“I’m acting sheriff,” he said, thumbing out the badge on his vest. “Anything you can tell Risley, you can tell me.”
Joyce started to speak, and decided not to. I looked at the Judge.
“That’s right, quite right,” he said, with that damn-fool cheerfulness. “The sheriff deputized Mr. Mapes before me, last night. It’s official; entirely official.” He cleared his throat and teetered again. He’d argued himself around to suit the way it had to go anyhow.
“If you have business which requires Mr. Risley’s services, you may speak quite freely before Mr. Mapes.”
“I saw that kid Greene, from down to Drew’s, come by here hell-for-leather half an hour ago,” Mapes said, standing up. “I thought it didn’t look like no pleasure jaunt. What’s up?”
I couldn’t see any way out of it. It was more than ten miles down to Drew’s. Like Davies, I didn’t think the Judge would be any help, and I knew Mapes wouldn’t. He’d do just what the men wanted him to do. But we couldn’t get Risley, and they couldn’t make things any worse than they were anyway, from Davies’ point of view. If the Judge couldn’t change the direction of things, at least with him there Davies wouldn’t have to feel that the whole blame was his. And besides, maybe the fact that Risley was down at Drew’s meant something itself.
Joyce, though, was sticking to orders.
“Mr. Davies said you and Mr. Risley, sir.”
“Quit the stalling,” Mapes said, his neck swelling out and his heavy, red face getting redder. “What the hell does Mr. Davies want, anyway?”
“Now, Mapes,” the Judge said, “the boy has a mission. He’s merely acting on instructions, I presume.”
“If it’s sheriff’s business, I’m sheriff,” Mapes said.
“Sure,” I said, thinking I’d make one more try. “We know that, Butch. But it’s not us. We’re here for Mr. Davies. Now if you’d let us have a minute alone, we’ll give the Judge our story, and then if he thinks it’s your job, he’ll tell you.”
“Certainly, certainly,” the Judge said. “If the matter touches your official capacity, I shall let you know at once, Mapes.”
Mapes stood with his feet apart and stared at us, one after the other. He had a huge chest and shoulders, and a small head with a red, fleshy face, small black eyes, thick black eyebrows, and short-cropped, bristly hair and beard. Like Winder, he always looked angry, even when he laughed, but in a more irritated way, as if his blood was up but he wasn’t clear what was wrong.
“All right,” he said finally, as if he’d decided that whatever we had to say couldn’t matter much, anyway.
At the door he turned, his face redder than ever, and told the Judge, “If it’s a sheriff’s job, you call me. See?”
“Of course, of course,” the Judge said, flushing.
When I had closed the door behind Mapes the Judge said, “And now,” rubbing his hands together as if he had settled everything without a hitch, “now what seems to be the trouble?”
With Mapes out of the way, Joyce told him rapidly. I went over to the front window, but listened while Joyce told him, and the Judge, all business, asked him questions about who was there, and just what Greene had said, and other things, most of which Joyce couldn’t answer very well. But I figured my job, which was bodyguard, was done, and didn’t horn in. From the window, which was in a bow, I could see Mapes standing at the top of the porch steps with his thumb in his belt. The Judge didn’t show any signs of doing anything but put more questions. Joyce was getting excited.
“It’s not that Mr. Davies doesn’t want them to go,” he explained for the third or fourth time.
“No, no, of course not,” the Judge agreed.
“He just doesn’t want it to be a lynching.”
“No. Can’t let that sort of thing start, of course.”
Joyce explained again how he wanted a posse sworn in.
“Assuredly,” the Judge said. “Only proper procedure. Anything else inevitably leads to worse lawlessness, violence. I’ve been telling them that for years,” he said angrily, as if he suddenly recognized a personal insult. “For years,” he repeated. And then I could hear him striding back and forth and snorting.
“Mr. Davies asks will you come at once, sir. The men are already gathering, and they wouldn’t listen to him or Mr. Osgood.”
The Judge stopped walking.
I saw a rider coming down the street at a lope. He was one of the men who had been at Canby’s when Greene came. He saw Mapes and yelled something to him. Mapes called out to him, and the rider pulled around, yelling something more.
“Mr. Davies wanted you and Mr. Risley to come, sir,” Joyce was pleading.
“Eh? Oh, yes, yes. But Risley isn’t here.”
He started walking again. “Today of all days,” he said angrily.
“If you would come, sir. You could talk to them.”
“It’s not in my position—” the Judge began. Then he said, even more angrily, “No, no. It’s not the place of either a judge or a lawyer. It lies in the sheriff’s office. I have no police authority.”
The rider had wheeled his horse toward the main street and pushed him up to a lope again. Mapes was coming in. I turned around.
“Risley’s at Drew’s?” I asked.
“Yes, yes. Thought there might be something …” the Judge began.
I cut in. “If you could get the men to promise they’d take orders from Risley. They’ll have to go that way, anyhow.”
Mapes came in, leaving the door open again. He didn’t look at us, or say anything, but took his gun down, and buckled it on, and then took down another little gun in an arm-pit holster and slung it on so it would be between his vest and coat. He had big, thick, stubby-fingered hands, and had trouble with the waist thong on the arm-holster.
“And where are you going, Mapes?” the Judge fumed.
“Rustlers got Kinkaid this morning,” Mapes said, still working at the knot. He got it, and looked around at us with that angry grin.
“There’s a posse forming, just in case you hadn’t heard,” he said.
“That’s sheriff’s work, ain’t it, Judge?” he asked, reaching his coat down.
“That’s no posse, Mapes,” the Judge roared. “It’s not a posse,” he repeated, “it’s a lawless mob, a lynching mob, Mapes.”
That seemed to me to be stretching it a little. Those men may have been bent on hanging somebody without the delay of a trial, but there was a lot of difference between the way they were going at it and what I thought of as a mob. I didn’t say anything, though.
“It’ll be a posse when I get there, won’t it, Judge?” Mapes asked.
“It will not,” bellowed the Judge, a lot angrier than there was any call for, even with the way Mapes spoke.
Joyce looked from one to the other of them for a moment. His face was white, so the pimples showed in red blotches on it, or rather kind of blue. Then he slipped out the door silently.
“I’ll deppitize ’em all proper, Judge,” Mapes said. His coat was on, and he put his sombrero on the back of his head.
“You can’t do it,” the Judge told him. “Risley’s the only one empowered to deputize.”
Mapes started to answer back. He put one foot upon his chair, and spit over on the corner stove first. He liked it when he had the Judge this way, and didn’t want to hurry it too much. There was going to be a wrangle, but I could only see one end of it. I started out after Joyce. We’d give Davies warning, anyhow, though I didn’t see what he could do with it.
I stopped in the door and said, loud enough so the Judge could hear over what Mapes was saying, “I’ll tell Davies you’re coming then, Judge.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, just glancing away from Mapes for an instant, and giving me a big, fixed smile. I figured that had him hooked the best I could manage, and ducked out quick, not stopping when I heard him call out in a different voice, showing he knew now what I’d said, “Wait, wait a moment …” I passed Mrs. Larch
in the middle of the hall, her hands folded over her belly and looking at me like she figured I was to blame for the whole disorder. I gave her a wink and went on out without bothering to close the front door. I figured she’d take care of that, and I was right. Before I could get to the road, I heard it slam, and by the time the Judge got my name from her, and opened the door again to call to me, I was far enough toward the main street so I could pretend not to hear him.
Joyce was nearly at the crossing already, running with his coat flapping around him. He could tell Davies all there was to tell. I eased off when I’d got beyond fair cry of the Judge’s house. There’s better things to run in than high-heeled boots, and it looked like the word had really got around now. I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. There were people out in front of every house, craning down toward the corner, and I passed women in the street who were trying to call back their children. One of them looked at me with a scared face. She looked at my gun belt and twisted her apron in her hands. But it wasn’t me that scared her.
“The horses,” she said, like I knew everything she was thinking.
“Send Tommy home if you see him, please,” she begged. She didn’t even know she didn’t know me.
At the next house a man in chaps was getting on his horse. There was a Winchester on his saddle. A woman, his wife I suppose, was standing right beside the horse and holding onto the man’s leg with both hands. She was looking up at him and trying to say something and trying not to cry. The man wasn’t answering, but just shaking his head short. His face was set and angry, like so many faces I’d been seeing, and he was trying to get her to let go of him before the horse, which was nervy, stepped on her. He was trying to do it without being rough, but she kept hanging on. A little kid, maybe two or three years old, was standing out in the brush in front of the house and crying hard, with her hands right down at her sides.
More people than before were out in the middle of the street watching the crossing, where now and then they could see one of the riders who had let his horse go that far. The excitement had got through the whole village.
One skinny old man in a blue work shirt, with his galluses out over it, and with a narrow, big-nosed head and his gray hair rumpled up so he looked like a rooster, was peering hard through his spectacles, and exclaiming furiously when a rider showed. A little old woman, as skinny and stooped and chickenlike as he was, was trying to keep him from going any farther. When he saw me he stared at me wildly. He had big eyes, anyway, and they were twice as big through those glasses.
“You goin’?” he rasped at me, shaking his stick at the corner.
“John, John,” the old lady clucked, “it don’t do for you to go gettin’ excited.”
“I ain’t excited,” the old man twittered, pounding his stick on the road, “I ain’t excited; I’m jest plumb disgusted.”
I’d stopped because he’d caught hold of my shirtsleeve.
“You’re goin’, ain’t you?” he threatened me again.
“It looks like it, dad,” I said.
He didn’t like my answer.
“Looks like it?” he crowed. “Looks like it? Well, I guess it better look like it. What kinda stuff you boys made of these days?
“You know how long they been dandlin’ around down there?” He jabbed his stick at the corner again.
“They got to get information yet,” I told him.
“More’n half an hour, that’s what, more’n half an hour already. Half an hour since I seen how they was lallygaggin’ around and started timin’ them,” he said triumphantly, hauling a big, thick turnip out of his pocket and rapping it with the forefinger of the hand that had the cane in it. He glared up at me with those big eyes.
“An’ God knows how long before that; God only knows. Looks like,” he cackled scornfully.
“John,” the old woman protested, “the young man don’t even know us.”
“An’ a good job fer him he don’t,” the old man told her.
He was still hanging onto me.
“You know those men that was killed?” he asked me.
“There was only one.”
“Only one. There was three. Three of Drew’s men was killed. Another one of ’em just told me so. And they gotta get information.” He spit off to the side.
My face was getting hot. I didn’t like to just yank my arm away from an old man like that, but people along the street were beginning to look at us instead of the show down at the corner. They weren’t having any trouble hearing the old man either.
“There’s no great rush,” I told him, sharp. “They got four or five hours’ start already.”
“No hurry,” he said, but not so loud, and let go of my shirt. “Chee-rist,” he boiled again, “five hours’ start and no hurry. That’s sense now, ain’t it? I s’pose if they had ten hours’ start you’d jest set to home and wait fer ’em.
“You get on down there,” he ordered, when I’d started on anyway. He trotted after me two or three steps, cackling, “Get a move on,” and gave me a rap across the seat with his stick.
I didn’t look around, but could still hear him, “No hurry, Chee-rist, no hurry,” and his wife trying to gentle him down.
I was pretty hot, the way you get when old people or sick people or smart kids talk up to you and make you look foolish because they know you won’t do anything, or even say much. I rolled myself a cigarette as I went along, and at the corner stopped and lit it and sucked in a couple to get hold of myself. But one thing I did see. If that old cackler who didn’t even have the facts straight could heat me up when I knew he was wrong, then a lot of these men must be fixed so that nothing could turn them off unless it could save their faces. The women were as stirred up as the men, and though a lot of them would have been glad if they could keep their own men out of it, that didn’t make any difference. When a man’s put on his grim business face, and hauled out a gun he maybe hasn’t used for years, except for jack rabbits, he doesn’t want to go back without a good excuse. And there were people along the walks now, too, a few old men, and a good many women and excited small boys, some of the women holding smaller children by the hands to keep them from getting out where the horses were. That meant an audience that had to be played up to from the start.
In the edge of the street opposite Canby’s, where things were thickest, I saw a little fellow no bigger than the one that had been crying because her mother and father were arguing. He was barefooted, and had on patched overalls, and had a big head of curls bleached nearly white. He was all eyes for what was going on, and stood there squirming his toes on the hard mud without a notion where he was. I didn’t see any other kid as small who wasn’t attached, so I figured he must be Tommy.
“Young fellow, your mother’s looking for you,” I told him.
He said for me to look at the horsies, and explained something pretty lengthy, which I couldn’t rightly follow, about the guns. It was too bad to spoil his big time, but he was in a bad place. I put on a hard face, and put it right down close to him, and said, “Tommy, you git for home,” and switched him around and patted him on the pants, saying, “Git now,” again. I guess I overdid it, because he backed as far as the boardwalk, looking at me all the time, and stopped there, and then his face gathered in a pucker toward his nose and he burst out bawling. I started toward him to ease it off a little, but when he saw me coming he let out a still louder wail and lit out for the corner. He slowed down there, and looked back a couple of times, digging at his eyes, but then went on out of sight up the cross street at a little half-jog that I figured was going to take him all the way. Well, I probably wouldn’t ever have to see that woman again, anyway.
When I got across the street to Davies, he was done talking to Joyce, and was standing there staring blankly at the men, his face tired as it had been after the talk in the bar, but the jaw muscles still bulging.
“Bartlett not back yet?” I asked him.
He shook his head.
“Wonder what’s ho
lding him?” I said.
He shook his head again.
“I’m sorry about Risley,” I said, “but I think the Judge will come.”
He nodded. Then he brought his eyes back to see me, and smiled a little.
“There wasn’t anything else you could do,” he said. “Maybe there isn’t anything any of us can do. They’ve made a show out of it now.”
I saw I didn’t have to tell him anything about that.
“Yeh,” I said, looking at the riders in the street too. And there was a change in them. Farnley was still sitting there with no change but a tighter bridle hand, and three or four others, one of them Gil, were still standing at Canby’s tie rail. But the rest of them, what with the wait, and the women standing on the walk watching them, looked as grim as ever, but not quite honest. There was a lot of playacting in it now, passing pretty hard jokes without much point to them, and having more trouble with the horses than they had to.
“They’d be willing to quit if it was dark,” I said.
He smiled a little, but shook his head again.
“Well, they’d go orderly pretty easy,” I suggested.
“They might do that,” he admitted.
I told him what I’d told the Judge about their having to go by Drew’s anyway.
“You could get them to promise to pick Risley up, and he’d take care of it.”
He considered that and nodded more vigorously. He thought it was a clincher too.
“It’s queer what simple things you don’t think of when you’re excited,” he said. “There’s a simple little thing, and it’s the whole answer.”
Then he added, “We’ll have to let the Judge tell them, though. They wouldn’t dare listen to me.”
I looked at him. He shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t care who does it.”
He went on as if he was thinking it farther to himself. “Yes, that will do it.”
Then, “Thank you. I know it was a hard place for you.”
I didn’t see why he felt as sure as all that about it, but I was glad he thought it cleared me.
“That’s all right,” I said. “Glad to do it. But the way things are, that’ll have to be my stake to you.”
The Ox-Bow Incident Page 9
