West of the Big River: Boxed Set of Eight Western Novels

by James Reasoner

  Joe McKinney made me a good deputy. I trusted that man from the git go.

  Now. When I took over from J.L. Hubbell, the county jail was more like a pig sty than anything fit for human beings. And Old Jack Conley, the jailer, was fit for little beside tippling the bottle and snoring through his watch. In the end, he let prisoners escape and I fired him. For a while, the jail was empty, but trouble was flaring up all over the county.

  A vigilance committee ran down some horse thieves over on the edge of the plateau. The no-goods took three horses, but even one horse stole is enough to get a man hanged.

  The three-man committee tracked the horse rustlers to their camp, which was quite well concealed in a gully down this side of Clear Creek. They must have been awful confident, maybe because they knew I was over to Navajo Springs, the little town that grew up between the stage stop and the railway station on the A&P line. At any rate, the vigilance boys could see the rustlers well from a bluff above their camp. They got off their horses, I mean the vigilance men, lay down, set their long guns on them horse thieves and blasted them.

  Two men fell dead. One was Long Hair and the other was Billy Evans. So there was a couple of warrants I didn’t have to serve.

  I sat in the office for a change, counting and recording the fees I’d collected over the past few days, when Joe McKinney come in.

  “By all that’s holy,” he said through clenched teeth. Then he let out a string of oaths I’d rather not repeat.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Navajo’s stole a prime mare from Defiance Cattle Company.”

  “Guess I’d better saddle up and see if I can get her back.”

  “Too late.”

  Joe didn’t look happy, to say the least.

  “What happened?”

  “George Lockhart went after the mare.”

  “The reservation’s outta his jurisdiction. Outta mine, for that matter, but we are the law in the county. You, Me, and Frank.”

  “They went. Lockhart and two Defiance cowboys named King and Palmer. They never come back.”

  I stood and took my hat from its peg on the wall. “Sheesh. We’d better go to the agency.”

  “I been to the agency,” Joe said.

  I put my hat back and sat down. I reckoned the news wasn’t gonna be good. “Lockhart all right?”

  Joe shook his head. “Hacked to little pieces outside the hogan of a Navajo name of Hosteen Chee. Chee’s dead, too. No tellin’ who died first.”

  “How ‘bout the cowboys?”

  “Dead. Run and fought for more’n two miles. Shot in the back of the head at close range. No telling what they did to the Navajos.”

  Joe took a deep breath and let it whoosh out. “Don’t like this, C.P., truly don’t.”

  “You left then, right?”

  Joe nodded. “Lucky to get out alive. Must a been forty Navajo bucks with rifles all pointing my way. Dogs was chewing on a dead horse. Reckon it got killed in the fray. The Navajo Hosteen Chee was lying in the hogan, probably pulled in after things died down. Never seen so many mad Navajos in my life.”

  “Where’re the bodies?”

  “Got some wagons from Navajo Springs to pick ‘em up and haul ‘em back.”

  “Well done.” Still, Apache County’s my territory and I figured I ought to go talk to the agency and the army. “I’ll get over to Fort Defiance first thing.”

  “I went.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Colonel over there said . . . and I quote . . . ‘We’ll look into the affair’.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Yeah. But Chee was dead and someone had to have killed Lockhart and his posse.” Joe licked a pair of dry lips. “Me and O.B. and John Scarlett went to Bennet’s Trading Post over to Houck’s Tank to see if he had any idea who done it.”

  “He know anything?”

  “He said them what did it had already run for the reservation. A bunch of Navajos with scowls on their faces and guns in their hands was hanging around and we could see a bunch more coming. ‘Walk your horses away, boys,’ I said. They’d a sure come a shootin’ if we’d run. But my horse walked something awful slow, almighty slow.”

  A while later, the army sent me a letter saying Constable Lockhart and “associates” were drunk and were the aggressors in the matter. All the time I was sheriff of Apache County, and later when I was sheriff of Navajo Country, we could never expect the army or the Indian agent to deliver justice in any form. I’m not saying every white man was in the right, but we surely wasn’t in the wrong every time neither.

  I’d warned Andy Cooper about his habit of taking other people’s stock. And I told him to lay low while I was sheriff. But that boy was forever getting into trouble.

  One of his escapades let me get my spurs into the army just a little bit. You see, Andy, his brother Hamp, and another cowboy from somewhere went up on the reservation and made off with a herd of Navajo horses. The thing about Navajo horses is, they have no brands, at least the horses born and raised Navajo don’t. They said Andy and them stole a hundred and three Navajo ponies, and was branding them at a ketch pen over by Canyon Creek. A horde of Navajos descended on the place and started shooting. One bullet caught Hamp Blevins in the hip. The other two cowboys got away, so to speak, and the Indians got all the horses back.

  Then the army came.

  How they knew I was in Holbrook, I’ll never know, but I was talking with Frank Watron in front of his drug store when a captain and six troopers rode up.

  “Sheriff Owens?” the captain said.

  “I am.”

  “I’ll be Captain Kerr, J.B. Kerr. I’ve been detailed with seeking your assistance in the matter of a man called Andy Cooper and his cohorts who stole more than one hundred head of horses belonging to the Navajo people. This man needs to be brought to justice.”

  I put a finger to the brim of my hat. “Good to know you, Captain. We’d be more than happy to help the army and the agency to apprehend Cooper and his bunch just as soon as you all bring in the Navajo bucks what chopped up Marshal Lockhart and the two men with him. Justice needs to work both ways, Captain. Wouldn’t you say?”

  The captain hemmed and hawed.

  “I’ve been thinking about mounting a posse to go hunting for them who killed Lockhart, even though I hear they run to New Mexico.”

  The captain drew himself up in his saddle—he wasn’t such a big man to start with and a bit scrawny at that—and said in his best cavalry officer voice, “Surely you know, sir, that bringing a posse onto the Navajo Reservation would put you at odds with the United States Army. We are assigned to guard the rights of the Navajo Nation.”

  “Are you saying you’d fire on a legal posse led by an elected officer of the law?”

  “If it came to that.”

  “Your troopers up to a firefight? I hear that they’ve got so much fatigue duty that there’s hardly any time for drills.”

  The captain puffed up. “They are soldiers in the U.S. Army. Of course they can ride and shoot.”

  “Captain Kerr, I can shoot the head off a turkey at a hundred yards. But then, I spend an hour or two a day practicing. I’m known as a good shot. Just ask around. But I’m by no means the best. Zach Decker is better’n me, and so’s Lot Smith. And there’s a whole bunch of rannies, including Andy Cooper, who’d stand right behind them two.”

  The captain got red in the face, but his pistol was in a flap holster and there was no way on God’s earth that he could get that weapon out and into action before me and Frank drilled him, and probably his troopers, too.

  “You bring me those killers, Captain, and then we’ll talk about horse thieves.”

  “You have no jurisdiction over the Navajo Reservation.”

  “Lockhart and King and Farmer just went onto Navajo land in hot pursuit of Indians what made off with a prize mare. There wasn’t no need for killing.”

  “They were drunk and disorderly, and started the shooting themselves. That was
our report on the incident.”

  “If that’s how you’re gonna treat men who enter the reservation in pursuit of criminals, then we can return the favor when you need us for the same reason. Turn about is surely fair play, Captain. Good day.”

  I turned to Frank. “I’d be obliged if you’ve got a can of pine tar, Frank. Don’t want none of my horses getting fly blown, ya know.”

  “Come on in, C.P.,” Frank said, and we left the captain and his men on their horses in the street. I bought a can of pine tar, and when I got back to the street, the army was gone. I did hear that Captain Kerr called me a “desperate, determined, and ignorant man.” Determined, I am, and at times, desperate. But although I am unschooled, I cannot see where I am ignorant in the least.

  3

  Becoming sheriff put me at odds with some of the toughest, randiest men in the territory. Men like Lee Renfro and Gus Snider, the Clanton brothers, and the old Mormon enforcer, Lot Smith.

  Next to Porter Rockwell, I reckon Lot Smith was an avenging angel, head to foot. He must have known Port Rockwell, because Smith was a bodyguard to Brigham Young when Rockwell was. Never heard of him wearing a badge, though. Still, when I was elected sheriff, Smith was getting along in years, nigh on to sixty, I heard.

  I’m not afraid of any man alive, but I don’t take chances either. Now Lot Smith. I had a warrant on him for having more than one wife. Some of the Mormons served time in Yuma for that offense, but I kinda figured a man’s religion was his own right, and if it caused a man to take care of more than one woman and a herd of youngsters at the same time, then more power to him.

  I put the warrant for Lot Smith in a desk drawer and ignored it. Smith’s home had originally been at Sunset, up north and west of Winslow. Now I hear he’s moved to Tuba City on the reservation.

  It weren’t often that he’d come all the way down to St. Johns, but one day he was watering his horse at the Little Colorado crossing below the bridge.

  “Howdy, Commodore,” he said.

  “’Day, Lot. Weather holding for you?”

  “Bit dry out in that Tuba City desert, good thing there’s a spring or two to irrigate from.”

  I give him a hard look, taking in the gray streaks in his red hair and full beard. “You take care, Lot,” I said.

  “I do that always. Somewhere I heard you have a warrant for my arrest. Would you like to serve it right now?” Lot Smith’s right hand rested on the butt of the S&W American he had stuffed in his waistband.

  “I do. It’s in the office. Says something about you having more than one wife.”

  “Well, that’s true.” Damned if Lot Smith didn’t name every one of his wives, ticking them off with a finger as he did so. “But you don’t see no Smith brats in the poor house, do you?”

  “County spent more’n two hundred eighty dollars for the poor last quarter,” I said.

  “Betcha none of the people taking county handouts’re Mormon.”

  “That may be true.”

  “So. Whatcha gonna do? Drag me in? You’ll have to do that over this here Smith and Wesson.” He patted the grips of his pistol.

  “No, Lot Smith. You kill someone or run off with another man’s critters, and you’ll see me on your trail. But I don’t give a hoot how many wives you have or how many mouths you feed. Deal?”

  Lot Smith grinned. “Deal, Commodore.” He reined his horse’s head out of the creek water. “Come on, Crazy Horse, we got miles to go before dark.”

  “Tuba?”

  “Nah. Stay the night at Oz Flake’s place.”

  “Take care, Lot. Don’t let your temper do you in.”

  “Be seeing ya, Commodore. Right happy to have you as county sheriff. Right happy.”

  He went north and I went into town. It just wasn’t worth the possibility of taking a bullet in the chest just to serve a warrant wrote up out of bigotry.

  * * *

  The brouhaha in Tombstone between the Earps and the Cowboys pushed the Clantons north into Apache County. Old Man Clanton died in an ambush at Guadalupe Canyon and young Billy Clanton went down at OK Corral. Ike and Phin, though, made homestead claims on more than 300 acres of pastureland in Cienega Amarilla, east of Springerville.

  From the first, the Clantons were nothing but trouble. They rustled cattle, blotting the Twenty-Four outfit’s 24 brand with one they’d registered as 74. They got arrested for burglary, and Ike shot a Mexican through the hip when a Springerville card game got too hot.

  Ike Clanton escaped Wyatt’s vendetta ride and so far he’d escaped justice in Apache County, but he couldn’t escape forever.

  The Apache County Stock Growers Association hired a range detective by the name of Jonas Brighton, and gave him the job of apprehending the Clantons. He came to the sheriff’s office, looking for help.

  “’Mornin’ C.P.,” Brighton said at the door.

  “Coffee?” I said.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” He come in and took the chair in front of the desk. Bert Miller, one of our deputies, brought Brighton a mug of coffee. He nodded thanks and slugged down half a cup before he said another thing. “C.P., I got good information that says Ike Clanton’s down in Black River country. I’d like to find him. Well, that’s what the Association’s paying me for, but you know I can’t arrest him. Need the law to come along. Could you do that, C.P.?”

  I had fees to collect and that killer Juan Carillo was waiting for me in Alma, but Bert Miller could go along. “Sorry, Jonas. I can’t. Got pressing matters to care for. But Bert can go along. He’s a sworn deputy. He can make any arrest, if it comes to that. All right with you, Bert?”

  “When ya leaving, Jonas?”

  “The sooner, the quicker.”

  “How long ya figuring on being gone?”

  “A week. Ten days, maybe.”

  “Association paying for grub and cartridges?” I asked.

  “It will.”

  “There you have it, Bert. You get ready and buy your grub and stuff at Schusters.”

  “Where’ll I meet you then, Jonas?”

  “I’ll get me a beer at the Monarch while you’re getting ready. We’ll leave soon as you get your stuff together.”

  Brighton and Albert Miller rode out just after noon. While the range detective said they’d be gone a week or so, I didn’t see them again until after the first of the month, and they’d left on May 14th.

  Funny thing was, Phin Clanton was in the county jail when Miller and Brighton come in carrying news of Ike’s death. They come into the office on the second of June, while I was working on a report about collecting fees and bringing in Juan Carillo. I laid my pen down. “Find Ike?”

  “He ain’t gonna cause you no more trouble,” Brighton said. “He’s dead and buried.”

  I raised my eyebrow, so Jonas told his story.

  He’d gotten word from Hal Simpson that Ike’d been over to Cienega, so him and Miller went there first. Ike Clanton wasn’t there. The barkeep at Lonesome Eight said he heard Clanton was headed for Eagle Creek—that word came about the time Jonas and Bert had been out two weeks. Brighton knew Jim Wilson, who had a spread over on Eagle Creek, so they rode in that direction and reached Wilson’s place on the night of the 31st. They chawed the fat with Jim for a while and turned in, sleeping on the hay in his barn. Nothing happened.

  “Rise n’ shine, law people,” Jim hollered, and Jonas and Bert rolled outta their soogans. Outside, it was still dark.

  “Come on in for breakfast when you get the sleep outta your eyes,” Jim said. Bert and Jonas headed for the washstand back of Jim’s cabin—his little ranch’s got all the comforts of home—and washed up. Time Bert and Jonas got into his house, Jim had bacon fried and heaped on a plate in the middle of the table.

  “How’d y’all want your eggs?”

  “You got eggs?”

  “Got some range hens. You’re gonna get one egg apiece.”

  “Sunnyside up,” they chorused.

  “That was a mighty good breakfast, C.P
.,” Jonas said to me, “right good.”

  “So yesterday morning you ate breakfast at Jim Wilson’s ranch and today you’re telling me Ike Clanton’s not gonna bother me no more.”

  “Hang on, C.P. I’m getting to that part.”

  He cleared his throat and took a mouthful of coffee. “I heard a horse coming,” Bert said, “and when I looked to see who it was, there was Ike Clanton, bigger than life itself, right there in front of the door. I hollered and told him to come peaceful, but he jerked that crazy horse of his around and headed for the brush.”

  “I had my Colt’s drawed,” Jonas said, “and when Ike jerked his Winchester outta its boot and laid it on his left arm to take a shot at us, I just naturally plugged him.”

  “How far off?”

  “Twenty yards, maybe.”

  “One shot?”

  “One shot and he fell. Him on one side of the horse, the rifle on the other. We went out to see if we could help him, but he was plumb dead. Shot under one arm and the bullet came out under the other. I reckon it went right through his heart on the way.”

  “He was plumb dead all right,” Bert Miller said. “We buried him as best we could. Jim Wilson had a shovel, but we didn’t have no Bible.”

  “One more warrant I don’t have to worry about,” I said. “I’ll go tell Phin that his brother’s dead.”

  PART IV

  Apache County Sheriff

  I was getting used to the Havasu House and the folks there, including the Harvey Girls, were getting used to me. As usual, I arrived at the Bucket of Blood with a full stomach, but also with a certain craving for the strong black coffee that seemed to be in inexhaustible supply at C.P. Owens’s saloon. C.P. himself sat at our customary table with his customary cup of coffee. I took my customary place and got my foolscap and pen from my leather satchel.