by Lauran Paine
Bannion nodded his head, pursed his lips just as the door opened. Ray stepped aside. Bannion’s hand stopped halfway to his face as his eyes fell upon Judith Rockland entering the office, wrapped in a heavy coat. Her eyes met those of her father in the cell.
Bannion stood up, casting a dark glance at Ray King. “She shouldn’t be here, Ray. Doc said....”
“It wasn’t my idea,” Ray responded, shrugging. “I tried to talk her out of it.”
Judith walked deliberately toward the cell, her gaze never faltering from her father’s face. She stood there a long time, studying his face, ignoring both Bannion and Ray King who were both growing increasingly uncomfortable.
Finally she said: “Why did you do it? Last night when you came to my room at the hotel, you told me you were grateful to the Kings for saving my life. You said you were going to talk....”
“Judy, honey, I didn’t mean for this to happen,” John Rockland tried to explain. “I swear that to you.”
“But it did happen,” she insisted. “You sent for those killers, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but that was before I knew they’d saved you....”
Judith stopped listening, turned her back on her father. Then she walked over to Ray King. “I know words aren’t enough,” she said, looking steadily into his eyes. “But they’re all I can give you right now. I’m ashamed for my father. I’m sorry for what’s happened tonight from the bottom of my heart. I’ll do anything I can to set this to rights, Mister King.”
Ray smiled. He reached out his hand, saying nothing. Judith put her fingers into that hand. Then Ray said gravely: “All right, Judy. The first thing you can do to help square things is come back to the hotel with me. You know you shouldn’t have left. You’re not completely recovered yet.”
He then took her hand and laced it under and over his arm, patting her fingers as they rested on his upper arm. “May I escort you back?” he asked.
Judith nodded and smiled. She did not look back at her father. As they were passing through the door, Ray said loud enough for Bannion and her father to hear: “And the second thing you can do is let me take you riding when you’re well again.”
She looked at him with that disconcertingly level glance of hers, and said: “Mister King, if you hadn’t asked me that, I was going to ask you.”
Bannion got up from his desk chair and went over to door and give it a good kick, then he stood a moment, considering John Rockland. He walked to his desk, picked up the keys, and scuffed over to the cell, which he unlocked. Then he stepped back and called Rockland several names, using what would be considered choice fighting words.
Almost meekly, Rockland passed out of the cell. He stopped next to Bannion. “I had that coming,” he admitted. “All right, Sheriff. You’ve left me no doubt about how you feel toward me. Now it’s up to me to prove that a man can return to what he once was.” He continued to stand there.
Bannion crossed over to his roadside door and flung it wide open. “Get out of here,” he ordered. “I can’t stand the sight of you.”
He closed the door, listening to Rockland’s retreating footsteps, then he returned to his desk, dropped down there, picked up his unfinished cigarette from the ashtray, lit it, and blew out a big cloud of bluish smoke. He rummaged in a drawer for a nearly empty bottle of whiskey, poured himself a powerful drink, and downed it, neat. When his eyes began to water, he laughed and said aloud: “I didn’t know I had any tears left in me.” He rubbed his eyes, thinking that no man could ever become so old, so hardened to life, that he could not feel anguish for the shortcomings of other men.
the end
About the Author
Lauran Paine who, under his own name and various pseudonyms has written over a thousand books, was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His family moved to California when he was at a young age and his apprenticeship as a Western writer came about through the years he spent in the livestock trade, rodeos, and even motion pictures where he served as an extra because of his expert horsemanship in several films starring movie cowboy Johnny Mack Brown. In the late 1930s, Paine trapped wild horses in northern Arizona and even, for a time, worked as a professional farrier. Paine came to know the Old West through the eyes of many who had been born in the previous century, and he learned that Western life had been very different from the way it was portrayed on the screen. “I knew men who had killed other men,” he later recalled. “But they were the exceptions. Prior to and during the Depression, people were just too busy eking out an existence to indulge in Saturday-night brawls.” He served in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War and began writing for Western pulp magazines following his discharge. It is interesting to note that all of his earliest novels (written under his own name and the pseudonym Mark Carrel) were published in the British market and he soon had as strong a following in that country as in the United States. Paine’s Western fiction is characterized by strong plots, authenticity, an apparently effortless ability to construct situation and character, and a preference for building his stories upon a solid foundation of historical fact. Adobe Empire (1956), one of his best novels, is a fictionalized account of the last twenty years in the life of trader William Bent and, in an off-trail way, has a melancholy, bittersweet texture that is not easily forgotten. In later novels like The White Bird (1997) and Cache Cañon (1998), he showed that the special magic and power of his stories and characters had only matured along with his basic themes of changing times, changing attitudes, learning from experience, respecting Nature, and the yearning for a simpler, more moderate way of life. His next Western will be Wyoming Trails.
