Open Range

by Lauran Paine

  When he finished, there was a long moment of stillness, during which Annie’s father whittled off a sliver of chewing tobacco and cheeked it, turned once to expectorate, then faced his brothers and said, “Started out as a friendly debt being repaid.”

  The bruised man propped himself up by one elbow. “There’s a judge in town.”

  Mack nodded.

  Alf surprised all but Paul by saying, “And there’s a U.S. marshal in town too. I don’t think they come together.”

  Paul mumbled, “They didn’t. That marshal was here last week an’ couldn’t leave until the stages was runnin’ again.”

  The three freighters slouched in thought. The dog decided to climb under the wagon where his owner was. Annie wearied of the long silence among her father and uncles, crawled back out on the far side of the wagon, got to her feet, and with the limping dog trailing along, went around to the front of the knoll where she could see the stage road, most of Harmonville, and moisture-laden heat waves farther out. It was an impressive view from Annie’s point of vantage.

  She was about to go back where there was wagon shade when her dog sat straight up looking northward, ears erect, eyes intent.

  Annie sat down, followed out the dog’s line of sight, and saw what could be three or four horsemen walking their animals steadily in the direction of town.

  She went back to the cool place beneath the wagon where her father and uncles were sitting, and announced that several riders were heading toward town from up north.

  Her father stood up, looking at Alf. “Could that be them?”

  Paul answered before Alf could. “It could be. If that whelp across from me hadn’t walked into a damned trap like a schoolboy, had rode north like the marshal told him to, that wouldn’t be Baxter.”

  Mack told Alf to move over against the big rear wagon-wheel beside Paul Sawyer. Mack’s uninjured brother got rope and tied the prisoners with an experienced hand.

  Mack gazed at his daughter fondly. “Stay away from them,” he warned her. “Don’t even get close enough for one of them to kick out.”

  She nodded.

  Chapter Seventeen

  A Time of Nerves

  The horsemen Annie had seen were several miles above town in the direction of the foothills, and at the gait they were riding it would be a couple of hours before they got down to Harmonville.

  They could have increased their gait but it was too hot and humid to ride horses any faster unless there was a good reason, and as far as Denton Baxter knew, there was no such reason.

  In Harmonville humidity, less than heat, made folks droop. Among local merchants the blacksmith was the first to slacken off. He and his helper went over to the long, earthen-floored runway of the livery barn and loafed where it was cool.

  Up at the general store, customers thinned out until the proprietor left his clerk in charge, crossed the back alley to the icehouse, went inside where it was bitterly cold and dark, and waited until the sweat stopped coming, then went back outside. Ten minutes later his shirt was clammily sticking to him again.

  Up at the saloon, which was normally warm in winter and blessedly cool in summer, Judge Collins was slouching at a little poker table with U.S. Marshal Dallas Pierce, sipping tepid beer made palatable by peppermint. They kept a small piece of peppermint in their mouths as they sipped the beer.

  Ambrose Collins was at ease. He also looked as though he had slept in his clothes, which was not unusual; he normally looked that way. He tipped ash from a cigar and considered his companion through half-closed eyes. “You’re getting old,” he said bluntly. “You’re letting your feelings get in the way, and you damned well know better’n that.”

  Marshal Pierce was sitting slightly to one side in order to have room for his long legs. His reply came slowly. “Naw, that’s not it, Ambrose. Maybe you’re right about the age but not the rest of it. Poole’s dancin’ on a string that someone else is pullin’.”

  “Who?”

  “A feller named Baxter. About the biggest rancher around here.”

  Judge Collins leaned to reach for his mug of beer, grunted from the effort, flopped back holding the mug, and said, “Where did you hear that?”

  “A couple of places. The corralyard and up at the doctor’s place. He’s got a kid who’s been with the freegrazers. Talkin’ to those folks up there was like pulling a plug. This Baxter sent some riders to the freegrazers’ camp in the night, shot one of them in the head from out in the darkness, and tried to kill the kid.”

  “I suppose he saw them in the dark?”

  Marshal Pierce’s eyes narrowed on his old friend. “You been a judge so long you wouldn’t believe your own mother. The boy told me he don’t really remember much. But when he was unconscious with a fever he said the name Butler. The doctor’s sister heard it plain as day.”

  Ambrose Collins emptied his glass and pushed it away. “Let me guess,” he said dryly. “Someone named Butler works for this cowman named Baxter.”

  Dallas Pierce smiled and nodded his head. “Butler tangled in the store here in town with the freegrazer who got bush-whacked in the dark. The freegrazer broke Butler’s arm.”

  Judge Collins raised an arm to catch the barman’s attention, then waited until refills had arrived before speaking again. “Dallas, you’re trying to influence me an’ you know a damned sight better than to do that.”

  The rawboned lawman did not smile, but his eyes twinkled. “Ambrose, we been friends upwards of fifteen years. You know I’d never try to influence you, any more’n you tried to influence me that time in the dead of winter I was settin’ out to track down those bastards who shot old Judge Mosby who’d sentenced them to twenty years for killin’ a clerk while robbin’ a bank. You wasn’t trying to influence me when you said it’d save a lot of money if they came back dead.”

  Ambrose Collins was looking into his beer when he replied. “I was just expressing an opinion.”

  Marshal Pierce looked steadily at his friend and spoke as though Judge Collins had not said a word. “And I brought them back belly-down.”

  Several limp townsmen came in from out front and ranged along the bar mumbling about the humidity as the barman set up their beers and put pieces of peppermint beside each glass.

  Four ragged old gaffers were at a table playing matchstick poker and nursing five-cent glasses of beer. They had not been provided any peppermint and did not seem to mind being slighted.

  Ambrose Collins fished out a huge tan handkerchief and swabbed his face and neck, then carelessly stuffed it into a coat pocket with half of it hanging out. “I got to hold court,” he mumbled, looking at something beyond Marshal Pierce’s right shoulder.

  The lawman nodded.

  Judge Collins’s gaze returned to his old friend’s face. “I can put it off for a day, or I can remand these freegrazers to their cells on the grounds that Mister Poole needs more evidence; there’s always a loophole.”

  Marshal Pierce nodded again.

  His Honor sighed and struggled up out of his chair, hitched at his sagging britches, and without another word headed for the roadway, leaving the marshal to finish his beer and suck on the peppermint.

  The sun was high in a flawless turquoise sky. The heat seemed to have lost some of its humidity as Judge Collins went northward to the Harmonville firehouse, where someone had stuck a national flag into a bucket of sand and had arranged an old table near the rear of the room in front of the flag. There were six or seven wooden benches a few yards in front of the table. Judge Collins made his inspection, tried the rickety chair behind the table, then walked out into the sunshine. He had two law books, a gavel, and a Bible among his belongings down at the roominghouse. He had not opened any of the books in a long time; he carried them along because they lent substance to his position when he convened court. Like the flag, they were an essential part of his trappings of judicial office.

  His presence in Harmonville had been noted the day before. People knew who were in the jail-house ce
lls. Every time a judge arrived in town to hold court, discussions livened the day. Sometimes the discussions got heated. This particular occasion was no different.

  Barry Haliday, who managed the corralyard for the company up in Denver that owned the stage line, was ambivalent in what he said about the freegrazers. If they had not saved his horses and coach he would have been outspokenly hostile to them, but now he seemed to agree with his yardmen, who had also witnessed Charley Waite’s behavior at the height of the storm, that freegrazer or not, Waite had done something heroic. His yardmen were not cowmen either, and even though they could not have avoided some of the hostility to freegrazers that had rubbed off on most people, today they considered freegrazing as much less of a transgression because of what that freegrazer had done for them at the height of the storm.

  Barry was a wispy, unsmiling man, strong on religion and fiercely opposed to both whiskey and gambling. He was out front with his corralyard foreman, a large Mexican, when he saw Judge Collins striding in the direction of the firehouse with his Bible and law books. He watched His Honor’s progress. The large Mexican sucked his teeth and also watched, but he was not inhibited and spoke frankly. “They put people on trial for trying to make a living and when it is over with, the prisoner ends up with the rope and the law gets his cow.”

  Barry made a little sniffing sound. Judge Collins had turned abruptly to enter the saloon. Barry said, “It’s the devil’s business,” and walked back into the corralyard with the Mexican following him.

  Down the roadway on the same side, Marshal Poole missed seeing His Honor. He was leaning on his desk scowling at a pair of battered townsmen. “Why,” he asked for the third time, “would they take Paul away with them?”

  Buff Brady gave the same reply he’d offered before. “All I know is that when I come around, Hugh Fenwick told me that’s what they done.”

  Marshal Poole tapped on the tabletop. He eyed big George Kendal but did not address him. There was rarely any reason to question George; his best answers were invariably formed by a ten-year-old intelligence.

  Brady ached. “Fenwick said he’d seen ’em in town before.”

  Marshal Poole left his chair to go draw off a cup of black coffee from the woodstove and take it to one of the little barred front-wall windows. With his back to his vigilantes he said, “What in hell did they want with Paul? There are always fights an’ when they’re over someone goes up to Doc’s place to get patched up.” He turned to face into the room. “Fellers get into a fight they don’t take the loser off with them. Why Paul? Why not one of you?”

  Brady answered dully. “Mister Fenwick said Paul gave up. Me an’ George was plumb out of it. To take us with ’em they’d have had to carry us.”

  Marshal Poole returned to his chair, still gripping the coffee cup. “Have either of you seen Alf?”

  They hadn’t. George brightened when he said, “He was lucky he wasn’t in the poolhall.”

  Marshal Poole drank the cup half empty before putting it aside. He did not tell them he had sent Alf north to intercept Denton Baxter; he told them instead to go on home and clean up, that they looked as if they’d been dragged the full length of Main Street behind a scouring mule.

  When he was alone Marshal Poole stared at the ceiling for a long time, then went over to the cell-room door, unbarred it, and walked down to halt in the pale gloom, eyeing his prisoners.

  This time it was Charley who was sleeping and Boss who was awake sitting on the side of his bunk. Poole said, “There was you, that feller sleeping, the kid, and the big feller who’s dead. Right?”

  Boss nodded.

  Poole looked at Charley. “Who are your friends in town?”

  “Don’t have any,” Boss replied. “About the only folks we know are the doctor an’ his sister.”

  Marshal Poole continued to gaze at the inert man on the wall bunk for a moment or two, then swung and walked back up to his office.

  He had an intuitive feeling, too vague and illusory to be pinned down for examination, but it was nevertheless in the back of his mind, and it would not go away.

  Something was going on.

  The roadway door opened. Judge Collins filled the opening looking sweaty and rumpled, with part of a tan handkerchief hanging out of a coat pocket. He said, “I’ll be at the firehouse whenever you are ready, marshal. If you got the facts written down I could take them up there to study while you’re gettin’ the chains on ’em.”

  Poole went to the desk, picked up a four-page handwritten complaint, and handed it to His Honor as he said, “You know that federal marshal who’s in town?”

  Collins was perusing the papers in his hands when he replied. “Dallas Pierce? I’ve known him a long time.” His Honor’s testy eyes lifted. “Some coincidence, him being stuck here until the roads got hard again, and me arriving when I did.”

  Al Poole muttered. “Yeah, some coincidence. All right, I’ll get the chains on ’em and march ’em up there in a little while.”

  Judge Collins stood gazing steadily at the town marshal for a long time, then turned and closed the jailhouse door after himself.

  As Marshal Poole went after his leg and wrist irons in the storeroom, Judge Collins was crossing the roadway squinting in the direction of a rangy, large man leaning on an upright post in front of the general store, watching the jailhouse. His Honor stopped a yard short of the plankwalk, looked up, and said, “I’m authorized to spend five dollars for a bailiff.”

  The U.S. marshal smiled faintly while studying the sweaty, fleshy face in front of him. “You don’t need a bailiff, Ambrose.”

  His Honor did not relent. “You never know, Dallas.” He rocked his head backward to indicate the jailhouse. “Something is bothering him.”

  Pierce’s rejoinder was as dry as corn husks. “Maybe it’s his conscience.”

  Collins stepped up into the shade before speaking again. “You been here long enough to start gettin’ influenced.” Dallas Pierce looked at the shorter man. “I only figured there was somethin’ wrong, starting with yesterday.” He looked northward up the roadway. “You can find another bailiff. I’d kind of like to stand out here and watch for this cowman.”

  Judge Collins swiveled his head northward. “He’s coming for a fact?”

  “Not for a fact. No one told me he was. But I been at this trade a long time. If the town marshal is goin’ to bring culprits before your court, an’ the basis of his charges against these culprits arises from trouble with this feller Baxter, I’d expect Mister Baxter to show up to support the town marshal’s charges.”

  Judge Collins held his coat open to catch as much of a little stray breeze as he could. Marshal Pierce brought forth a thin, dark cigar from an inside coat pocket, offered it to the judge, who shook his head, so Pierce lighted up, trickled smoke, and without looking down again, said, “Ambrose, if just half of what I’ve heard the last day or so is true, just half of it, mind you, that town marshal over yonder and his friend named Baxter are so crooked that when they die, folks will have to screw them into the ground.”

  Ambrose Collins fished out his tan handkerchief to mop off sweat, and as carelessly as before, shoved it back into a coat pocket. “Dallas, you be careful. As far as I know right now, even if the town marshal is up to something, an’ even if his partner the cowman comes into town, this here is a routine case of assault.”

  The federal officer continued to smoke his stogie, lean against the overhang upright, and alternately watch the northward roadway and His Honor, who was marching up toward the fire-house.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the Middle of the Road!

  Marshal Poole brought his prisoners up to the jail-house office and told Charley to go sit on a bench and stay there while he clamped leg irons on Boss Spearman, then belted him with a midriff chain and cuffed both his wrists to it. Boss couldn’t even scratch if he got an itch.

  He did not say a word. Neither did Charley when it was his turn to be shackled, but when the lawma
n went to a rack for a short-barreled shotgun, which he methodically loaded in their sight, Charley said, “If this is what you do to men who haven’t done anything but defend themselves, what do you do to murderers?”

  Poole ignored Charley to open the roadway door while facing inward. He jerked his head for them to leave the room and made a curt announcement. “Just walk across the road an’ turn north. I’ll tell you when to stop. I’ll be behind you. If you try to duck down between any buildings, I’ll blow you in half. Move!”

  They both faltered when blinding sunlight struck their faces. Charley rattled his chains as he nudged Boss to keep him walking. It seemed improbable that Poole would kill them in plain sight of startled onlookers on both sides of Main Street, but every graveyard west of the Missouri River held evidence that this was nothing to gamble on.

  People stopped to watch, mostly in silence, but occasionally to murmur to each other. Marshal Poole had his shotgun in the crook of one arm. He looked neither right nor left. When they were passing the general store and a startled man said, “They couldn’t run if they wanted to,” the town marshal snarled at him.

  There were some rangemen tying horses at the rack in front of the saloon. They became motionless as they watched the clanking cavalcade approach. One rangeman leaned down on the hitchrack, smiling. He was about to say something about sonofabitching freegrazers when a tall, rangy, older man walking ten feet behind Marshal Poole spoke sharply. “Keep your damned mouth shut!”

  Al Poole gave a little start, risked a fast rearward stare, recognized the U.S. marshal, and faced forward again as he growled at the federal officer. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  They were past the staring, motionless rangemen before Dallas Pierce replied. “Bringing up the rear.”

  There was a small crowd out front of the fire-hall. Judge Collins was among them, tan handkerchief hanging from a coat pocket. Marshal Poole said, “Spearman! Waite! Turn in up there. Stay close together and don’t stop!”