by Lauran Paine
“No, he won’t think any such a thing, John,” MacCallister insisted. “I’ve known that old firebrand a long time. He’ll know exactly why we did that … to avert bloodshed. And unless he’s changed an awful lot this past year, he’ll be grateful for us keeping the peace.”
“Him,” Klinger said, standing up and darkly scowling, “grateful? That doggoned old cuss is meaner than a roiled-up rattler even when he’s in a good mood. I know. Remember I repped at his roundups before I got to be sheriff.” The young lawman looked over at his father-in-law. “Ethan, you may have known him a lot longer than I have, but I know his kind. Every big cow outfit between here and the Cimarron has one like him. Opinionated, rough-talking, willing to fight, mean and powerful.”
MacCallister stuck to his point of view. “You convince Dick DeFore he’s wrong, and he’ll back down.”
“Yeah? And how do we do that?”
“I already told you, we let him have his day in court with the stage company and anyone else who challenges his right to exact a toll for going through the pass.”
Klinger stared at his father-in-law and gently shook his head. “You know better, Ethan. You’re just saying that. I’m not convinced it would have worked out that way before, but I know DeFore well enough to know it’s sure not going to work out like that now … not after Travis Browne tells DeFore about Ray Thorne.”
MacCallister privately agreed, but he would not say so. Instead, he said: “John, go on home to your wife, and get something to eat. Tell Ruth I’ll maybe drop by for a spell this evening. One thing’s sure, there won’t be anything else happening today. It’ll take DeFore at least until tomorrow to get set for whatever he figures to do next.”
Klinger’s frown didn’t abate even after he nodded and headed over to the door. He knew as well as MacCallister knew that they hadn’t settled anything between them, and that whatever was going to happen—while it probably wouldn’t occur today, as the deputy had just said—would very likely only be postponed until tomorrow. Still, MacCallister was right—or, at least, they both felt that he was—the sheriff might as well go home, enjoy his supper, and have a good night’s rest. Worrying wasn’t going to do any good.
After Klinger left, MacCallister went to the little woodstove, made a fire, put on a pot of coffee, and rolled and smoked a cigarette. He was indignant. For the first six months, a new sheriff shouldn’t have to handle anything but drunks, an occasional horse thief, or maybe a wife-beater. Whatever fate governed things like this had no business dumping a potential shooting war into his son-in-law’s lap.
While he stared at the woodstove, the office door opened, and a slight, wispy man entered. He closed the door and looked owlishly over at MacCallister’s craggy and resentful face.
“’Afternoon, Ethan,” the visitor said in a tentative manner, his hand still upon the door latch as though uncertain of a welcome.
“Hello, Clem. Sit down. I’ll have coffee ready directly.”
The stage driver advanced up to the chair, but he didn’t sit. His face relaxed a little. He shot the woodstove a quick look, as though verifying the fact that the coffeepot was indeed on, then he dropped down, hooked his thin arms over the back of the chair, and said: “I wanted to tell you that it wasn’t my idea … what happened up in the pass today. When Thorne got in my coach, he told me what to do. I didn’t have no say at all.”
“Sure,” MacCallister said easily. “I figured as much, Clem. You looked embarrassed when he jumped out of the coach up there.”
Clem made a wry little grin. “Well, later maybe,” he said, “but when Thorne first stepped out, I was sweatin’ pure lead. You know, a fellow up on a stage seat is pretty much exposed. I was tryin’ to remember some prayers while Thorne was talkin’. I thought for sure Travis was goin’ to make a play.”
“He would have, Clem. He would have. Of course, Browne didn’t know that it was Ray Thorne. But I’m not sure, even if he had known, that he would have let any man back him down in front of all of us.”
Clem rested his chin upon the arms he’d crossed over the chair back, and steadily regarded the former sheriff for a moment. Then he said: “Ethan, Mr. Thorne just give Hank orders to send the coach up there again tomorrow mornin’.”
“And you think Weaver will do it?” said MacCallister.
Clem scratched his head, still carefully watching Ethan. “What choice does he have?”
“That damned fool’s going to get himself killed, Clem.”
“Well, if you’re talkin’ about Thorne, that’s fine by me if he gets himself kilt. But right now I’ve got a different problem. The shotgun guard went to Hank after Thorne told him, and he quit. Said he’d be hanged before he’d go up to the pass again.”
MacCallister, with the glimmering of an idea, said: “I see, Clem. So that leaves just you.”
“Yeah, it sure does. Now what I come down here about, Ethan, is to ask if you’d ride up on the box with me tomorrow. You know I’ve got a wife and kids, and I got me a house here in town, so I can’t just up and quit like the guard did. And I got the same bad feelin’ about tryin’ that twice, just like the guard did.”
“And you figure if I’m up there on the box with you, maybe I can prevent a fight.”
“Yeah, something like that. How about it, Ethan?”
“Does Weaver know you’re asking this?”
“No.” Clem straightened up and said a tart word. “Hank’s so flustered by everything that’s happened that you can’t talk to him about anything.”
“Let me think on it,” MacCallister said, getting up and heading over to the stove.
“What is there to think about? You and John want to keep the peace. I’m here to tell you that if that coach goes back up there tomorrow with Ray Thorne on board, there’s goin’ to be serious trouble.”
MacCallister poured two chipped crockery mugs full of black java, walked back, and handed a cup to the stage driver. “Be careful,” he admonished, “it’s hot.”
Clem held the cup but didn’t take his eyes off the deputy sheriff. “You gonna try evadin’ this thing?” he asked pointedly.
MacCallister resumed his seat at the desk, sampled his coffee, found it scalding hot, and relaxed, because that’s how he liked it.
“You know better than to say a thing like that, Clem. But there’s more to this than just riding the box with you tomorrow.”
“Like what, I’d like to know.”
The deputy took a sip, but screwed up his face when he realized the coffee was bitterly acidic. He paused before responding to Clem’s question. “Well, like that stage not leaving Winchester,” he finally said.
Clem stared and very gradually began to shake his head. “You’ll never talk Hank into goin’ along with that. He’s too afraid of Thorne. And even if you could, you’d never get Thorne to call it off, and right now he’s givin’ the orders down at the office.”
MacCallister said placidly: “We’ll see about that, Clem. What time you figure to pull out in the morning?”
“Nine, like always.”
“All right. I’ll have an idea by then.”
Chapter Four
In a town the size of Winchester, when anything as unusual as a smoldering feud between the largest, richest cowman in the locality and the local stage line occurred, all the less important facets of existence swiftly fall into the background. The same applied to the active participants of such a feud, but once it became generally known that the fancily dressed dude with his matched ivory-butted six-guns was probably the most notorious and durable of that will-o’-the-wisp fraternity of gunfighters, Ray Thorne, local interest sharpened, saloon gossip became unusually lively, and every sporting man had a wager to make one way or the other.
There was no possible way to keep Thorne’s identity from reaching Ethan MacCallister’s daughter, so when Klinger went home that afternoon, following
the confrontation up in Cheyenne Pass, he found his wife absent and a cold supper laid out for him on the kitchen table.
* * * * *
Ruth MacCallister Klinger, with a shawl over her shoulders, walked into the sheriff’s office not ten minutes after Clem Whipple had departed. In fact, MacCallister was still sipping that original cup of hot coffee when his daughter came through the door.
He put aside the cup and smiled upward. “Hello, honey, John left about twenty minutes ago. He ought to be home by …”
She dismissed what he said with a wave of her hand.
“Dad, is that man the stage company sent up here really Ray Thorne, the gunfighter?” she asked, her hands shaking and her eyes wide in a fearful look.
Easing forward, MacCallister squared a chair around and motioned Ruth toward it, saying: “Honey, sit down and relax.” He hadn’t seen his daughter this agitated in a long time.
Ruth was a fair-complexioned, clear-eyed woman of twenty-five. She had curly blonde hair and a look of youth that made her seem four or five years younger than she actually was. It was difficult now, seeing those two in the same room alone, to note any marked resemblance, and in fact Ruth didn’t much resemble her father. She was the cameo image of her mother, dead seven years now. And yet in her sturdy, solid build, she was like Ethan. Where she differed markedly from him, which perhaps had more to do with age than heritage, was in her manner now, for he sat there as calm, as imperturbable, as stone, while Ruth was anything but calm.
She took the chair and sat, but she did not relax, and her clear eyes clung to her father, awaiting his reply to her question.
He said quietly: “I reckon so, honey. I reckon that stranger is Ray Thorne. But that’s nothing for you to get so upset about.”
Ruth locked both hands across her stomach. “Nothing to get upset about!” she exclaimed. “Dad, my husband is the sheriff!”
“Well, sure he is, Ruthie, but Thorne’s made no threats. In fact, we met him up in Cheyenne Pass this morning and sent him back to town.”
“You and John did that?”
“Yes, honey. And he went right along. Now listen to me. As long as John is sheriff, he will be meeting up with the Ray Thornes of this country. I told you that when he decided to run for sheriff. I explained all the perils to you, honey. I also explained them to John.” Ethan leaned back in his chair, considered his daughter for a thoughtful moment, before continuing. “You know, if your mother were here, she’d tell you being married to a lawman isn’t the most secure life there is, but that after a while, if that’s what your man wants from life, you learn to live with it. I reckon she’d also tell you that while there’s danger, it’s very seldom as bad as one’s imagination can make it seem.”
Ruth lost some of her stiffness under her father’s quiet philosophizing. She leaned back in her chair, unlocked her clasped hands, taking in deep breaths. Finally, she said: “Dad, promise me you’ll stay with him. That you won’t let anything bad happen to him.” She stopped, but then added: “Or you.”
“Of course I’ll stay with him. I promised you that when he was elected, didn’t I?”
Ruth nodded. Her gaze turned misty. She got up, went over to kiss Ethan’s leathery cheek, then she left.
For a full fifteen minutes after her departure, with outside shadows thickening, the former sheriff sat there, scarcely moving, as he reflected how Ruth was painfully like her mother had also been at twenty-five.
Finally, he left the jailhouse, strolled along the northward sidewalk in the balmy dusk, and paused in front of the stage office. The place was dark. He went on around to the back where the corrals and barn were, found several hostlers playing cards, and asked a few questions of these men before returning to the roadway again.
A few cowboys were beginning to drift into town, as it was still early for Winchester’s night life to start up, but that didn’t prevent the exceptionally eager riders from hitting town for a few head-start beers, or perhaps a woman-cooked supper over at the hotel dining room or one of the town’s eateries.
MacCallister considered the hotel for a moment while he teetered upon the plank walk’s edge before coming to a decision. Thorne would perhaps be there. He was obviously a meticulous man who would prefer the amenities of a hotel over a boardinghouse. The deputy could picture him dressing carefully before a mirror in his Denver clothes of high quality, and he made a rueful face about that. None of the men around Winchester were fancy dressers, not even the ones like Richard DeFore, who could’ve bought and sold a dozen Ray Thornes without missing the money.
He stepped down off the walkway into the roadway dust, crossed over, but as he stepped up onto the opposite walk, he turned northward and bypassed the hotel entrance entirely. He would meet the gunfighter tomorrow morning, for if he sought him out now, then the ensuing meeting would be pointless, and MacCallister, with an idea beginning to form in his mind, wanted that morning meeting to be the crucial one.
He strolled into the Teton Saloon, nodded at several idling men, crossed to the bar, and bought a drink of ale from Rusty Millam, night bartender and part owner in the Teton. MacCallister and Rusty had been friends for years. In fact, eight years before, when Rusty had first come into the country, dead broke and hungry, it had been MacCallister who’d staked him and gotten him a job. Once Rusty had proved himself, it was MacCallister who made the loan necessary for Millam to buy into the Teton. All those loans had long since been repaid, but the balance—due of goodwill—could never be repaid.
Rusty Millam was the warm, outgoing type of man never to forget that, so, while he served MacCallister his ale and picked up the coin that the deputy tossed down, Rusty leaned far over and spoke swiftly in a lowered voice.
“That Ray Thorne the stage company sent here from Denver has let it be known that if any DeFore men comes in here while he’s drinking, he’ll call ’em out.”
MacCallister listened, drew back, and raised his glass. Over the rim of it, he said quietly: “Rusty, you got your shotgun under the bar loaded?” When Millam nodded, the deputy drank half of the ale from the glass, set it down hard, and said: “If he tries anything like that in here, Rusty, you use that scatter-gun.”
The freckled, rusty-red-haired Millam, about thirty years of age, was thin and likable, and he had increased the Teton Saloon’s trade considerably since buying into the place. But he had a definite rule about becoming involved in feuds like this one.
“I think it’d be better for me to sidestep this one than mix into it, Ethan,” he said, wrinkling his forehead as he placed a pained look of silent protest on the deputy. “One way … I could lose all the DeFore Ranch business. The other way … I could wind up dead. You know that Ray Thorne’s reputation … he’s a killer. I wish to hell he’d decided to patronize some other saloon in town.”
To this, MacCallister had nothing to say, so he finished his ale silently, turned away from the bar, and gazed out over the room. There were no DeFore Ranch men in sight, but that didn’t mean much. Richard DeFore’s home ranch was six miles from Winchester. When his men rode into town for a night’s revelry, they invariably arrived late.
“Ethan?” MacCallister faced back around again, and watched Millam thoughtlessly wipe his bar top with a rank rag. “Is it true the stage is going to try the same run again tomorrow?” the saloonkeeper asked.
“That’s what Clem told me, Rusty.”
“Well, maybe you ought to know that Thorne isn’t figuring on being the only one inside the coach this trip.”
MacCallister regarded Millam stonily for a long while without uttering a sound. Around him, the room’s noises ebbed and flowed. As newcomers walked in out of the darkening night, they were greeted by acquaintances already waiting for the poker games and serious drinking to begin. The bar began to fill up, too, and Millam’s assistant barman was kept busy while Rusty and the deputy sheriff stood across from one another down wh
ere the bar turned and met the wall.
“Where’d you hear that?” MacCallister finally inquired.
“Eavesdropped on Thorne when he was in this afternoon. He was sounding out some of the boys. Heard him offer ten dollars gold just for riding up through the pass with him inside the coach.”
“Did he get any takers?”
“Four,” replied Millam soberly. “Strangers to me … looked like the usual run-of-the-mill unemployed riders on their way through town.” Millam made a particularly wide sweep with his bar rag, leaned over, and whispered: “Two of ’em are sitting at that table behind you … near the door. Those two big, rough-looking fellows playing twenty-one. But don’t turn now, they been watching us.”
Finished cleaning the bar top, Millam turned and walked on down where the clamor for service was getting profanely loud.
For a minute or two, MacCallister toyed with his glass. He returned an overly friendly greeting from some new arrivals to the saloon, then casually watched before heading toward the door. As he passed the table where the two range men were indifferently playing twenty-one, he threw a quick, sharp look downward. Both the men were strangers to him, and, as Rusty Millam had observed, they seemed to be another pair of unkempt, unemployed drifters, nothing more.
The deputy passed out into the warm night, spotted a light over at the stage office, and decided to head on over, stepping into the roadway and across the street. By now the saddle horse traffic was thicker as riders converged upon Winchester. It was also fully dark out. So dark, in fact, that when he walked into Hank Weaver’s office, he had to pause a moment until his eyes grew accustomed to the pale light coming from the single lamp.
At the desk, Weaver was nervously shuffling through a wrinkled stack of papers. When he looked up and recognized his caller, Weaver put the papers down abruptly. His nervousness obvious, he tried to explain once again. “Ethan, I couldn’t do a thing about it. I already told you, Thorne’s got a letter of authority from the Denver office.”
