High Lonesome

by Peter McCurtin

  The words Socorro County & McDade Banking Company were lettered in gold on the window of the two-story bank. Except for the Sheriff’s Office & Jail, it was the only other brick building in town. In smaller letters Major Emmett Caulfield was listed as President. Lassiter didn’t have to guess that this Major Emmett Caulfield owned most everything else in McDade, from the undertaker’s to the blacksmith shop.

  Caulfield’s private office was in the back, through a heavy wooden door reinforced with metal strips. It was guarded by two mean-looking Mexicans loaded down with cartridge belts and toting Winchesters. One of the Mexicans rapped on the door with the muzzle of his rifle. A peephole set into the middle of the door snapped open. A dead bolt rattled in its slot and the heavy door opened. Lassiter expected to see more hard faces and guns. Instead, the person who opened the door was a woman with dark chestnut hair drawn tightly back from a pale, beautiful face. Though she hadn’t spoken yet, she gave Lassiter the impression of great composure.

  “Morning, Ellie,” the Sheriff called out, digging Lassiter in the back with the scattergun and snatching off his hat at the same time. The Sheriff doffed his own hat. Lassiter went in.

  After the glare in the street, it was hard to see in the room. Lassiter blinked, trying to see what was going on. It took him a little time before he was fully able to make out the white-haired man behind the massive Mexican desk in front of the window. The woman still hadn’t said anything, but Lassiter felt she was watching him very carefully.

  “You just stand right there,” Sheriff O’Neal said.

  The man behind the desk didn’t get up. For some reason, Lassiter had expected Major Emmett Caulfield to be a big man. He wasn’t. If you wanted to stretch it, you might even say Emmett Caulfield was a small man. But there wasn’t anything so strange about that. So many of these would-be Napoleons were small men.

  “Ellie, open the shutters a bit,” the man behind the desk said. “Let’s have a look at this gentleman.”

  Caulfield’s voice had a quiet rasp in it. It was an Irish voice but with most of the brogue worn away. The face was long and thin and baked berry-brown by the New Mexico sun. Like his hair, Caulfield’s mustache was bone white. Unlike the Sheriffs, it was carefully trimmed, almost dandyish. The Major was dressed like a banker, but there was a military snap in the way he handled himself.

  “Mind if I sit down?” Lassiter started to say. Caulfield snapped back, “You will do nothing till I tell you to. Stand perfectly still. I will let you know what you may or may not do. Is that clear?”

  Lassiter grinned at him and the Sheriff balled one of his fists and took a step forward.

  “Never mind that, Billy,” the Major said. “What did you find out about this man?”

  Lassiter said, “I’m going to sit down. That’s what I aim to do unless this old man here shoots me.”

  “Old man!” O’Neal roared. “You’re looking to get killed, mister.”

  Now the woman spoke, “Emmett, can’t we get on with this?”

  The Sheriff shut up. Lassiter was glad the Major and the woman were there. Otherwise, he’d be leaking his guts all over the floor.

  Caulfield stared at Lassiter. “Mister, you sit down over there. One more word ...”

  Lassiter felt more danger in what Caulfield didn’t say than in all the Sheriff’s threats. It looked like that two-hundred-and-fifty dollars was going to make him an awful lot of trouble.

  Caulfield listened while O’Neal spoke his piece. The old killer lawman told the part about the saloon and the whore Serafina. O’Neal got red in the face every time he mentioned the crotch-thumper. The woman Ellie’s face didn’t show anything, but she looked at Lassiter. Lassiter didn’t give a good goddam what she was thinking. It wasn’t easy to figure how she fitted into all this. She was young enough to be Caulfield’s daughter. But somehow she didn’t strike him that way. Wife maybe. Could be she was the Major’s mistress. She had the kind of body that could get a man excited without half trying. Lassiter decided he had other things to think about.

  “Then he told me to go to hell,” O’Neal finished with a twisted grin. “If you hadn’t told me to bring him over here, that’s where he’d be right this minute —roasting in hell. It would pleasure me no end to take care of this gent. My advice is—kill him now! Don’t matter whether he’s lying or not. That way we know for sure he ain’t working for Danvers. That way we don’t even consider the possibility.”

  Caulfield pretended to be thinking while he made a small fuss about cutting the end off a cigar with a tiny gold knife attached to his watch chain. He wet the end of the cigar and rolled it around for a while before he spoke. Lassiter figured there was something of the touring actor in this little Irish dandy. He decided he liked him even less than the Sheriff.

  “There’s good sense in what you say, Billy,” the Irishman rasped. The Major looked at Lassiter. “On the other hand, it could be a mistake to kill a man just because his story doesn’t pan out all the way.”

  “That’s mighty decent of you,” Lassiter put in.

  “You shut your mouth,” O’Neal roared.

  “What do you think, Ellie?” the Major asked the woman.

  She was looking at Lassiter when she spoke. “Get rid of him. One way or the other. Get rid of him. I think he means nothing but trouble.”

  Well, I’ll be damned, Lassiter thought.

  Caulfield sent clouds of cigar smoke drifting toward the ceiling. Clearly, the little man enjoyed exercising the power of life and death. “Pour me a little brandy,” he told the woman. He didn’t offer any to the Sheriff.

  “If Ellie thinks you’re a dangerous man, mister, then you must be. Ellie’s known her share of dangerous men. Including me, I might add.”

  Caulfield smiled at the woman. Her pale face remained expressionless. There was a lot of love and hate mixed up with these two people, but Lassiter still hadn’t figured out the situation.

  Caulfield looked at Lassiter. “If you’re not working for Colonel Danvers—how would you like to work for me? We could use a good man. All the good men we can get.” The Major turned his pale gray eyes on the Sheriff. “The men we’ve been recruiting don’t amount to much it seems to me.”

  O’Neal got red in the face. “I do the best I can,” he blustered. “I got more than forty fast guns in town right now. Soon as I weed out the kids and the farmers well have ourselves an army.”

  Caulfield asked, “You mean that scum out there in the street? My question is—will they fight or run when the gunplay starts? Danvers men won’t come in here with their backs turned, you know.”

  The Sheriff’s feelings were hurt. “You thought Wes Boone was pretty good when I sent for him...”

  “I wouldn’t talk about Boone after what happened last night,” Caulfield said. “I wouldn’t even mention him. If Boone is the best you can get, then maybe things aren’t so good.”

  “You want to work for me or don’t you?” Caulfield asked Lassiter. “Just a yes or no is all I want from you. If you’re half as good as you seem to think you are, you can do all right for yourself. The pay is sixty a month to start. Take it or leave it.”

  “What happens if I leave it?” Lassiter asked.

  “You get out of town and don’t ever come back,” Caulfield said.

  “Suits me,” Lassiter said. “I’d like nothing better than to get the smell of this town out of my nose.”

  Caulfield got up from behind his desk. The gunbelt strapped around his middle didn’t go with the businessman’s clothes. “Don’t press your luck,” he rasped. “We happen to be mighty proud of our little town.”

  The Sheriff gave Lassiter back his gun. Lassiter checked the loads and slid the long-barreled Colt into his holster. While he was doing this, Caulfield said to the Sheriff, “Those men you brought into town have been getting out of hand. I’d say it’s time you did something to bring them into line. That way there’ll be no argument later about who’s boss.”

  O’Neal nodded. So
mething told Lassiter it wasn’t over yet. Still, it might be just a feeling. He tipped his hat at the woman. She didn’t smile back. “Goodbye, Mister Lassiter,” Caulfield said.

  Lassiter walked out to the street with the Sheriff behind him. The hayseed deputy Muley was waiting with Lassiter’s horse. Most of the hangers-on and would-be gunmen were hanging around in front of the bank, waiting for something to happen. Lassiter, taking it very slow, had the feeling that Major Caulfield was watching from inside the bank window. Still, that might be just a feeling, too.

  Lassiter figured he must have been in worse looking towns than McDade. He couldn’t think of any of them, though. Up the sun-scorched main street horses were twitching with fly bites. The Mexican band in The Socorro Palace had stopped playing, but the nickel-in-the-slot piano was still fighting the desert silence across the street in the McDade Paradise. Some of the whores had come out on the balcony to see what was going on. Some town!

  With such a lot of people around, the street was very quiet. Lassiter mounted up. Just as he did, the Sheriff called out, “Where do you think you’re going, cowboy?”

  Lassiter swung the horse’s head around. O’Neal was in the street now, with the big deputy, Muley, backing his play from the sidewalk. The years had made O’Neal heavy, but there was nothing heavy in the way he moved. He still had the shotgun and it almost looked like a handgun in his big paw. “I asked you a question, mister,” he said. “You think you can just ride out like nothing happened. Well, you just better know it ain’t that way in McDade. This is my town and I run it my way.”

  O’Neal didn’t have to shout, but he did anyway. Lassiter didn’t have to guess that Major Caulfield was behind this play. If he ever got out of this, Lassiter figured, he’d like to have a nice visit with the puffed-up little Irishman.

  Lassiter decided to force it. Keeping the horse reined in tight, he called out even louder than the Sheriff, “You got a mind to start shooting, then you’d better do it. You’re the famous lawman, not me—remember? You’re the famous Texas Billy O’Neal! The famous dime novel town tamer. The scourge of the whole southwest! Only I never read in a dime novel that you carried a scattergun. Being such a shooter with a six-gun you didn’t need a scattergun. But times do change, I’d say.”

  Somebody laughed in the crowd and O’Neal’s face flushed angrily.

  “Mister,” O’Neal said, quietly now. “You just dug your own grave on Boot Hill. And I aim to help you fill it.”

  “Muley!” the Sheriff called out. “Take the shotgun.”

  O’Neal tossed the scattergun and the big deputy caught it. Muley moved back onto the sidewalk and everybody cleared out of his way. No matter what O’Neal said, Lassiter knew the deputy would try to mix in. He guessed the deputy wasn’t very fast with a six-gun. A six-gun was one thing, the scattergun was something else. A man didn’t have to shoot very straight with a sawed-off-shotgun. If you were close enough, all you had to do was sort of aim—and pull the trigger.

  O’Neal had planted himself squarely, with none of the crouching and bobbing favored by a lot of gunmen. O’Neal had gunned down at least fifty men for the fifty-odd years of his life. Some of the men who had died under his guns in Kansas and Oklahoma were the fastest killers who ever lived until O’Neal showed them that nobody lived forever. Lassiter didn’t know if he could beat O’Neal. He didn’t think about it. He had to give it a try.

  Lassiter got down off his horse. “Take him,” he told one of the loungers.

  Lassiter didn’t think O’Neal would draw first. If he thought the lawman would draw first he’d have been standing still. ONeal’s draw was so fast that Lassiter barely saw his hand move. O’Neal drew and cleared leather and fired all in one motion. It was the fastest draw he’d even seen, but it didn’t kill him. O’Neal’s bullet burned through the side of his vest without touching the skin. Then Lassiter put two bullets through O’Neal’s wide chest before he could get off a second shot. If Muley hadn’t yelled with rage, Lassiter might have forgotten to kill him. But Muley yelled before he brought the shotgun up.

  “Dirty yellow bastard,” Muley screamed. Lassiter swung the long-barreled Colt and shot him three times. The first bullet thwacked into the deputy’s fat gut, the second into his neck. That should have been enough to stop him, but it wasn’t.

  “Murdering son of a bitch!” he screamed, trying to line up the shotgun and dying at the same time. Lassiter helped him to die with a bullet that hit him right under his left eye.

  There was only one more bullet in Lassiter’s gun. It wasn’t worth a damn against this crowd of gunmen and drifters. He didn’t think about that. “Who’s next?” he yelled. “There’s one left—-who wants it?”

  Nobody moved.

  “Come on!” Lassiter yelled, putting on a good show, knowing that when this was over he’d either be riddled with dozens of bullets or top gun in this miserable town.

  A murmur ran through the crowd when the door of the bank opened and Major Caulfield stepped out onto the sidewalk. The two Mexicans with the Winchesters came out on either side of him. There was no sign of the woman. “Put away your gun, Lassiter,” Major Caulfield said. “You’ve done quite enough damage for one morning.”

  “Go to hell, Irishman,” Lassiter said.

  Caulfield stayed calm. “Put away the gun I said.”

  “Make me!”

  Not all the blarney had been squeezed out of the little Irishman. “What a desperate character you are, Lassiter,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, put away that gun and come inside.”

  Lassiter grinned and holstered the Colt.

  Chapter Five

  Caulfield introduced the woman as Ellen Longley. He didn’t say what their relationship was and Lassiter didn’t ask. They were sitting in the Major’s office back of the bank, drinking some very old, very good brandy. Lassiter had nothing against fine brandy. He wouldn’t go out of his way to look for it. It was better than the fiery slop they sold in the saloons. But he still preferred tequila.

  “The Sheriff said Boone was killed by a Negro,” Lassiter said.

  Major Caulfield gave a dry laugh. “Negro! Is that what you call it? And you a Southerner.”

  “Not recently,” Lassiter answered. “Anyhow, why should you worry about the South? Old or new.”

  This didn’t go over too well with the Irishman. He was too sun-baked to get red in the face. His pale eyes narrowed instead. “I expect you think I just happened on this title of Major by accident,” he snapped. “Like some snake-oil peddler who calls himself Colonel to impress the rubes.”

  “No offense,” Lassiter said mildly, sipping at the little man’s brandy.

  “I’ll have you know I enlisted as a private in the New Orleans Rifles and came out a Major,” Caulfield declared proudly. “Before that I was a lookout man in a gambling hall on Beale Street. I know what you’re thinking but better not say it. Maybe the South would have had no use for me if it had survived. But I loved it in my own way.”

  “I’m sure that’s more than you can say for Mr. Lassiter,” the woman said.

  Lassiter refused to be intimidated. Though Lassiter usually spoke in such a way that you couldn’t tell where he was from, now he slipped into a cornpone drawl, and said, “Why the war’s over, missy, or ain’t you heard?”

  Caulfield didn’t find it amusing. “I’m sorry you don’t have more respect for the South, Lassiter. Now me, I don’t ever intend to forget that I was once an officer in the Army of the Confederacy. However...”

  “You’re right,” Lassiter said. “However...”

  Major Caulfield got up from behind his desk and pulled a spring-roll map down from one wall of his elaborately furnished office. He told Ellen Longley to let in some more light. Lassiter saw that it was a fairly detailed map of Socorro County. There were pencil marks here and there as if Major Caulfield had gone over the same ground many times, planning attacks and campaigns.

  “This is where we are now—McDade,” Caulfield told Lassit
er, pointing with a long, thin cigar. North of here, up there about twenty miles, is where Colonel Danvers has his ranch. Or I should say ranches because it appears to be Danvers’ ambition to gobble up all of Socorro County, one ranch at a time.”

  “It’s not just an ambition anymore,” Ellen Longley said. “Because that’s what he seems to be doing. If we don’t stop him soon ...”

  Lassiter gave her a mean grin. “You seem to be bent on stopping all kinds of people. Only an hour ago you were telling the Major to get rid of me.”

  “We can still do that,” she threw back.

  The little Major sighed with exasperation. Starting again, he said, “The way I see it—Danvers is trying to buy up all the outlying land so’s he can get a strangle-hold on the town. Danvers needs to control the town. As your diplomats back in Washington would say—relations have been strained around here this past year. Because you see I have my own ambitions in this part of the country. I’ve put too much time and money into this place to see it go for nothing because of some Yankee fanatic.”

  Lassiter laughed out loud. He knew it wasn’t the healthiest thing to do when the Major was feeling emotional, but he couldn’t help it.

  “I’d say you sound like a man running for some public office,” Lassiter said. “Or about to run. Only you don’t have to convince me that Colonel Danvers is a rascal. Or a Yankee fanatic.”

  Caulfield began to laugh in spite of himself. “You really are a desperate character,” he said.

  “I want what O’Neal used to get,” Lassiter said. “Maybe more if it isn’t enough. But at least what he used to get.”

  That’ll give him something to laugh about, Lassiter thought.

  The Major’s face stiffened for an instant, then it was all smiles again. Ellen Longley’s pale, beautiful face had remained unsmiling throughout.

  Caulfield made a stab at using some of his rusty blarney. “Ellie, will you listen to the man. Didn’t I tell you he was a real desperado. Wanting Billy’s full share and maybe more if that isn’t enough. Why, man, I was going to offer you a handsome amount to work for me, but what you’re asking for is a full partnership. Besides, Billy O’Neal was an old friend of mine. Why don’t we say a hundred-and-fifty a month for the time being. Then later...”