Paper Sheriff

by Short, Luke;

  “Not long. It’s always nice to see somebody else working.” He came up to her and gave her a gentle, sideways hug of affection. “Let’s talk for a minute, Callie.”

  “All right, but out here, Pa. The kitchen’s a furnace.” She gestured to a pair of chairs, one a battered rocking chair, under the nearest cottonwood which they often used to escape the summer heat of the house. “You sit down. I’ve got some coffee on the stove.”

  Ty moved over and sat down on the weathered rocker and presently Callie came out with two tin cups of coffee and joined him. Here in the shade the soft wind that rustled the leaves overhead was pleasant and cool. When Callie had seated herself on the straight chair, Ty put his cup on the ground beside his chair to let it cool and said, “That trial put everybody back a week’s work. Reese too, I reckon.”

  “Yes, he was up ahead of me, Pa. They’re building a new line camp and corral at Lime Canyon. He’ll be gone a week maybe.”

  “Did you talk to him last night late?”

  Callie frowned. “No. Why? What’s happened?”

  Ty took a cautious sip of his coffee, found the temperature right, took two swallows, then wiped the coffee off his already stained moustaches with his free hand. “Nothing much. He threw Buddy, June, Emmett and Big John into jail last night. As far as he’s concerned,” he added wryly, “there’s nothing too good for the Hoads.”

  “What for?” Callie asked.

  “Oh, they were drinking a little, making some noise. Jim Daley thought Buddy was kind of loud and tried to take him in. The boys wouldn’t let him and some shooting started. Reese heard it and came over to break it up. He knocked Big John cold and then he made Buddy and the other two boys lug Big John to jail. He locked them all up overnight. Like I say, there’s nothing too good for us Hoads.” He was watching Callie’s face and saw it flush with anger.

  “He’s dead set against us, Pa. I don’t know why, but he just is. I’m a good wife to him, but I don’t think he even likes me.”

  “Come back home if you want, Callie. You know you’re always welcome.”

  Callie shook her head shortly. “I can’t, Pa. He did me a good turn, the best a man can do.”

  “Does he give you money, Callie?” Ty asked with seeming irrelevance.

  Callie shrugged. “Enough. I’ve never been used to much anyway. You know that.” Then the oddity of his question struck her. “Why d’you ask that, Pa?”

  Ty finished off his coffee, then leaned back in his chair. “Well, Orv and me had an idea on how to make all us Hoads some money, pretty big money too. That includes you, Callie. Fact is we can’t make it without your help.”

  “My help?” Callie asked. “What can I do that somebody else can’t do better?”

  Matter of factly then Ty told her of the scheme. They would raid the herds on the National Trail, hide the beef in Copper Canyon and sell them through a cattle company of which she would be the president. Ty finished by saying, “We’ll only be stealing from thieves, Callie. Them Texans stole the cattle originally from their neighbors, so stealing from them don’t really mean stealing.”

  Callie nodded. “But why me, Pa? Any one of you knows more about buying and selling cattle than I could learn in fifty years.”

  “No, it has to be you, Callie. You have to sign all our bills of sale or the scheme won’t work.”

  Callie frowned. “I don’t understand, Pa. Why couldn’t you or Uncle Orv or even Buddy sign them?”

  Ty leaned forward now with elbows on knees. “Because you’re married to Reese Branham, Sheriff of Sutton County. If he catches us, he’ll have to prosecute the company. That’ll be you. Like a wife can’t testify against her husband, a husband can’t testify against his wife. Now d’you see?”

  Callie was silent, staring past her father as she pondered this. Then a ghost of a smile touched her thin lips. “You mean him still being Sheriff couldn’t do anything to me?”

  “The law says he can’t testify against you, just like you can’t testify against him,” Ty repeated.

  “Lordie,” Callie breathed softly.

  Ty didn’t push it. He waited, watching her, trying to read the fleeting emotions that crossed her face. Finally she said, “He won’t like it, Pa.”

  “What d’you care? He don’t even like you, you said.”

  “No,” Callie said softly, remembering.

  “You can wind up kind of rich and independent as a hog on ice. It’ll be your money, Callie, to buy your dresses to wear on your trips to the places you want to go.” He gestured toward her tubs. “You can pay for somebody even to wash for you.”

  “That’s not only why I’d do it, Pa,” Callie said quietly. “It’s getting even that I’d like. He thinks us Hoads are trash. I wonder if he’d think a rich Hoad was trash.”

  “Why, the rich are never trash, honey. Only the poor like us are trash.”

  Callie nodded. “I’ll do it, Pa. Now go through it all again. Slow.”

  Ty did, answering all Callie’s questions. Afterwards he told her that now she was willing to front for the Hoad Land & Cattle Company, he was on his way to Bale to see the lawyer, Martin Farmer, who had defended Orville. Farmer would draw up the papers of incorporation for her to sign. She would probably get them tomorrow and then Farmer would file them with the county clerk. Orville, June and Buddy would come to his house tonight and a list of the Hoad relations would be drawn up to be approached and asked to join. They would do that tomorrow while Big John and Emmett would head for the National Trail to find out what herds were moving up to it. It was easy enough to learn that because every trail boss and his hands knew whose herds had started ahead of him and whose were following him, since the herds were mostly made up at the same few Texas communities. Now he had to get on, Ty said, for there was much to do.

  Callie walked him over to his horse and then returned, not to her washing, but to the battered rocking chair her father had just vacated. She wanted to think more about this since she knew instinctively this was the turning point in her married life.

  Just what did she stand to lose by heading up this band? Almost nothing, she thought with a bitter candor. She was unloved, married to a stranger, childless and lonely and with no prospect of any of this ever changing to something else or for the better. She was not physically afraid of Reese because he was gentle with women, all women.

  If that was all she stood to lose, what did she stand to gain? Well, money for one thing. She and Buddy had never suffered from want of enough to eat and wear. In spite of his poor-mouthing, her father had always earned a fair living back in Tennessee, trading, buying and selling stock or anything that could be moved, leaving their mother to take care of them and force their schooling and teach them pride. But still Callie had always had a hunger for physical possessions, the things she could feel and touch and look at and say to herself, “This is mine and mine alone.” It could be anything—a dress, a carved mirror, a pretty little mare or a man. She supposed this same craving for possessions was what drove most women into harlotry, but that didn’t make it any the less real. She would like to be rich enough so that if she saw a woman in the street whose dress she admired, she could stop her and say, “I’ll buy that”; or if she saw one of those beautiful, delicate buggies, with red-painted wheels as fragile as lace, she would like to be able to say, “It’s got to be mine. I’ll pay you whatever you ask.” Admittedly, Callie believed that possessions made people and that without them people weren’t worth bothering much about. If one day she could appear before Reese in a rich dress with real jewels, would he love her again? She doubted that, but she knew one thing, he would place some value on her. All those preachers’ admonitions to shun material things, that money is the root of all evil, that it was impossible for a rich man to get into heaven were just so much nonsense dreamed up by poor people for poor people. Why care if you couldn’t get into heaven if you had heaven on earth?

  Callie rose, suddenly feeling that this was a new kind of a day now. The
Hoads, with herself heading them, would finally come into their own.

  Exactly a week after Reese left the Slash Seven, he stood beside his foreman in the morning sunlight and both regarded the new line shack. It stood at the edge of a broad park high in the Wheeler range, whose foothills stretched down almost to the outskirts of Bale. Surrounding the big park that was already dotted with Slash Seven cattle were the towering spruce from which the line shack had been built. Its freshly peeled logs were yellow-pink in the morning sun and the ground around the new three-room building was littered with long strips of peeled bark. The new building abutted the old line shack and was three times its size. The smell of sun-warmed pitch was everywhere around it, inside and out.

  “Well, there it is, even if it damn near killed us all,” Reese said.

  Ames Tolliver was a dozen years older than Reese and built like a bank vault. Any shirt he bought was torn at the forearms and biceps after a day’s wear, so it was his custom to saw off the shirtsleeves above the elbow to give his huge arms room to move. His face was square and homely, topped by iron-rimmed spectacles, which he had to wear if he wanted to move safely in an area as small as a room. The lenses magnified his blue eyes hugely so that he always seemed to wear a startled look. His range clothes were worn and smeared with pine pitch as were Reese’s.

  “It’s too pretty to call a line shack, Reese. Too big, too.”

  “It beats a tent,” Reese conceded. He looked down at his blistered and pitch-stained hands. The five of them had worked like fools this past week, cutting, hauling and splitting logs and shingles and digging post holes for the new corral across and down the creek. Glancing that way, Reese saw Sam Commery, the youngest crew member, heading up toward them afoot, driving a harnessed team. He was, Reese knew, heading for the loaded wagon by the old line shack that held their tools. Looking again at the house in quiet approval, Reese wondered again why he or his father years ago had not enlarged the single room shack. This high country was really Slash Seven’s main house when the hot summer winds began to burn the lower range. It was cool here and the grass was plentiful and now, thanks to the new building, it would be habitable for the crew and for Callie and himself.

  “We forgot something, Ames,” Reese said and he cut in front of his foreman, heading for the wagon. Standing between the wheels of its left side, he opened the big tool box and lifted out a hammer and some nails. From a keg in the wagon he lifted out a new horseshoe and then tramped over to the door of the new building. While Ames moved up to watch him, Reese nailed the shoe solidly to the lintel log above the door, wincing a little at each blow. He looked at his hands now and said, “Even that hurts.”

  He moved back to put away the hammer, then headed for the corral, crossing the double-log footbridge ahead of Ames. This had been a pleasant, if driving, week, Reese thought. They had worked from sun-up till long past dark, at first sleeping with the sky above them, then with walls around them, then with a roof over them, and the work after the long days in court was the purest kind of joy.

  They passed Sam who was limping a little. He grinned at Reese and said, “I’m going to drive back lying face down on the blanket rolls. I’m too sore to sit down.”

  “Just don’t go to sleep,” Reese said.

  At the corral they caught their horses and saddled them. Steve Ashton and Walt Ryder, the other two hands, had saddled up and were halfway across the park by now. When Reese’s grey was saddled, he watched Ames close the gate, then they rode off across the grassy park, headed for Bale and the Slash Seven.

  When Reese and Ames caught up with the other two, Steve and Walt were already discussing how it would feel to drown in the Best Bet’s beer. Steve was the younger, in his twenties, a lean, long-faced young man with a smouldering insolence in his eyes that never found its way to his speech. He was cynical, yet almost courtly in his manner, and women of a certain type found him irresistible. Walt Ryder was a taciturn, ruddy-faced Scotsman who had been imported by one of the big English owned ranches up north. A quarrel with the owners which he would never discuss had set him adrift to be hired by Reese’s father. In his fifties, he would long since have been foreman if he had not shunned all the responsibilities that Ames Tolliver was willing to accept.

  The wagon road, such as it was, snaked through the dark timber, and Reese paid little attention to the slow-paced talk of his crew. He had started the morning with a carefree sense of satisfaction at having accomplished some hard and necessary work, but as they approached the pinyon-clad foothills above Bale, his feeling of well being slowly wore off to be replaced by a vague depression. At the end of his ride today Callie would be waiting for him—a silent, rebellious and bewildered Callie with whom he had no communication whatsoever.

  Reese dropped off the crew at the Best Bet, then turned off Main Street, heading for the court-house. Out in the distant prairie a storm was drifting in. He wondered what had come up during this past week that Jim Daley had had to handle. There couldn’t have been anything serious for Jim would have sent for him, he knew.

  Putting his horse in under the open-faced shed behind the court-house, he tramped up the court-house steps and entered the rear door of the corridor. He found his office was locked, which meant that Jim Daley was out on an errand. Since he carried no keys with him, he would either have to wait for Jim’s return or query one of the court-house officials on what had happened in his absence. Then he thought of Jen who, though she seldom used her father’s office, might be there today. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and turned left toward the Judge’s chambers next to the court-room. The door adjoining the Judge’s chambers was open and Reese felt a sudden rush of pleasure knowing that Jen was here.

  Tramping into the room which held a small conference table and chairs plus the desk and files, he saw Jen seated in the swivel chair that she had pulled up to the low window. Her feet were on the windowsill and she seemed to be looking out over the summer-lazy town.

  At his entrance she turned her head and smiled. “I saw you ride in, Reese, and hoped you’d come up.”

  She was wearing a grey-colored, lightweight summer dress with a touch of white on the collar and on the cuffs of the short sleeves, a dress Reese remembered and liked.

  “I had to find out if the court-house had burned down. Tell me what’s been happening.” He came over to the big window, leaned down and gently shifted her legs so he could sit down on the sill facing her. She smiled lazily and affectionately.

  “The same old nothing,” Jen said. “I came down to make a pass at working, but when I looked out the window, I saw that storm shaping up. I’ve been watching it.”

  Reese nodded. “We’ll be getting it at home but not near here, looks like.”

  “What’ve you got all over your hands and clothes?” Jen asked.

  “Pitch from logs for the new line shack,” Reese answered. Then he asked, “How’s your father?”

  Jen hesitated a moment. “Puzzled, I’d guess you’d call it, or maybe surprised.”

  “At what?”

  “At some gossip I picked up from the county clerk today.” She paused. “Reese, why is Callie going into the cattle and land business?”

  Reese felt a shock he tried to hide and couldn’t. “I didn’t know she was.”

  “Martin Farmer filed the incorporation papers of the Hoad Land & Cattle Company this morning. Callie’s named as President of it.”

  Reese shook his head in bewilderment. “That happened while I was gone.” He smiled faintly. “She doesn’t own any land and hasn’t got a cow to call her own.” He paused, then asked, “Who are the other officers?”

  “Martin Farmer is secretary. The names of the president and secretary are all that the State requires, although most companies list all officers. That’s what puzzled Dad and me. And now you too, I suppose.”

  Reese rubbed his jaw in thought and the gesture made a faint rasping sound on his week’s dark beard-stubble. “Well, her father’s been a trader of sorts al
l his life—all kinds of stock or anything he could swap for. Sounds like it might be Ty’s idea.”

  Jen nodded. “That’s probably it.”

  “But why Callie’s named president I can’t guess. Maybe he did it to humor her.”

  Jen smiled. “Everybody should be president of something in a lifetime. I was president of my fifth grade class. As I recall it, it was very satisfying to my little ego.”

  Reese grinned. “You probably let the boys kiss you if they’d vote for you.”

  Now Jen laughed. “No, it wasn’t that complicated. All the boys were monsters but there were more girls than boys. I just organized the girls.”

  Reese knew they were both talking just to be talking about anything but Jen’s strange news of Callie. Certainly this was the oddest way any husband ever learned that his wife had launched into a business venture. Was it a result of their last quarrel or had she been planning it all along? He felt a new restlessness now and it was touched with irritation. He hated to be surprised by plans that he should have known at their inception, and now he rose.

  “Jim got any problems?”

  Jan shook her head. “The jail’s empty, and Jim might even be fishing.”

  Reese bid her an abrupt goodbye, tramped downstairs and outside to his horse. Mounting him, he put him directly through town, knowing as he passed the’ Best Bet that his crew was still there.

  He took the short cut across the prairie toward the Slash Seven and felt the chill ground breeze, which preceeded the coming storm. He paused long enough to untie his slicker and don it and then saw that the rain had already blacked out the distant trees at home. The same questions kept troubling him now. Should he challenge Callie immediately, demanding to know what she planned and why she planned it? No matter what their relationship, she was his wife and he had a right to know of her activities. But would she tell him any more than he already knew? It came to him then that demanding an explanation of her might be precisely the wrong way to find out what she was up to. Why not pretend ignorance and let events develop as they would? After all, it was only through chance and then curiosity that Jen had learned of the new corporation. The few people who would learn of it would think it was Reese’s idea and that it was his whim to make his wife president. If he didn’t bring it up to Callie, then she would assume that he knew nothing about it or that he was so indifferent to her and her doings that he didn’t care.