by E. Walsh
No doubt, with the stubble shaved from his face and his hair trimmed up, he would look a bit better, but he was far from being the gentile type.
Bill hadn’t been particularly gentile either, but he hadn’t had that wild look about him that Cutler had.
At first, she hadn’t placed exactly what it was about him, but as she placed the mug of coffee and the plate of bacon, eggs and biscuits in front of him, it came to her.
It was his eyes.
She’d seen eyes like that only once in her life and it had been a terrifying moment right before Bill had shot the rabid wolf that had nearly snatched their two-month-old baby from his bed.
She’d forgotten about that journey until that moment. It was the one that had brought them to Alma and the home they’d shared for ten years.
“Fine vittles, ma’am,” Rance mumbled through a mouthful of food.
He must have been half starved by the way that he attacked his plate and shoveled more food into his mouth before he had finished chewing and swallowing the last of it.
She quickly realized that she hadn’t prepared nearly enough for a hungry man.
She glanced at Tommy whose eyes moved back and forth between the noisy eating of Cutler and herself.
Tommy knew better than to eat the way that Cutler was. Both his ma and his pa had boxed his ears a few times for being in a hurry and not minding his manners.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing take place at his own table.
“You must not have eaten in a while,” she laughed, hoping that he might pause and remember his manners.
“No ma’am,” he said, still chewing and shoveling in another bite as he spoke.
“I have more biscuits, but I’ll need to put on a little more bacon and some more eggs,” she responded turning back toward the stove.
“If you got it,” he said, licking his lips.
Their breakfast had spelled the last of the money that she’d put aside. The Victorian style house at the far end of town was beginning to haunt her even more as she considered how she was going to manage to get by.
Unsure of where she and Tommy were going to get their next meal, she took out the last of the bacon and eggs that she had planned to save for later in the day and began preparing them for Cutler.
“Better to be polite and let Providence settle the score,” she’d heard Bill say more times than she could count.
They had never been stingy with what they had and she wasn’t about to start.
After she and Tommy had eaten a meager portion compared to that of Cutler, she gathered up the plates and put them in the wash pan beside the stove as she watched Cutler stretch out his legs and rub his stomach.
“That could be the best breakfast I ever had, Miss McBride. I am in your debt.”
Tommy eyed the stranger warily as he cleared his plate from the table and scrambled to help his mother with the dishes. It wasn’t that he wanted to wash the dishes. He just wanted to be as close to her as he could get. She glanced down at him, seeming to understand, and smiled.
“That’s a fine boy you have,” McBride commented. “You help out your ma. You only get one in your life and you ought to be tending to her.”
Tommy didn’t respond.
“He doesn’t talk much, huh?” Cutler asked.
“He’s a little shy,” Holly replied. “And you sort of surprised us. The council told us that you’d be coming in tomorrow.”
“I didn’t cotton to Leadville much and it was too cold to get a good night’s sleep last night, so I got a pretty early start,” Cutler replied.
“Where did you travel here from?” Holly asked in an attempt to make polite conversation.
“Cal-ee-for-neye-yeah.”
He pronounced it in syllables and then chuckled.
“Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
“Bill spent some time in San Francisco before we met,” Holly replied. “He got started as a sheriff after working in the gold camps there.”
“Why, that’s exactly where I came from. I trailed a herd of cattle up out of Yuma, Arizona. I’d eaten a belly full of trail dust to last a lifetime by the time I got the wire that invited me here,” he grinned.
“So, you’re really from Arizona, then?” she asked.
“I’m really from ‘round abouts, since I left Kentucky when I was sixteen. I’ve lived in Texas, Arizona, Utah and Colorado at one time or another.”
“How did you get into being a lawman?” Holly asked.
Cutler was rough around the edges, but he seemed to be eager to talk. It was likely that, because he’d traveled all the way from San Francisco, he hadn’t had much of anyone to talk to in a while.
“I sort of got pulled into it on account of I learned to shoot pretty fast and pretty straight,” he said matter-of-factly. “When you’re a fast gun, you have two ways to go. Law man or outlaw. I picked the first because I didn’t like looking over my shoulder.”
“I hope that’s not the only reason,” she said, failing to keep the judgment form her tone. Bill hadn’t been particularly complimentary of gunmen becoming lawmen.
To him, keeping the peace was more than just being handy with a gun. Most gunmen didn’t like people and didn’t care if there was peace or not.
There were men like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and Matt Caldwell that served their purpose when their type were needed, but by and large, a sheriff needed to be a man of peace if he wanted to keep the peace.
Of course, with Bill lying in a grave due to an outlaw with a quick trigger, maybe Alma had need of the type of man that Rance Cutler represented.
“Most places don’t keep you around long after you put a slug in somebody, even if they were a really bad hombre. West is growin’ to the point where killin’ is hard for people to stomach. Of course, Alma doesn’t appear to be quite so wild and wooly, maybe I can light here and sit a spell. I got one outlaw to hunt down right away though. We’ll see what folks think by the time I’m done delivering Skip Hutto to the pen or to the devil; depending upon his preference.”
“You gonna put a bullet in Skip Hutto?” Tommy asked through clinched teeth as he whirled about to look at Cutler.
“Tommy!” Holly snapped. “I don’t need to hear that sort of talk from you.”
“Ma’am,” Cutler said. “You can hardly blame the boy for wanting his pa’s killer dead.”
Cutler’s comment, especially when she was correcting her son, irritated her.
“Sheriff Cutler, both his pa and I taught Tommy that justice is served in many different ways. Killing a man without benefit of a fair trial doesn’t make law abiding citizens any different than the outlaws.”
“Fair enough,” Cutler responded. “You mind your ma. She’s right.”
“Thank you,” Holly responded, though she was pretty certain that Cutler only said what he did to keep the peace with her and not because of what he truly believed.
There was a long silence between them after that, during which time, she finished up the dishes and stood drying her hands on a rag.
“Very well, then, we’re cleaned up here, so Tommy and I will be on our way and leave the place to you.”
Tommy had already climbed the ladder into the loft after the flour sack with his belongings in it and she was opening the door to the bedroom when Cutler called after her.
“Ma’am,” he said. “It ain’t none of my business, but where are you and the boy headed?”
Her jaw clenched and her shoulders went back. She said, “Honestly, we haven’t worked that out just yet, but we’ll get along just fine. But that’s none of your concern.”
“Do you always cook the way you did this morning?” he asked.
“I do the best I can with whatever I have,” she replied.
“Well, then, maybe we can make an arrangement,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “I mean, just until you get things figured out.”
“What sort of an arrangement?” Holly asked warily.
> “How about you and the boy stay on here? You know, just until you get it settled where you’re headed and all. I hate to be tossing you folks out.”
“I hardly think that it would be appropriate for me to be cohabitating with the town’s new sheriff,” she said with a frown. She had thought that maybe he was going to hire her to come in and cook and clean for him, but living with him was an entirely different prospect.
“I didn’t ask to shack up with you,” he replied.
“That’s what it sounded like to me,” she answered.
“Is there a loft in that barn out back?” he asked, rising up from the table and heading toward the door.
“There is,” she said. “What of it?”
“Then I’ll bed down out there and you and your boy can stay right where you are,” he said.
“Sheriff Cutler, that’s very generous of you, but we couldn’t…”
“Sure you could,” he said. A broad smile crossed his face. After a bath and a shave, she thought, he might actually be a decent looking man.
“You need a place to stay, I need someone who can cook and keep this place clean. A man gets tired of hotel food and jerky.”
“I don’t know…”
“Ma’am, you’d be doing me a great favor,” he said, picking up his bedroll and moving toward the door. “Now then, where might a fellow get a bath in this town? I must smell to high heaven.”
* * *
Chapter Five
Rance wasn’t used to being around women and kids, but he had to admit, after giving the arrangement a week, he found himself enjoying the company of Holly and Tommy McBride quite to his liking.
Fact was, it was nice having a home cooked meal instead of taking his grub as a diner or the hotel, but getting used to having to watch what he said and did.
Sometimes he regretted suggesting the arrangement. Holly had a tendency to be a little bit more persnickety about things than he might have been if left alone. Of course, being a mother and trying to raise a boy to be well mannered made that sort of thing necessary.
What Rance didn’t regret was having someone to talk to. For that Holly had proven to be more than adequate and he found that she was a great deal more knowledgeable about things than she had given her credit.
He heard a good deal more about Bill McBride than he wanted to initially, from both her and the other townspeople, but he supposed that it was because their former sheriff had been a good man.
He’d treated people fairly, was generally in a good humor and was slow to use his guns to enforce the law. That, of course, was part of the reason he was six feet under on Boot Hill.
In most cases, Bill McBride’s method worked, but there were elements out there that didn’t give a half penny’s width about the law; for them it was better to slap leather and get it over with.
He’d gotten a tip that Skip Hutto had holed up in abandoned prospecting shaft along the trail toward Breckenridge.
Word had it that he’d taken on a couple of friends to accompany him as well.
The miner who gave the tip told him that the one was Crazy Ike, but that he didn’t recognize the other.
It didn’t matter, all that much, to Rance, who the other one was, Crazy Ike and Skip Hutto together was poison enough.
Saddling up earlier that morning, he started toward Breckenridge keeping his eyes open wide for any sign of the notorious pair and their third wheel.
Being away from Holly’s prying eyes, he’d enjoyed the opportunity to finally roll a cigarette and enjoy it without having to hide behind the barn or fear that he’d be discovered by the overprotective mother.
He wasn’t necessarily afraid of her, but the scolding that he would have gotten and the way that she would have looked at him wasn’t something that he wanted to endure.
He liked it a whole lot better when she smiled at him. It was damned sure a smile worth cherishing.
He ran the image of it through his mind and realized that the couple of days that were ahead of him would be lonely ones.
He heard a whistling buzz pass by his head and he dropped from the saddle instinctively. A split second later came the report of a rifle.
The echo of the shot bounced off of the mountains surrounding him and it was impossible for him to locate where it came from.
The roan had bolted when he tumbled off of him and pulled up fifty, or so, yards ahead where he lowered his head and cropped grass.
Rance made himself as small as he could among the buck brush and waited.
Without knowing where the shot came from, attempting to make a move might be the last thing that he ever did.
With his heart thundering in his chest and his breathing returning to normal, Rance peered out of his hiding place and toward the roan.
If anyone was stirring around nearby, the roan would pick up his head, perk his ears and look in their direction.
The horse kept his head down and continued to crop the fresh, mountain grass with vigor.
Whoever took a shot at him either hadn’t moved or was too far off to alert the roan when he did.
The distance of a rifle shot could be measured in a similar way to that of a lightning strike, or so he’d been told.
The problem he had was that he’d been more concerned about saving his bacon than he had been about counting the time that passed after the shot.
The fact that the report of the rifle wasn’t right on top of the buzzing of the bullet as it passed his head was enough to tell him that it hadn’t been close range, however, a man with a rifle who had a good spot to rest his weapon might not miss a second time.
He held his place and waited, trying to decide whether it was safe to crawl out of the buck brush and back to his mount.
Nearly a half hour had passed and Rance was considering making a move when he heard the soft trickle of rocks tumbling down the slope off to his right.
At the same instant, the roan’s head came up and he looked in that direction. Whoever had shot at him was probably coming to see if he was dead.
As quietly as he could, Rance crawled on his belly under the buck brush until he was a dozen, or so, yards away from where he’d left the saddle.
He rolled onto his back, drew out his pistol and waited.
It was nearly impossible for a man to move through buck brush without making a sound.
Though the man hunting him was doing a pretty decent job of it, Rance still picked up occasional scrapes of a branch on overalls.
When the man finally came into sight, Rance recognized him immediately.
“Why, now, Will Barnes,” he said in a low tone. “I didn’t know that you started playin’ piano with two fiddlers.”
Barnes froze in place, turning his head ever so slightly toward Cutler’s voice, but he didn’t move.
“I guess I missed,” Barnes replied.
“That’s a pretty good deduction, Will. Now, how about you lay that rifle down real slowly and keep that thong on your pistol.”
Barnes followed his directions and Rance stood up and came toward him.
“Last I seen of you, you were driving drill steel in a prospect hole over to Durango.”
“Never amounted to much and I got a little short on cash.”
“That’s what they all say when they start out on the wrong trail.”
“It’s the truth, Rance.”
“Far as I’m concerned you haven’t done anything wrong yet. You jack the shells out of that rifle and ride on out of here and I’ll let you keep your scalp. There are honest ways to get back on track. Ridin’ with Skip Hutto ain’t one of them.”
“Hutto will kill me if I light out of here.”
“I’ll kill you if you don’t,” Rance said. “So, make your choice.”
“Ain’t much of a choice.”
“It’s the one you’ve got,” Rance growled. “Hutto ain’t goin’ to last out the month anyhow. If you steer clear of him that long, you won’t have to worry about him. What do you say?”
“I think I’ll light out of here.”
“You’re thinking more clearly already,” Rance smiled. “You follow this creek right along for about a half a day and you’ll be in town. You can stop off and have a drink, but you better keep on goin’.”
“What about my horse?”
“I’ll take him to the livery in town.”
“You’re gonna make me walk?”
“Yep. It’ll give you some time to think about what you’re going to do next. Better get movin’.”
Barnes wasn’t pleased, but neither was he stupid. Surrounded by Crazy Ike and Skip Hutto, taking on Rance Cutler hadn’t seemed so bad, but facing him when he held a pistol was a whole different story.
He jacked the shells from his rifle and started walking along the stream toward town.
Cutler watched him go, making certain that he was going to stay honest and then turned toward the roan.
He caught him up, mounted and worked his way up a draw and around the backside of the ridge where Barnes had taken his shot.
He found the sorrel, untied him and trailed him along behind his own mount as he headed back around toward town using a different route than the one that followed the Middle Platte down to Alma.
It wasn’t until he was nearly back to town that he realized that he’d seen Will Barnes shoot before and missing wasn’t something he did very often.
“Well, now,” he said, addressing his roan. “I reckon I’ve come across a streak of good luck.”
* * *
Chapter Six
Holly was beginning to feel a little bit differently about Rance Cutler after a couple of weeks.
With some of his rough edges sanded off, he was tolerable to have around.
She’d had to talk to him a couple of times about setting a better example for Tommy, but he’d taken what she said to heart and cleaned up his act.
It had been nice to have an adult around to talk to, especially one who had seen things and done things in so many different places.
In fact, when she listened to him talk, she felt like she’d taken a trip out on the prairie of Texas or in the Arizona desert.
