there’s been a trial and somebody’s been found guilty and sentenced to hang.”
“I’d say Williams has already been found guilty. That baby my little girl’s carryin’ is all the verdict I need.”
“The law doesn’t work that way,” Slaughter said coolly. “Come on.” His voice was firm enough that McCabe didn’t argue.
The two men went into the office, and Slaughter closed the door behind them.
“Sit down,” he said with a nod toward the leather chair in front of the desk.
“Don’t feel like sittin’.”
“Do it anyway.”
Grumbling, McCabe sank into the chair.
Slaughter went behind the desk and sat down, too. “Tell me about what happened this morning.”
“What do you mean?”
Slaughter’s voice hardened again. “I mean, I want an explanation of how you came to be chasing Dallin Williams down Allen Street and shooting up my town.”
With obvious reluctance, McCabe said, “I’m sorry about that, Sheriff. Reckon the boys and me, we just got carried away. We were so mad when we heard what that skunk did that we couldn’t think straight.”
“Back up a mite. How’d you hear about it?”
McCabe heaved a deep breath into and out of his barrel chest. “We were out at the corral breakin’ some horses. Williams is a pretty good hand at bronc bustin’, I’ll give him that. He was smoothin’ the rough edges off that bay he rode in on when my wife came out and got me.” He stopped and frowned as if he had to compose himself for a moment before he could go on. “Seems Jessie finally broke down this mornin’ and told her what happened. I guess the gal figured that in her condition she couldn’t keep it a secret much longer.”
He sighed again and rubbed a big hand over his rugged face. Even a big, bear-like hombre like him fell prey to his emotions from time to time. “I went in and talked to her, and when she told me the same thing she told Hallie, I stormed back out to the corral to have a showdown with Williams.”
“Did you figure on forcing Williams into a shotgun wedding?” Slaughter asked.
McCabe grimaced and shook his head. “Hell, no! If the two of ’em had been sweet on each other and that’s the way the, uh, problem came about . . . well, maybe. I wouldn’ta been happy about it, that’s for dang sure, but if Williams had been willin’ to do the right thing by her . . . But that ain’t what happened. Jessie don’t love him. She don’t want him for a husband. He forced her! That’s rape, pure and simple, and he oughta be strung up for
it!”
Slaughter couldn’t really make much of an argument against that, but it was up to a judge and jury to decide what to do about the offense, not him.
“What did Williams do when you confronted him about it?”
“He lied through his teeth, of course. Said he never did anything to Jessie. I asked him if he was callin’ my little girl a liar. He didn’t answer that. He was still on the back of that horse he’d been breakin’. He put the spurs to it and jumped it right outta that corral. Damnedest thing I ever saw, the way that horse sailed over that fence.”
McCabe sounded like he could almost admire Dallin Williams’s horsemanship, if nothing else about him.
“Then Williams lit a shuck,” he went on. “Took me and the boys a few minutes to throw saddles on horses and get after him. We didn’t catch up until we got to town.”
McCabe’s powerful shoulders rose and fell in a shrug as he paused again. “Reckon you know the rest of it, Sheriff.”
Slaughter leaned back in his chair. “You realize there’s no proof things happened the way Jessie said they did.” He held up a hand to forestall the inevitable angry protest McCabe was about to make and continued. “You’ve just got her word for it.”
“That’s plenty good enough for me,” the rancher said.
“And I agree that it’s good enough to take to Judge Burroughs and get a proper charge filed against Williams. That’s exactly what I intend to do.”
“You’re not gonna turn him loose, are you?”
Slaughter shook his head. “No, I plan to keep him locked up until I’ve talked to the judge. If he agrees to hear the case, then Williams will stay behind bars. After that, what happens is up to the court.”
“I still wish I’d just shot him when I had the chance.”
“If you had, you might be the one in trouble,” Slaughter pointed out.
“You think so, Sheriff? You really think so?”
Slaughter frowned. McCabe was right. if he had killed Dallin Williams after hearing the news that Williams had raped his daughter, no jury in Cochise County—probably no jury in the whole territory—would have convicted him. In all likelihood, there wouldn’t have even been a trial.
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