by Gene Curry
I cut in before John could let off more steam. In a more settled part of the country a man could more or less depend on a fair trial, but where we were, anything could happen once a man was locked up.
“I’m afraid it’s no deal, Sheriff,” I said. “John isn’t going and neither is the girl. Same for me.”
I wasn’t making any threats, and I kept my hand well away from my gun. “Maybe we’ll come in later after we get a good lawyer. For now we stay put.”
Brimmer looked down at me. “You mean you’re resisting arrest?”
“Putting it off is more like it.”
Brimmer’s eyes were tired. “I can’t let you get away with this, Saddler. If it’s trouble you want ...”
I raised my left hand and a dozen rifles were aimed at the posse. “Say hello to the sheriff, boys.”
They said hello in a chorus.
“I’ll be back, gunslinger,” Brimmer said, turning his horse.
I was about to tell him not to hurry when Jessie horned in. I turned and she was swinging her hand across the side of her holster.
“Jessie!” I said.
She avoided my eyes; her own eyes fixed on the sheriff.
“Keep out of this, Saddler,” she said. “You had your chance. Now it’s mine.”
Even John, out for the sheriff’s blood a few minutes before, looked surprised.
“I’m calling you a low stinking coward, sheriff,” Jessie said. “Want to do something about it?”
Gray-faced, Brimmer turned back to face her. For John to call him a crook wasn’t all that bad. After all, John was a drunk and they had known one another for years.
“I didn’t hear that,” he said.
“Then I’ll say it again. You’re a lousy no-good coward hiding behind that tin star of yours. How many men have you shot in the back in your time?”
I cut in. “Pay her no heed, Sheriff. I’ll make her see sense.”
Jessie yelled at me, “The hell you will! Nobody makes me do anything I don’t want to do. You sheriff, you with your badge, I just called you a coward. What are you going to do about it?”
“You started this,” Brimmer said. “Woman or not, you can’t call me yellow.”
“I just did.” Without warning Jessie’s hand went for the .38, but I was faster. My gun was out and cocked before her finger curled inside the trigger guard. Brimmer’s hand hadn’t even come close to his holster.
“Why don’t you ride out,” I said to him after I warned the girl to hold still. “You made your point.”
Indeed he had, and if I hadn’t stopped in time he would be lying dead beside his horse. I knew that Jessie would have drilled him between the eyes. I had watched her with the tin cans and knew she could shoot.
“This changes nothing, Saddler,” the sheriff said to me.
They rode on out and I sent a man to trail them to the wire.
Yelling for a bottle, John sat in a porch rocker. He was in high good spirits, probably thinking of the wild old days when sheriffs were meant to be shot. Laughing Woman handed him his rum.
“By God, did you see the look on Brimmer’s face when Jessie here called him down. Brimmer who used to have the big reputation as a tough hombre. Indian-fighter, town tamer, man hunter, so-called, and a mere slip of a girl tells him the truth about himself. Why did you have to butt in, Saddler? It was between the girl and the sheriff.”
“You hired me to look after your interests, John. That’s what I was doing. If Brimmer got killed here today they’d be looking for you. Jessie could just ride on and they’d probably never find her. What would you be doing in the meantime? Hiding out in a cave waiting for the trouble to blow over. It wouldn’t blow over. You know that.”
John didn’t want to hear the truth, especially after he’d had a few drinks—and he always had. “I know no such thing.” he complained. “You say you were looking out for me. Well, I think, so was Jessie. Isn’t that right, girl.”
It pained me to have to listen to this.
“As best I could, Mr. Wingate,” she said, looking at the ground. “I just wanted Brimmer to know that he couldn’t ride in here any time he felt like it. You’ve been the first person who’s been nice to me since ...”
John looked bashful. “No need to go into that. I understand what you’re trying to say. Another thing, you can stay on here as long as you like.”
“Thanks, Mr. Wingate,” Jessie said, and gave me a tight little smile that old John couldn’t see.
She walked away.
“Now there’s a girl with spirit,” John said. “Nobody can deny that.”
Watching Jessie’s nice firm behind underneath the striped pants, I had to agree with him, though I wasn’t sure we were thinking of the same kind of spirit.
John’s eye still had the glint of battle in it. “That was mighty close for a minute. And you know I’m kind of sorry the whole thing didn’t come to a head. Get it over with, get Brimmer and his deputies out of the way, then me and Vince could have it out without any interference from the law. I thought to myself, why not here and now?”
“You want to die that bad, John?”
“Hell no, I don’t want to die at all. It’s just that I get to thinking of the man I was—and ain’t no more.”
“We all have our time. Besides, you won’t find any rum, or any Navaho women in hell. Think about that because you sure aren’t going any place else.”
Laughing Woman was working in the parched flower garden to one side of the porch. Bent over, she displayed strong, smooth, brown legs. John looked at her legs, her rump, and licked his lips.
“You’re right, Saddler. A poor Yankee boy with nothing but the clothes on his back. That’s what I was when I first came to this country. Now look at me! What have I got to complain about? You know another man my age—uh, fifty-five—can drink a quart of rum a day and still take care of a woman every night?”
Of course John was sixty-five and, while the part about the rum was probably true, I doubted the nightly woman. But you never know about these old goats.
“You’re a wonder to behold,” I told him.
He took the Peacemaker from the waistband of his pants and spun the chamber. Holding the heavy framed gun, he said, “It should have been me calling out the sheriff instead of the girl. An odd sort of gal, but I like her style.”
“If it doesn’t get her killed.”
“I’d say she knows how to take care of herself. Maybe you made a mistake not letting her kill the sheriff.”
“You keep coming back to that, and you’re wrong. If Brimmer gets killed for any reason the governor has to act. You and Pardee are a long way from the capitol. Maybe the governor knows something about the trouble here but hasn’t done anything because nothing big has happened. But if you kill the sheriff you won’t get another sheriff—you’ll get the militia.”
“In the old days we would have whipped the militia too. Anybody that got in our way.”
I let him run on till he got tired of it.
“Look, John, we’re still in trouble with the law after today, but it could blow over because nobody got shot and Brimmer looks bone-tired. My guess is he won’t be back for a while, if at all. Give him a chance to let those warrants get stale.”
I was thinking that not much more than a week before, I had been way ahead in a high stakes poker game in Goldfield. The men in the game were a good bunch, not a sharper in the lot. One of them was the owner of the saloon we were playing in, and he kept the whiskey and the steaks and the black coffee coming all the time. Now and then we’d knock off to get some sleep. The saloon keeper didn’t run any girls in his place, but there was a nice clean whorehouse across the street. One of the girls, new from Mississippi, took a shine to me; there wasn’t a thing she wasn’t ready to do. And she did it.
And I had given all that up just because the boy from the telegraph office came to me with a message from John Wingate.
I didn’t ride all the way to Arizona because of the money.
I had plenty of money and was getting richer all the time. I went because I owed John for old times’ sake.
Now, listening to him on the porch of his house, I wondered if I hadn’t made a big mistake. When I came all the way to Arizona to take the job I figured it would be the same as it had always been. Once I hire on as top gun I like to do things my own way; I insist on it. Any fighting force, whether it’s a bunch of riders in a range war or a brigade of cavalry, has to have one leader. Maybe John saw himself as the commander in chief. That was fine as long as he left the field decisions to me.
But he was an old friend and getting old; I decided to hang on for a while. What John didn’t seem to realize, or didn’t want to, was that it’s easy enough to win the first part of a range war. You can do that just by acting like a savage: killing, burning, maiming cattle and horses, poisoning wells. Maybe there was a time when you could do all that and get away with it; not any more.
I hadn’t been joking with John when I mentioned the militia. Even if he recruited every rider and renegade in the territory, the militia would just bring up a howitzer and blow him and his ranch to kingdom come.
John seemed to know what I was thinking, and maybe it scared him a little.
“All right! All right!” he said grumpily. “You handle it. That’s what you were hired for. I’m going in to take a nap.”
I grinned at his back.
But I hadn’t been joking when I said he was looking for trouble when he bragged about killing sheriffs. These old cow kings like John—Pardee too—thought there was nothing they couldn’t do, if they wanted to do it badly enough. They had come West with nothing but iron nerve and guns to back it up. They murdered the Indians and cheated the Mexicans, and woe betide the man who stood in their way. But the times were changing—had changed—and they didn’t know it or didn’t want to know it. They all wanted to be John Chisums, but even Big John had managed to change some of his ways.
I wondered where Jessie had gone off to. She had come close to getting some of us hung, and so I was naturally interested in what she was going to do next. I didn’t know what to do about her. John might side with me if I told him to send her packing, but I knew I’d look like a fool in front of the men, if it came to that. There I’d be, the tough troubleshooter having a showdown with a pretty girl just out of her teens. I could imagine how they’d laugh at that in the bunkhouse. No, I couldn’t do that. In fact, I didn’t want to do it at all, if she behaved herself, an idea that seemed damned remote. I could always grab her at night and dump her over the county line, with firm instructions not to come back, but she would. Not a doubt about it, and then there would be genuine trouble.
I knew I was thinking about her too much for my own good.
Chapter Eight
The next trouble that day was with Curly Fitch, who liked to brag, I was told, that he was the toughest ramrod to ever come out of the Texas Panhandle. I didn’t doubt that he was tough enough and good at his job; and it wasn’t his bragging that bothered me but the way he kept getting in my way.
I’d set a man to cleaning rifles or filling sandbags, to protect the buildings from a night attack, and then later I’d come back and find that Curly had taken it on himself to change the order. I didn’t much care if he didn’t follow orders himself—I could get along without him—and that wasn’t the problem. The men knew what he was up to, and if I let him get away with it everything would start to fall apart.
It was time to teach him to be a good little soldier-boy. I got the boys in a bunch, but I could feel them grinning every time I turned my head. So one more time I went to dig Curly out of hiding.
For a change he wasn’t off chasing strays; he was over by the side of the barn checking a load of lumber that must have been checked when it was first delivered. He was making marks in the supply books, wetting a stub of a pencil with his tongue.
“I thought you’d like to attend our little get-together,” I said. “We’re going to talk about what happens if there’s a night attack. That lumber’s already been checked.”
“I know that, Saddler. No need to tell me my job. I’m checking it again if that’s all right with you.”
Curly was tall to the point where some men slouch a bit so they won’t look like freaks. I’m six-one and that’s tall enough for any man. Curly was at least five inches taller, and I got the feeling that he would have liked to be even taller.
I said it wasn’t all right with me. “Check it later. We got things to do.”
He looked at me in that weary manner some people reserve for fools. “I’m checking it now,” he said. “I like to start what I finish.”
“Don’t start anything with me. Leave off what you’re doing and come over with the rest of the boys.”
Curly grinned down at me from his great height. “I like it better here.”
“Move it,” I said. “That’s an order, and I’ll back it up if I have to.”
I don’t know if I could have beaten him in a fair fight. It’s possible that I could if I had enough time to slug it out with him. But that wasn’t the idea; I wasn’t about to roll around in the dirt with him while the men looked on. Then, too, it was possible that somebody might trip me or throw a rock when I wasn’t looking.
So the usual fair-play was out of the question. I didn’t have the time and I didn’t want to take the time. Curly’s lesson was going to be short and sour.
He wanted to impress me with what a dangerous cuss he was. But he didn’t want to fight me. His eyes were that blank, almost childish blue you often find in huge men who can’t believe they’ll ever have to prove how tough they are.
“Saddler,” he said slowly and deliberately, “You been getting between me and my work ever since you got here. You ought to know I don’t like that. You keep it up and you’re going to get me mad. You won’t like it if I get mad, as any of the boys can tell you if you have a mind to listen. Now why don’t you go away before I step on you!”
For me that’s all it took. If he said he was going to beat me to mush—fine! Threatened with being shot I wouldn’t have been too offended. But to say he’d step on me had just earned him a beating that he’d never forget.
“That’s right,” he pressed on with it, “I’ll mash you like a bug.”
“Try it, lame brain!”
Curly knew he wasn’t very bright and the name stuck in him like a knife between the ribs. Doubling his big fists he stepped forward, big as a grizzly. His voice was thick with anger.
“You lousy gunslinger,” he said, “a man that never did an honest day’s work in his life. What do you know about anything but guns and killing men that don’t know about guns. You’re strong enough to hold a man’s job, but you’d rather be a saddle tramp killer.”
Nobody can say he wasn’t asking for it; in a little while he got it. He wasn’t wearing his gun in a holster; he had it stuck in his back pocket, but instead of going for it he just bunched up a work-scarred fist and shook it at me.
“I don’t need a gun to handle a man like you,” he said. “Not if you’re man enough to try your fists.”
“Why not?” I said. “I’ll try anything, but why don’t we move back where it’s private.”
“That’s fine with me.”
I wasn’t sure he might not try to jump me, so I kept some distance between us while he went back behind the tall stack of lumber. You should have seen how his eyes popped when I drew on him; he didn’t try to get at his own gun.
“I knew you didn’t have it in you,” he sneered. “What’re you going to do now? Kill me and say I drew first? That would be the way you’d do it.”
“Throw your gun away. Reach around with your left hand. Don’t get tricky or you’ll lose an elbow.”
Curly did what he was told.
“That’s good,” I said. “Now throw it over the fence. If you want to fight now’s the time.”
Curly tossed the gun away, grinning while he did it. Which only proved how dumb he was, and his grin f
aded abruptly when he saw I was going to hold on to my gun.
“You still got your iron,” he complained, thickhead that he was. I almost felt sorry for the fool; almost but not quite.
“So I have,” I said, and before he could say another word I slammed him across the side of the neck. There was a loud whacking sound like an ax handle hitting a side of beef. He was too tall to go for the head at this point. That would come later when he began to falter. I hit him again in the neck and he roared with pain and raised his fists to try to protect his face. I pulled his guard away with a quick feint, then laid open his cheekbone, and he would carry the scar from that blow till the day he died.
It wasn’t my intention to beat him to death, but when he ran at me opened handed there was nothing I could do but kick him in the crotch. He yelled in agony but didn’t stop. Lowering his head he charged at me and if his hard skull had hit me I would have been driven halfway through the wall of the barn. But when he lowered his head, that gave me the inches I needed to beat him on top of the skull. I hit him three times, then stuck the gun in my holster and used my fists like hammers.
It was a beating, not a fight, and that’s what I meant it to be. He kept coming at me, blood streaming down his face, and I kept moving out of the way. I rocked his head with solid punches, and hitting him so hard and so often it was starting to wear me out. I had to finish him off.
I lay back and hit him with the meanest punch I could throw. It got him in the throat right under the chin and, gasping and clawing the air with his hands, he crashed forward and lay still.
But he wasn’t unconscious, just down. He lay twitching and groaning; I told him I’d kick his brains out if he tried to get up before he listened to what I had to say. I told him I wasn’t going to say it more than once.
“You won’t get another chance,” I said. “You looked for trouble and you got it. Now you hate my guts more than you did before, which means you’ll be looking to find me without a gun. Give it up, Curly. Take your beating and stay alive. I don’t have time for fist fights. Jump me—try anything at all—and I’ll shoot you through the head. Later, if we come through this business with Pardee, maybe we’ll go at it with just our fists. Not now.”