High Lonesome

by Peter McCurtin

  “No,” Lassiter said. “Definitely no. O’Neal’s share or I ride out of here.”

  The woman glared at him, no longer hiding under a mask of practicality. “You’ll ride out if we let you,” she said.

  Lassiter grinned at her again. Caulfield didn’t like that, but he was more interested in the other thing. He cracked a smile that didn’t have enough warmth in it to warm a gnat. He shrugged and spread his hands like a man bested in a business deal. Again Lassiter thought there was more than a little ham actor in the dangerous little dude.

  “All right, Lassiter,” he rasped. “I know you’re aiming to get two hundred a month. All right, no more arguments—two hundred a month it is. And if I might say so, that’s a lot of money for a man come all the way from El Paso for two-hundred-and-fifty to kill a man. Is it a deal then, Lassiter? More brandy, woman!”

  Lassiter shook his head, enjoying the way Caulfield tried to hide his rage and didn’t quite succeed.

  “No deal,” he told the Irishman. “No offense either but why don’t we just forget the whole business and I’ll be on my way. Sorry about O’Neal, by the way. He was a good man in his day.”

  “Better than you’ll ever be,” Ellen Longley said spitefully.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Lassiter answered agreeably. “Better known anyway.”

  “I could have you held for murder,” Caulfield suggested.

  Lassiter grinned at him and the Irishman grinned back.

  “You could have a try at it,” Lassiter admitted.

  Caulfield laughed and slapped his bony thigh. “A desperate man is right. Maybe that’s exactly what I need right about now. All right, Mister Lassiter, it’s a deal. You get O’Neal’s share if you do the job. You may think you’re good, and maybe you are, but this isn’t just any ordinary situation we have here in Socorro County.”

  “I’ll do the job,” Lassiter said. “Soon as you fill me in a little more.”

  The Major went back behind his big desk and sat down as importantly as a judge about to make a decision. Sitting down behind the squat, elaborately carved Mexican desk seemed to have a relaxing effect on him. Lassiter, who didn’t put much store in objects and possessions, figured the jumped-up Irishman wouldn’t feel half as important without his CSA title, his banker’s duds, his Mex bodyguards, and this woman—whoever she was.

  “The job’s simple enough if you look at it one way,” Caulfield rasped. “It seems that our friend Danvers is looking for a real fight—not just the usual bushwhacking that’s been going on—and we’re going to give it to him. First order of business—and it’s very big and bad business—is to kill off Danver’s pet nigger, Jeff Turner.”

  “I keep hearing about this Turner,” Lassiter said. “Is he the same Turner they’re starting to write dime novels about? The Black Bandit and so on?”

  “To hell with that bullshit!” Caulfield snapped. “But it is true that Turner’s fast and dangerous. Hate the bastard though I do, I can’t deny that. This black boy’s a killer.”

  “Boy!” Lassiter said. “This black boy as you call him must be at least thirty. Supposed to be sort of unique in his way. I mean, how many black gun-fighters are there?”

  “One’s too much for me,” the Major said angrily. “But I’m telling you, Lassiter, don’t sell the bastard short. I’d like nothing better than to douse this boy with coal oil and set him afire. It seems he’d rather kill a white man—’specially a Southern white man— than just about anything. That’s how crazy he is.”

  Lassiter smiled at that. From what he’d heard, this so-called black gunfighter had been born a slave back in Alabama and still had whip marks on his back to remind him of the fact. If you could believe the stories, Turner had made a third and successful getaway in the last year of the war. He was ten or so at the time. A man with a real deep hate would be hard to kill, Lassiter thought.

  “Danvers must be paying Turner pretty good,” Lassiter commented. “This is the first time I ever heard of Turner actually working for anybody, ’specially a white man. Last I heard of him he was robbing banks back in Texas. Had a gang of Mexicans and half-breeds. One worse than the other.”

  The Irishman started another cigar. What he said next pleased him. “They wiped out Turner’s gang during a raid on Salter City. Got them all except Turner and some Mexican, and they were shot up real bad. The Mex died in jail and they were getting ready to hang the black boy when he broke loose. Rode up here on a stolen horse. The story goes Danvers found him laying half-dead under a bush and took him in. Now Turner thinks the Colonel is Abe Lincoln and St. Peter rolled into one. Claims he’s going to kill anybody even looks sideways at Danvers.”

  Lassiter helped himself to more of the Major’s expensive brandy. The Irishman didn’t seem to care but the woman sneered at the way Lassiter slopped out a full glass and tossed it off with a gulp. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned at Ellen Longley. “Sounds like he got his health back anyway,” he said.

  “It isn’t funny, Lassiter,” Caulfield complained. “Last night after it got dark, this trained ape of Danvers comes out of nowhere, calls out Wesley Boone and kills him. Right there in front of the whole town. A minute after he killed Boone there must have been twenty guns shooting at him, but he got away. Not a trace. We chased him but he just disappeared out there in the dark.”

  The next question he came up with made Lassiter smile inside. It seems like he should be the last person to ask it.

  “If you knew Turner was out there at Danver’s ranch, why didn’t O’Neal go after him legal? With enough men you could have done it. And the courts would back you up.”

  “The law is pretty thin in these parts,” Caulfield stated. “Anyway, O’Neal was just the law in McDade. He was the law here because I made him the law. But town sheriff was all. Outside of town—in the county—he had no authority. Not legal authority you might say. Apart from all that, Danvers had— still has—too many men to try a head-on attack.”

  Lassiter asked, “Then the law isn’t after Turner in Socorro County?”

  “Somebody murdered the territorial marshal— shot him from ambush,” the Irishman said. “For one reason or another, they haven’t appointed anybody to take his place. The Governor is only acting-Governor. Doesn’t care too much what happens down here. So for the time being Turner can stay around here all he wants. Talk is that our friend Danvers is trying to use his political influence to get the nigger a pardon.”

  “Then he’d really run wild,” Ellen Longley said.

  “No, he won’t,” Lassiter assured her. “I’ll see that he doesn’t run wild or anything else. When I take on a job I usually do it all the way.”

  Lassiter looked at the Irishman. “I can’t do the job if I don’t have a free hand,” he reminded the Major. “Once I start on something I won’t stand for any interference. From you or anybody else, I just wanted to say. That’s the way I work. The way I always work. The only way.”

  “Do you think we should make him Sheriff?” Caulfield asked Ellen Longley. The little Irishman laughed at the disgusted look on Lassiter’s face. “Don’t have much use for the law, do you, Lassiter?”

  Lassiter didn’t answer.

  Ellen Longley tried hard to sound matter-of-fact, but Lassiter was pretty sure she wasn’t feeling that way. The fact that she wasn’t the kind of woman you could cozy up to right away made her that more interesting. Lassiter promised himself that he’d look her over more carefully, at some other time.

  “Making him Sheriff might look better later,” she said quietly. “Specially with all the terrible things he’s promising to do on our behalf.”

  Caulfield smiled broadly. “Raise your right hand, mister,” he said. “As you might expect, since I own just about everything in this town, I’m also its Mayor. Therefore, by the powers vested in me, I hereby appoint you acting-Sheriff of McDade Township. Do you swear to uphold the laws of the United States and the Territory of New Mexico...”

  Caul
field the cynic was enjoying himself immensely.

  “Well, do you?” he asked in his raspy voice.

  “Sure I do,” Lassiter answered, not getting up and not raising his hand. This little Mick had a peculiar sense of humor. Lassiter wasn’t much for humor himself. The little he had was hard and sour and buried deep. Maybe Caulfield wouldn’t be feeling so frisky when all this was over. Any maybe this woman, Ellen Longley, would know there had been a man in town. Once again he figured he’d have a go at her when the Major wasn’t around. Thinking about this, he grinned at them. When Lassiter grinned it was hard to grin back. They didn’t.

  Caulfield asked, “Well, Lassiter, how does it feel to be Sheriff?”

  “It stinks,” Lassiter said.

  Chapter Six

  It was still the same day. With the Major’s rare old brandy burning weakly in his gut and the dead Sheriff’s star pinned to his shirt pocket, Lassiter left the bank and walked down to the jail. No more than four hours had passed since he’d rode into McDade. Lassiter squinted down at the lawman’s badge glinting where it picked up the early afternoon sun. This sure is a hell of a note, he thought. During the years in which he’d crossed over to the other side of the law he’d done a lot of things. But this, sure as hell, was the god-damnedest situation he’d ever been in.

  If Lassiter had been the kind of long rider with friends, he might have thought, if only the boys could see me now. Because he had no friends, false or true, he didn’t think about it that way. Lassiter didn’t think about himself in terms of friends or any other kind of people. Most of the time he didn’t think about himself at all. A man who started thinking about himself too much didn’t last long, as a rule. Still and all, him being a lawman was enough to make a man smile a bit. And that’s what Lassiter did at the crowd of gunmen and would-be gunmen and the just-plain-loungers still hanging around in front of Caulfield’s bank.

  Some of the hard cases tried to look as mean as they could, but they got out of his way all right. Lassiter figured they would, and so he grinned at them. Lassiter would have grinned at them anyway. He might have grinned harder at them if they hadn’t gotten out of his way. That was how brandy or whiskey and any other kind of firewater affected Lassiter. It didn’t make him mean and it didn’t make him easygoing. It just made him care a little less than usual, which wasn’t a whole lot in the first place.

  Caulfield had given him the key to O’Neal’s office and jail. It was the first key to any jail, good or bad, that he had ever owned. It sure was, he thought once again, one hell of a note. He grinned again, thinking how he’d like another drink of something stronger than the Irishman’s so-called rare brandy. But that would have to wait a bit, he decided. He was the law in McDade and he had a job to do.

  Lassiter became aware that a big man—a bigger man than he was—was standing in his way and saying something to him in what sounded like a Pennsylvania Dutchman’s accent. The man was young and blond and sweating through his clothes. He was drunk or nearly drunk and Lassiter could smell him from three feet away. The wind, what there was of it, was blowing the other way, but Lassiter could smell him anyway. Lassiter, usually not fussy about the way people smelled, didn’t like the way the blond Dutchman smelled.

  “I’m Charlie Clingman,” the big man was saying in that dutchy accent.

  Lassiter didn’t like it when people he didn’t know planted themselves right in his path. Lassiter didn’t think too much about people but he knew when he didn’t like them. He didn’t like this Dutchman. With Lassiter it was always that simple.

  “Later, friend,” he said. “You got something to say it’ll have to wait. No matter what you want or what you want to sell me, it’ll have to wait.”

  The Dutchman didn’t like it but he wasn’t quick on the uptake. He blinked stupidly because he was a dumb Pennsylvania Dutchman. He started again. “Sheriff O’Neal sent for me,” he said. “I’m Charlie Clingman. Sheriff O’Neal sent for me.”

  “Later, friend, I said,” Lassiter told him. “That means later. Later means not now. It means not right now when I’m going someplace. You understand, square head?”

  Lassiter still wasn’t feeling mean, but it wouldn’t take much. It wouldn’t take much, coming from the big square head standing in his way. Damn! he thought, I sure could use another drink—something with hair on it.

  The Dutchman had a slow mind. The eyes he looked at the world with were just as dumb. They were light-blue and very small for such a wide, fleshy face. They were mean, too, but more stupid than anything else Lassiter could think of. “Hey you,” the Dutchman declared, putting one word on top of the other like bales of hay. “You’re not Sheriff O’Neal.”

  “You must be new in town,” Lassiter told him. “Now, friend, you move out of my way—or I’ll move you. Anything you might want to discuss, I’ll be in my office.”

  Just about then one of the loungers called out to the Dutchman, “O’Neal’s dead, pilgrim. Just a little while ago.”

  Lassiter looked at the loudmouth, a skinny runt with a pockmarked face and a tied-down gun that looked too big for him. He didn’t say anything.

  There was a long minute, maybe less, and slowly the Dutchman got out of Lassiter’s way. Lassiter felt this was as good a time as any to speak his piece, and he did. “Boys,” he said, looking hard at the Dutchman. “Anybody not stupid knows that Sheriff Billy O’Neal ain’t sheriff any longer. I am. Some of you the Sheriff sent for and some of you he didn’t. Things change and now I’m the Sheriff and I decide who stays and who goes. You might think you’re hell on wheels, but I’m the one who decides that too. I figure to take on some deputies, but that’s my decision too. Be right there in front of the jail in ten minutes and we’ll see.”

  Lassiter grinned at them and went on down to the dead Sheriff’s office. It was, he sort of thought again, one hell of a note.

  Feeling just a little bit like a fool, Lassiter unlocked the heavy, nail-studded door and went into the jail. It wasn’t much of a sheriff’s office and jail. It wasn’t much of anything. Back of the sheriff’s office, in the cells, some geezer was mumbling his way through a drunken song. Somebody else was trying to cough up his lungs.

  Lassiter thumbed the jail key off the usual hook behind the sheriff’s spur-scarred desk and opened the door to the cells. It sort of amused him that the Sheriff would have bothered with penny ante thieves and drunks, now that everything was threatening to bust wide open.

  “Everybody up and out,” he yelled. “No singing, no talking, no nothing.” He rattled the heavy key against the bars. There were three cells and two of them had occupants. There were no windows in the cell area and the only light was from, a feeble coal-oil lamp suspended from the ceiling. The whole place stank from sweat and urine and boozy breath.

  The drunk who was singing struggled up from under a vomit-smeared blanket. It was hard to tell what he was or might have been before the rotgut got him. He might have been a cowboy. He was young and pasty looking. He tried to claw at Lassiter through the bars and Lassiter punched him squarely in the mouth. The other man who was coughing kept on coughing. When he was able to stop coughing, he called Lassiter a miserable rotten no-good son of a bitch.

  “Everybody out,” Lassiter yelled, opening one cell door, then the other.

  Christ! he thought. The smell! There was no use hitting the drunk again. The drunk started flailing with both arms, like a crazy windmill. Lassiter grabbed him by his shirt, vomit and all, and pulled him out of the lock-up. Lassiter pointed at the cougher, then at the door. “Out,” he said. “You get out.”

  The cougher wasn’t so young. Maybe about forty-five, small, with the scooped-out face of the consumptive without too much time left. Lassiter caught him by the shirt and sent him staggering out into the sheriff’s office after the drunk. The cougher stared at him with ferocious, dead bright eyes. “Your mother was a whore,” the cougher said in a papery voice.

  “What’s your name, friend?” Lassiter asked him, not th
e least bit riled.

  “My name is George Sully, you whoreson,” the cougher answered fiercely. “Whoever you are.”

  Lassiter grinned at him. The drunk was still trying to figure out what was happening to him.

  “You have a gun or anything when you came in here?” Lassiter asked the cougher in a mild voice.

  The drunk came at Lassiter again. Lassiter kicked him in the leg and he went down yelling dirty words.

  “I asked you?” Lassiter told the cougher.

  “A gun, sure,” the cougher said, not sounding afraid. “A forty-four Remington.”

  Lassiter found the forty-four and gave it to the cougher. Somebody was rapping on the jail door. Keeping an eye on the cougher, he grabbed the drunk by the belt and hauled him to the door and opened it. Outside the hard guys and would-be hard guys were starting to congregate. Lassiter shoved the cougher outside and pitched the drunk after him. The big Pennsylvania Dutchman Charlie Clingman was out front and one of the drunk’s arms hit him in the face. The Dutchman cursed and kicked the drunk savagely in the crotch. The drunk screamed with pain and fell face down in the dusty street. The Dutchman kicked him again in the stomach. Before he could launch any more kicks, Lassiter shoved the big square head out of the way.

  “Don’t be a hog,” Lassiter said mildly. “No more than two kicks to a customer.”

  Lassiter stood relaxed but ready. The Dutchman was slow on the uptake sure enough. Rage flooded his face. He shook his thick blond head. “You pushed me, mister,” he blurted out. “Come up and pushed me.”

  “No need to make a big thing out of it,” Lassiter said. It was hot and he was tired and not all that interested in fighting with this big hulk of mean impulses. The Dutchman had height and weight on Lassiter, but that was nothing to fuss about. This Charlie Clingman would be a mean son of a bitch. That didn’t bother Lassiter either. He’d fight the Dutchman if he had to.