Gun Law

by Ralph Cotton

  “Rob every bank at once, eh . . . ?” said Tribold Cooper, considering it. “I like the sound of it.”

  “The government won’t even have to say where the money went. Just say, ‘Hey, all you rubes, the banks have been robbed. Now go home and start all over again.’ ” He laughed as he rolled his eyes. “The idiots won’t be able to do nothing about it!”

  “ ‘Cause they won’t even have guns!” Philbert added, laughing loudly.

  After a moment the laughter settled.

  “But that’s the future,” Cooper said in a more serious tone. “What about right now?”

  “What about it?” Jason Catlo asked.

  “Are you Catlos willing to sit back and squeeze this town for nickels and dimes?” Bender asked.

  “We hate to,” Jason said, still not jumping out front until he knew where the two men stood on the matter. “It might look a little more respectable. But it’s still robbery. I always say ‘whole hog or none.’ He patted his holstered Colt. “Until people like Kern and this Mayor Coakley figure out how to rob every bank at once, I say take what you can and ride on.” He paused.

  “But that’s just the Catlo way of thinking,” said Philbert, tapping his fingers on his gun butt. “How do you boys have it figured?”

  Cooper and Bender both looked at the closed front door, then all around as if to make sure they couldn’t be overheard.

  “I have always wondered how it would feel to rob a town dry with all the time in the world—no bullets whistling past my head,” said Cooper.

  “Funny thing,” said Jason Catlo, “we’ve always wondered that ourselves.”

  Darkness had fallen when Marshal Kern walked into the office of the Kindred Star Weekly News. Ed Dandly sat at his desk behind an oaken handrail. When he saw Kern, he stood up and took off his glasses.

  “Well, Marshal,” Dandly said, “I saw your deputy whip the townsmen into shape for you—quite literally, I might add.”

  “The blacksmith broke the gun law,” Kern said, walking over to the gate in the handrail. “Any time a new law like this comes on the books, somebody has to be made into an example. This time it happened to be Erkel Fannin.” He shrugged. “He was just doing his civil duty.”

  Dandly glanced at the pencil stub and notepad lying on his desk. He started to reach down and pick them both up, but then he thought better of it.

  “The irony is that Fannin happened to be one of Mayor Coakley’s strongest supporters of the gun law,” said Dandly. He gestured toward the printing press that took up a large corner of the room behind the handrail. “I plan on mentioning it in next week’s edition of the paper.”

  “Do you really?” challenged Kern. “Which side are you going to be taking?”

  “Which side?” Dandly questioned. He gave Kern an indignant look. “Neither side, Marshal.” Again he pointed toward the ink-splattered iron and wooden machine standing in the corner. “The press takes no sides. The press only prints the facts as it sees them to be.”

  Kern also gave a glance toward the large machine. Where Dandly’s look had been one of admiration, the marshal’s was one of scorn.

  “That big stinking machine only spits out what you tell it to,” he said. “So, I’m going to ask you again, which side are you—”

  “Speaking of Mayor Coakley,” Dandly said, cutting the marshal off, “has anyone heard from him? Any idea when he might be returning to Kindred?”

  “I have no idea,” Kern said, hearing an implication of sorts in Dandly’s tone. He stepped through the oaken handrail and let the gate flap on its iron spring behind him. “Why are you asking me?”

  “I’m asking you because you are the next highest seat to the mayor,” Dandly said. “Do you find something wrong with me doing my job?”

  “No,” said Kern, “not as long as your job doesn’t interfere with what I’m trying to do here.” He stopped a few feet away from Dandly. “I’d like to think that in your job and mine, we could both do a lot to help each other. In turn, we’d both be helping this town go in the right direction.”

  “Hunh-uh,” said Dandly, shaking his head. “My press doesn’t take sides, Marshal. When the next edition comes out, it will talk about the new gun law and how it’s being received. I will print the facts—the truth and nothing but the truth. Let the chips fall where they may.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Kern.

  “Too bad?” Dandly stared at Kern. “Marshal, I have always said, what good is a reporter and his press if he doesn’t print every side of a situation, in spite of his personal opinion?”

  “I understand,” said Kern. “But I look at it another way. I say, what good is a press or its reporter unless they do exactly the way I tell them to do?”

  Dandly gave a slightly bemused grin; Kern grinned along with him.

  “My goodness, Marshal, you can’t be serious—”

  Before Dandly got the words from his lips, he felt a deep searing pain shoot deep into his chest. His eyes went down to the front of the marshal’s fist, which stood firmly against the center of his chest.

  “Shhh, be quiet now,” Kern said softly, almost soothingly.

  Dandly gasped; his eyes bulged as the marshal’s fist pulled away slightly. He saw the blood-smeared knife blade slide halfway out of his chest, then plunge back deeper inside him, this time probing, this time finding the center of his heart.

  “Let’s just sit you down right here, Dandy,” Marshal Kern said calmly, easing the man around to his chair and following him down with the knife’s handle gripped firmly in hand. He stood over the newsman until he saw life fade away from his bulging eyes. Then he turned loose of the handle and took a breath. Finding none of Dandly’s blood on his hands as he inspected them and wiped them together, he turned and left the office, a job well done.

  Across the street from the newspaper office, the young man stood watching from the darker shadow of an alleyway. His belly growled with hunger. He was beginning to think the marshal would never leave. Now, as he saw the marshal walk along the boardwalk back toward his own office, he eased out of the shadows and slipped across the empty street, hearing only the music from the saloon wafting in the night air.

  He made his way inside the newspaper office, slipping a club from his coat and starting across the floor. He didn’t like doing this, but he had no choice, he told himself. He walked toward the man who sat staring straight at him, a look of terror on his face. But as he drew closer, he saw the knife in Dandly’s chest, the circle of blood surrounding it.

  “My God . . . !” he murmured to himself, looking all around. But he wasted no time. Within seconds he’d burst through the handrail gate, rifled the desk drawers and come out with an apple and a piece of bread wrapped in a piece of paper. He wolfed down the apple and the stale bread as he raked up a handful of change and a small pepperbox derringer Dandly kept in a desk drawer.

  The young man turned the gun back and forth in his palm and checked to make sure it was loaded. All right . . . ! It was about time he found himself a gun, even though this one wasn’t much, he thought. He tossed the club aside, stood up and dropped the coins into his pocket. The old man’s shotgun would have been better, but Virgil Tullit wouldn’t give it up.

  The young man took a deep breath and swallowed the last of the apple that he’d eaten, core and all. He tucked the small pepperbox down into his pocket and smoothed his hand over it; he turned and hurried back out the rear door into the alleyway. He had a lot to do tonight on his way out of town. He wasn’t going hungry anymore. That’s for damn sure. . . .

  Chapter 14

  Dahl and Sara Cayes stood over the bed where the injured woman lay sleeping. As soon as Sara had put her into bed, she’d driven the doctor’s rig out of sight into the barn behind the widow’s shack and hurried back to the house before Dahl had arrived.

  “Was there any trouble?” she asked Dahl, who still held his rifle in hand.

  “None to speak of,” Dahl replied. He offered no more on the m
atter.

  But moments later, when the doctor arrived on foot, his black medical bag in hand, he looked Dahl up and down and said, “I saw what you did to the fellow outside the barn. Ought to be upset with you for going against my warning and overtaxing your bruised heart.” His somber expression changed and a smile spread across his face. “But I’m not.”

  Dahl only looked at him.

  “Are you feeling all right, after that?” the doctor asked.

  “Never better, Doc,” said Dahl.

  “What did he do, Doctor?” Sara asked.

  “Nothing that low miserable miscreant didn’t have coming to him, Sara, I can promise you,” the doctor said. He’d already stripped off his linen coat and started rolling up his white shirtsleeves. “But enough about that ugly incident. Let me see how my patient is doing.”

  An hour passed as the doctor redressed the bullet wound in the woman’s back. Sara stood beside the bed with a pan of warm water and clean gauze; Washburn treated the countless punctures, cuts and scratches covering the woman’s feet and calves, caused by the torturous prickly pear and barrel cactus she’d trudged through.

  Dahl sat cleaning his big Colt and his Winchester rifle at a wooden table in the corner of the room. They were ready to be used again—the most current bullet holes patched tightly and sewn over with cotton cloth—his bulletproof vest hung from the chair back. When he laid his guns aside and looked over toward the bed, he saw the woman try to sit up, but Doc Washburn placed a hand on her shoulder and pressed her back down gently.

  “You lie still now, young lady,” the doctor said. “We’re not here to harm you. I’m a doctor. Remember me, from earlier?”

  The woman blinked and stared, at first with uncertainty, but then with relief as she recognized Washburn as the man she’d seen when she’d awakened in the surgery room.

  “We’re not . . . in the same room,” she said, looking around her dim-lit surroundings with swollen eyes.

  “No, we’ve moved you,” the doctor said, raising her limp wrist between his thumb and forefinger, checking her pulse as she spoke. “We thought you’d feel safer here, away from the men who did this to you.”

  The woman looked from the doctor to Sara Cayes, who stood watching with a pan of water in her hands. Sara smiled at her.

  “You do remember telling us about those men, don’t you?” Doc Washburn asked her, making sure the story hadn’t only been delirious ramblings.

  “Yes, I remember telling you,” she said, tensing at the thought of the three men.

  “And everything you said was true, then?” Washburn pressed. “I mean what they did to you and to your husband?”

  “Yes, all of it . . . is true,” she said, her voice still a bit shaky. She collapsed back onto the pillow, but remained conscious.

  “You can still identify them?” Washburn asked, hoping to keep her awake and talking for a while longer.

  “I heard their voices . . . I saw their faces as best I could. . . .”

  “I understand,” said Washburn. “You’re a mighty brave and courageous woman.” He patted her shoulder. “What is your name, ma’am?” he asked.

  As Washburn spoke, Dahl stood up from the table. He walked over and stood behind the doctor and Sara, looking down at the injured woman.

  “I’m . . . Celia Knox,” the woman said, sounding more alert than she had a moment earlier. “My husband is—” She caught herself. “I mean was Charles Knox.” Her swollen eyes welled. “We were . . . coming here to Kindred.”

  “Do you have folks here, or friends maybe?” the doctor asked.

  “No.” She shook her head weakly.

  Washburn glanced at Sara, then asked Celia, “What brought you and Charles here?”

  “We . . . we heard about the new gun law,” she said. “We wanted to live . . . somewhere like this. Where we could raise a family . . . not be afraid to walk the streets.”

  Sara set the pan of water down and moved closer to Dahl. He slipped an arm around her and turned her away from the bed while the doctor continued to talk to Celia Knox.

  “I keep wanting to tell her not to worry, that the law will see to it these men are punished,” Sara said under her breath to Dahl. “Isn’t that what we tell people, that the law is going to bring them justice?”

  “Yes, ordinarily,” Dahl said quietly, “but not this time.”

  Sara looked at Dahl’s saddlebags sitting on the floor near the hearth, one flap unbuckled and hanging open. Next to it lay his saddle, his blanket rolled and tied behind the seat.

  “Are you . . . leaving?” she asked.

  “No,” Dahl said, “not yet.”

  She looked at him and said, “I mean, I knew you’d be leaving eventually. I’m not trying to keep you. If it’s time for you to—”

  Dahl placed a finger on her lips, gently hushing her, his arm still around her waist.

  “I’m not leaving,” he said.

  “But your saddle, your belongings,” Sara said.

  Dahl turned her loose, stooped down and flipped the saddlebags closed and buckled the flap. “I needed some things,” he said.

  Sara looked at the box of .45 caliber bullets sitting on the table. She looked back at Dahl, who stood watching her.

  “You’re riding into Kindred?” she asked.

  “I thought I might, as soon as the woman can be moved somewhere safer,” Dahl said coolly.

  “Are you going to . . . ?” Her words trailed; she wasn’t sure what she had started to ask him.

  “I’m going to talk to the marshal,” Dahl said. “He might not know what his new deputies did.”

  “Just talk to him?” Sara asked, sounding a little worried.

  “Yep, just talk,” said Dahl. “We have to give the law the benefit of the doubt sometimes, if we expect it to work for all of us.”

  He picked his Colt up and slipped it down into his holster, which was rolled up in his gun belt on the table.

  “And if you find out he does know what kind of men his deputies are?” Sara asked.

  Dahl gave her a trace of a smile. “Then I’ll stop giving him the benefit of the doubt,” he said.

  “But you won’t take the law into your own hands, will you?” Sara asked, looking for some reassurance.

  “Into my own hands . . . ?” Dahl repeated. He considered it. “That’s a complicated question, Sara,” he said at length. He turned away with no further word on the matter.

  Overhearing part of their conversation, the doctor walked over and stopped at the wooden table. He looked down at the bullets, the Winchester lying cleaned and freshly oiled.

  “This woman can be moved again if need be,” he said firmly to Dahl. “If these men learn that she’s here, they’ll come to kill her.”

  “I know that, Doc,” said Dahl. “Is there another place where you can hide her?” he asked.

  “I have something in mind,” said the doctor.

  “Good,” Dahl said. “It looks like she might be leaving here anytime.”

  In the dark hours of morning, three sudden blasts of gunfire caused Marshal Kern to bolt up from the cot in the back room of his office. He yanked his boots on and grabbed his rifle, which leaned against the wall beside him.

  Along the rear wall of the building, Tribold Cooper had jumped up from his blanket and hurried through the open door of one of the cells where he’d bedded down. The other four deputies followed suit, grabbing rifles and revolvers as they rushed into the main room of the marshal’s office.

  “What the hell was all that, Marshal?” Cooper asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kern said crossly. “Think we ought to stand here and jaw about it ‘til somebody comes and tells us?” he asked with sarcasm.

  “It was a fair question, damn it to hell,” Cooper barked.

  “So was mine,” Kern growled.

  He levered a round into his rifle chamber and looked at the others through sleepy eyes in the glow of a candle lamp on the wall.

  “Everybody’s up, Mar
shal,” Jason Catlo said. Behind him stood his brother, Philbert, and Buck the Mule Jennings, the big dirty gunman still crooked at the neck with his shoulder hunched up in pain. Denton Bender was the last to walk out into the main room, his rifle held loosely in his left hand, his right hand steadying him with a firm grip on the barred cell door.

  “Jason Catlo, you come with me. Thanks to what you did to the blacksmith, everyone’s scared of you,” Kern said, thinking quickly. “The rest of you stay here with the guns, in case they’ve come to revolt on us.”

  “An unarmed revolt,” Philbert said with a chuff. “It doesn’t seem like it’s worth waking up for.”

  “If that’s why they woke us up, they won’t wake us again,” Jason said in a grim voice. He slung his gun belt off his shoulder and down around his waist. He buckled the gun belt, adjusted his gun and holster and hurriedly looped the tie-downs around his thigh.

  “Let’s go,” Kern said.

  The two walked out onto the dark street, immediately setting eyes on torches and lanterns held in the air by a group of men gathered out in front of the mercantile store a block away.

  “Here comes the marshal!” a voice called out as Kern and Jason Catlo walked closer.

  “Don’t worry, Marshal Kern. We’ve caught the sumbitch!” another voice cried out beneath a waving lantern.

  “Be ready, Deputy,” Kern said to Catlo, who walked quickly beside him. “There’s no telling what these flat-headed rubes are up to.”

  “You’re covered, Marshal,” Jason said confidently.

  “What sumbitch is that?” Kern called out to the voices on the street.

  “The sumbitch who’s been pillaging our stores all night long,” a voice called out in reply.

  Kern and Catlo saw a slender man hurled to the ground a few yards in front of them. An ax handle rose in the air and came down hard on the man’s back. A scream resounded from the man on the ground.

  “All right, take it easy,” Kern called out as he and Catlo walked into the light and looked down at the young man lying in the dirt.