The Marshal of Whitburg

by E. R. Slade

  “S’pose my horse could get a turn in the paddock, instead of having to stand in that stall all day?”

  “That’s for regulars. Your horse going to be a regular?”

  “Might be. I’ll know more later tonight. Who’s got the handsome roan out there?”

  Gabe grunted. “That’s Vern’s. Don’t be thinking of buying him. Vern sets considerable store by that horse. Though I don’t know why with that bad hoof. It seems all right, but I wouldn’t want to have to count on such an animal if the going got too rough. You just never know with things like that.”

  So it was Vern who had followed him. He couldn’t quite picture Vern doing that without being told to by Everson.

  Chapter Seven

  They held town council meetings in Buckeye Brewster’s hardware store way down the other end of the street from the hotel, almost at the end of town, the end from which Lon had ridden off into the woods. He also had a wagon shop, a wheelwright’s business next door and a sawmill out back, but at seven-thirty at night they were closed.

  Brewster had had his clerk move some merchandise out of the way and set out some chairs. More chairs were in a row behind the counter on a sort of long box to get them up so people could see the councilors when they sat there. A number of lamps were lit and hung on hooks overhead since the sun was down behind the mountains to the west.

  Lon had arrived fifteen minutes ahead of time but already there were men sitting in some of the audience chairs, though nobody sat in the councilors’ chairs until a couple of minutes before seven thirty, by which time all the rest of the audience chairs were full and men were standing in the rear, smoking and talking in low voices.

  Lon was aware that he was an object of curiosity, but tried to be unconcerned about it. He’d saved an extra chair and when the councilors sat down, in came Everson and sat beside him. There was a quieting of the room and Orville Tuft, looking to be in a good humor, opened the meeting. He asked for minutes of the last meeting, for comment, and then called for a vote of approval. Then they talked about a new enterprise in town that served very cheap liquor which some said was really just a mixture of creosote and raw alcohol; one man was claimed to have died of the stuff.

  The councilor who had brought this up on behalf of a petitioner was Walter Turnbull. He suggested they vote to send the owner of the new saloon packing. Turnbull was a big, bluff man with heavy white eyebrows and a booming voice and seemed to fancy himself in the role of heroic public figure, alternately pointing into the air and pounding on the counter with his fist as he spoke.

  Lon was trying to size up the councilors in hopes of figuring out how to talk to them. Tuft he already knew he was going to have a hard time with, Buckeye Brewster he couldn’t figure, sitting there with an enigmatic twist of his narrow face, but Turnbull he could imagine appealing to. There were two others, Sid Greeley, a saloonkeeper, they said, and Alden T. Wescott III, a lawyer with the kind of smooth, polished veneer that reminded you of the perfect finish on a hearse. There was something vaguely familiar about his face, yet Lon didn’t think he’d ever seen the man before.

  When Turnbull finished his speech in defense of the public good and morals with a final slam of the counter and had sat back to pull out a handkerchief and mop the sweat from his brow, Buckeye Brewster leaned forward slightly and said, “I don’t see where we’ve got anything to say about that fellow. We got no laws telling how good or bad anybody’s liquor’s got to be. If people want to buy it, that’s their business, not ours. If it goes around somebody got sick or died of the stuff you can bet he won’t be in business long. Ain’t we got better things to talk about?” He glanced at Lon appraisingly, then leaned back again in his chair.

  “I’m with Buckeye,” Sid Greeley said. “I don’t need the competition, but if we start picking and choosing who can be in business here, pretty soon we’ll all be in trouble.”

  “What’re your thoughts on this?” Tuft asked Wescott.

  As soon as the man spoke, Lon knew why he seemed familiar—Zinnia’s companion had the same voice, the same long thin nose, the same air of superiority. This had to be his father.

  “We are the council in this town,” he said. “We can do anything we want to. If we want to pass a law outlawing one or more cheap drinking establishments, we can do it.”

  “I tend to agree we could do it,” Tuft said judiciously. “I’m sure Alden is right about that. But Sid has a point. If somebody has died, though, that could be considered murder, it seems to me. I’d say the thing isn’t for us to decide but for our marshal to investigate, if he feels it needs investigating. If he sees fit to bring charges, then a jury can decide if harm was done. Anybody have more to say?”

  Turnbull rehashed his speech. Greeley said it was a bunch of irrelevant rot and then they voted three to two not to interfere with the new saloon.

  Tuft looked at Lon and smiled, barely glanced at Everson, and then introduced a motion to let the current marshal go and replace him immediately with Lon Pike. He gave a slightly overblown—as it seemed to Lon—picture of Lon’s heroics, and then launched into a listing of all the holdups that had happened in the last twelve months and pointedly stated that all of them had happened on Everson’s watch and he had gotten exactly nowhere in any effort he might have made to catch the perpetrators.

  “Mr. Everson,” he said, “you have had plenty of chance to do something about this, but the holdup men are just getting bolder. I think you are incompetent.” He looked to his right then his left at the other councilors and said, “Discussion?”

  “I second the motion,” Greeley said promptly. So promptly that Lon was pretty sure it had been arranged beforehand. Greeley didn’t look at either Lon or Everson.

  “I’d like to hear from Marshal Everson,” Wescott said. “And then from Mr. Pike.”

  “There’s a motion on the floor,” Tuft said. “I have called for discussion, not presentations or a public hearing.”

  “I’m not suggesting a public hearing out of order,” Wescott said. “I for one need to hear from both of these men before I’m ready for a discussion.”

  “All right,” Tuft said, eyeing Lon speculatively. “I’ll let marshal Everson say whatever he wants in his own defense, and then we can hear from Mr. Pike. Marshal?”

  Everson got ponderously to his feet. He’d changed his shirt and wore a gun belt he apparently kept for formal occasions since it wasn’t his usual one, though the gun was the same.

  “My deputy Billy died trying to catch those holdup artists you’ve been talking about,” he said. He let that sink in a moment, then said, “I’ve decided to replace him with Lon Pike here who I think will do a good job. Otherwise, I haven’t got a lot to say. Those bandits are hard to catch. Changing marshals won’t change that.”

  He sat back down.

  “Hold on a moment, Marshal,” Wescott said in his smooth voice.

  Everson struggled back to his feet.

  “You say those men are hard to catch,” Wescott went on. “Why is that?”

  “They don’t leave tracks to speak of. They seem to know every trick in the book.”

  “What is your plan to try to catch them?”

  “There’s only one way. That’s wait for them to strike again and hope to catch them in the act.”

  “And if that fails?”

  “Try again. It’s impossible to be everywhere at once.”

  “But you know where the bank is, don’t you?”

  There was a slight stirring and stifled laughter from the onlookers.

  “I expect everybody knows where it is,” Everson said stolidly.

  “You also know where the holdups of the stage take place, too, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know when the stage arrives and when it leaves, do you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why aren’t you on hand at the place where it gets held up when you know it will be there?”

  The room went dead silent.

/>   “I often am,” Everson said wearily. “But somehow they know and nothing ever happens then. Sometimes I can’t be there.”

  “The front of your office needs propping up sometimes?”

  That brought open laughter. Tuft rapped his gavel and demanded order.

  “Mr. Wescott,” Everson said, “I’m not sure you appreciate what’s involved in keeping order in this town. If the law can be counted on to always be elsewhere at known times, those who have illegal things to do will know when they can do them with impunity.”

  There was no laughter that time.

  “No further questions,” Wescott said.

  “Anybody else?” Tuft asked, and when nobody said anything, he said, “Thank you, Marshal. Mr. Pike? Do you have anything to add? Is it true you have been hired as the marshal’s deputy?”

  Lon stood. Not being used to public speaking, he found his palms sweaty and had to clear his throat four or five times to get his words out without strangling them first.

  “It’s true,” he said. “I’m amazed anybody’d think me qualified to be marshal since I’ve never had any sort of experience in that line. I’m thinking maybe people have a bigger idea of that business with the drunk that burst in waving a gun than they ought to have. But I’m willing to take on being deputy. That way maybe I can do some good but you’ll still have Marshal Everson. Just seems to make the most sense.”

  “You know we want to offer you the marshal’s job,” Tuft said.

  “Yes, and thank you. But I think this way would be better.”

  “You would turn us down if we voted you into office?”

  Lon felt hotter and hotter, sensing every eye in the room focused on him. He’d been back and forth in his mind about what to say to this question.

  “I’m hoping you’ll decide not to do that,” he said.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “That’s true, I didn’t. I’m hoping to turn you in another direction.”

  “I see that, Mr. Pike. But we need to know where you stand.”

  Lon drew a long shaky breath, let it out again.

  “Fair enough,” he admitted. “All right, then. I told you I would accept and since I gave my word I won’t back away from it. But it’s my best judgment that you’d be wiser not to hold me to it. Why not keep the experience you’ve got? If I can add something, well and good.”

  Wescott leaned forward. “Orville, can I interject a question here?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Mr. Pike, just why is it you don’t feel qualified to be marshal?”

  “No experience in that kind of job.”

  “Yet you admit you promised Mr. Tuft you would take the job—is that correct?”

  “I did.”

  “And why was that?”

  Lon felt his face go red. He couldn’t help it. “Mr. Tuft was very anxious to have me say yes. I guess I let him talk me into it. But afterwards I thought it through more carefully, and then Marshal Everson offered me the deputy job and I thought that seemed a better thing all around.”

  “Well, Mr. Pike,” Wescott said, sitting back in his chair, “I think maybe you’re right that you’d make a better deputy than a marshal.” It was a dismissal of sorts, a way of saying that Lon didn’t meet his definition of anybody important enough to be respected.

  “Mr. Pike,” Tuft said, “let me ask you something. You brought Billy’s body back here after he’d been shot dead. Suppose you had been in Marshal Everson’s shoes and Billy had been your deputy. What would you have done when he appeared slung dead over the back of a horse?”

  Lon hadn’t expected the question and wanted to take time to think through his answer, but this wasn’t the place for being a long time about a response.

  “I’d have got on my horse and taken after those bandits.” He hesitated, knowing that what he wanted so strongly to say might not be smart under the circumstances, but something about the moment made him say it anyway: “I wouldn’t have come back until I found them, either.”

  That brought a stirring and approving murmurs and he knew he should have kept his mouth shut, but there it was.

  “And what did Marshal Everson do?”

  “I would have to let Marshal Everson speak for himself on that.”

  “I’m not asking him. I’m asking you.” Tuft’s eyes were shining.

  “He asked me questions, and that was when Jack came bursting in. Afterwards he said it was no use trying to go after those men because you can’t track them. I assume that’s something he’d know more about than I would.”

  “But you would have gone after them in any case.”

  “Yes.”

  “That, Mr. Pike, is why I want you to be marshal.”

  This brought cheers and stomping of feet from the audience.

  “If I’m deputy,” Lon said, “I can still go after them. Like Billy did.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Pike. Gentlemen I call for a vote on my motion.”

  But they wanted more discussion and it turned out there was a lot of uncertainty in their minds what the best course to take was. Eventually, though, they did finally take a vote and voted three to two against the motion. Tuft and Greeley voted for, the rest against. Then Wescott motioned they pass a resolution supporting Everson and approving his choice of Lon Pike as his deputy. That passed unanimously and they went on to other business.

  “Deputy Pike,” Everson said as they went out into the cool night air—the wind had pretty much blown itself out—“report for duty first thing tomorrow.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lon said.

  Chapter Eight

  “Stage at noon today,” Scott Warner told him the next morning as Lon was about to head out the door.

  “Really,” Lon said, caught off-guard.

  “Congratulations on your new job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I think they should have made you marshal. I see why Tuft wanted you.”

  Lon turned from the door to look at him. “You were there last night?”

  “For some of it. I heard you say what you’d have done if Billy’d been your deputy. I’ll bet everybody in town knows you said you’d have gone after those bandits and not come back until you found them. That’s what people want to hear.”

  “I didn’t intend to say anything like that. Just came out.”

  “Proves you’ve got the most important thing a lawman needs: determination not to let the thieves and bandits get away with it—and not to let your own doubts stop you from acting.”

  “Depends, maybe, what type of doubts we’re talking about.”

  “That’s true. I’m talking about doubts whether you can succeed. Maybe the bad guys will get away, maybe they won’t. But if you spend too much time doubting you can catch them you won’t spend enough actually doing it. Like Everson.

  “By the way, if you want to rent a room by the month instead of by the day, I have one in back upstairs. Window looks on an alley instead of Main Street, but the room is actually a little bigger.” He gave Lon a grin. “More space to store your gun collection and wanted posters of road agents you’ve caught. Anyhow, it’s a lot cheaper.”

  Lon took him up on the offer of a cheaper room, glad to reduce the outflow from his modest little hoard of cash money. After moving his few belongings, he went to have breakfast and found a lot of smiles and people telling him he should have taken the marshal’s job. He sure wished he’d kept his mouth shut about what he would have done in response to Billy’s death. He could see how this was going to make trouble for him by raising people’s expectations beyond his ability to satisfy them. And he could already tell that Everson wasn’t pleased. He hadn’t said so directly, but he hadn’t needed to. Lon wasn’t looking forward to going to the marshal’s office to get his assignment for the day.

  When he did, he found Everson had laid out a tin star on his desk. The words, “Deputy Marshal,” were on it in raised letters.

  “Don’t lose it.” he said. “It’s the only one
I got left.”

  Lon picked it up, thinking what it meant once he pinned it on.

  “Put it on your left shirt pocket,” Everson said. “Well, go on.”

  Lon drew a deep breath, held it, and put the star where directed.

  “Now you’re official. Let’s get to work.”

  “I hear the stage comes in at noon today,” Lon said. “Want me to watch the spot it gets held up?”

  Momentarily there passed over Everson’s face a look Lon had seen once before—when Tuft had said he could be replaced. He didn’t care for it any more now than he had then.

  “I need you to patrol the saloons, stop fights, arrest anybody who destroys property. The saloonkeepers in this town expect us to protect their property. Fights in the street are less important than fights in saloons since there’s less likely to be damage, but stop them anyway. Use the butt of your pistol if you have to, but as good as you are with your fists, use them first.”

  “Sounds like you don’t expect the stage to be worth holding up today.”

  “Now look. You wanted to be deputy and that’s what you are. You let me do the thinking. Clear?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Anything special I should know about any of these saloons? Particular troublemakers to watch out for, that kind of thing?”

  “Not really. You’ll be able to pick out the hardcases as easy as I can tell you. Most of them aren’t worth worrying about too much. You’ll know the ones that might be trouble. Don’t bother with that new tent they were talking about last night. Says “DRINK” in big letters on the tent flap, but everybody calls it Shorty’s on account of it being the handle of the man that owns it. I’ll be down around there quite a bit today trying to see if there’s anything in the talk about somebody dying of what gets served in that place. So you can skip it.”

  Lon went off to start his rounds. Since it was only about eight o’clock in the morning, not much was doing. He went down one side of the street and back up the other, poking his head into drinking establishments, smelling a lot of unsavory smells, seeing proprietors sweeping up, emptying spittoons, spreading new sawdust, or just reading the newspaper.