I corked off right away tonight, but not for long. Somebody coming in and making a ruckus woke me up. I sat up quick, some disoriented the way a man is when he’s woke up sudden, and rubbed my eyes clear—and my first thought was that maybe I was still asleep and having a bad dream about a giant scarecrow come to life.
The noisemaker was a tall drink of water wearing a black coat slung over a striped nightshirt, long chin whiskers pooched out and hair sticking up like straw, waggling a bull’s-eye lantern in one hand and saying something garbled like he was speaking in a foreign tongue. But he was real enough, not any dream figment. I seen that as soon as I hoisted up off the cot and went out there where he was standing.
“You’re not Marshal Jennison,” he said.
“No, I ain’t. I’m the night marsh … the night deputy, Abner Dillard. Who in tucket are you and what’re you yammering about?”
“Where is the marshal?”
“In bed asleep where most folks ought to be.” By then I was awake enough to recognize the scarecrow—Doc Christmas, the painless dentist that come into town the day before. “What’s the idea barging in here half dressed in the middle of the night?”
“I am here to report a shooting.”
I could scarce believe my ears. What with the town ordinance against sidearms, we hadn’t had gunplay in Box Elder in so long I couldn’t recall the last time. “A shooting? You ain’t wounded someplace, are you? I don’t see any blood…”
“I am not the victim, fortunately.”
“Well, then, who is?”
“Elrod Patch, the blacksmith.”
“Patch! Who shot him?”
“I did. In self-defense, when he attacked me after attempting to murder my horses.”
Hell, I thought, maybe I’m having a bad dream after all. I shook my head, blinked a few times. Doc Christmas was still standing there with his lantern, looking at me as though I might be a little soft in the head.
“Run that by me again,” I said.
He did, in more or less the same words. Then he added some so that I commenced to get the gist of what happened. Seemed Patch had snuck down to where the Doc and his assistant, Homer, had their wagon, with the intention of killing one or both of their horses picketed nearby. Doc and this Homer woke up and run outside in time to stop him from using his sledgehammer on the horses.
“Either he was drunk or out of his mind,” the doc finished up, “because then he tried to attack me with the hammer. I had no choice but to shoot him down like the cur he was.”
“You sure he’s dead?”
“As a doornail.”
“All right. Let’s go have a look and make sure.”
I got back into my boots and we hoofed it down to the willow flat, where the big fat guy, Homer, was waiting. Sure enough, Patch was sprawled out dead near where the two big bay horses was picketed, a bullet hole where his right eye used to be. In one hand was a five-pound sledgehammer, just like Doc Christmas said. I leaned down and took a sniff of Patch’s mouth. Who-ee! He smelled like he’d been fortifying himself with forty-rod, all right.
“You wait here, both of you,” I said. “I’ll go fetch the marshal.”
Which I done straightaway, and kind of a hard duty it was. Seth hates to be woke up in the middle of the night, and a thing like this not only surprised him as much as it done me, it made him growl and grump all the more while he got dressed. On the way down to the willow flat he snapped at me, “I told you about Patch’s threats, and to keep a sharp eye on Doc Christmas and Homer and their wagon.”
“I did,” I said, which was partly true anyhow. “Last time I checked down there at the flat, everything was quiet. And I didn’t see hide nor hair of Patch anywhere.”
“Damn fool. Patch, not you, Abner. He must’ve figured he couldn’t get away with busting up Doc Christmas’s wagon, but that he might with killing one or both of the horses.”
“Like he done with Ben Coltrane’s steeldust. Misdemeanor charge and a fine.”
“Be just like him to think mean and stupid when he was liquored up.” Seth grunted and spat into the dust. “Somebody had to get himself killed, better him than anybody else I can think of.”
“Good riddance, eh, Marshal?”
“I didn’t say that. And don’t you say it, neither. Ain’t right to be disrespectful of the dead, even a son of a bitch like Elrod Patch.”
Seth looked at the wound in Patch’s eye and sniffed his mouth the way I done. Then he made Doc Christmas and Homer repeat to him everything that’d happened, not once but twice. Then he took a close gander at the Doc’s pistol, which I hadn’t done.
“You know,” he said, “guns ain’t allowed in Box Elder.”
“Surely I did not violate the ordinance by keeping my weapon stored inside the wagon?”
Seth chewed on that, and allowed as how he reckoned not. He sniffed the muzzle, then checked the loads. “One shot fired.”
“One was all that was necessary.”
“You must be pretty handy with a pistol to hit a man square in the eye on a dark night.”
“I don’t wish to brag, sir, but I am indeed something of a marksman.”
“Uh-huh. You or Homer here take the time to light a lantern before you come out of the wagon?”
“There was no time for that,” Doc Christmas said, “with the horses frightened and fussing as they were. There was only time enough for me to grab my pistol.”
“And you say you hollered at Patch before you ventilated him?”
“I ordered him to cease and desist his foul intention, yes, sir. That was when he turned on me with the sledgehammer upraised. Inasmuch as I had no desire to have my skull crushed, I had no recourse but to fire.”
“Clear case of self-defense,” I said.
“Looks that way,” Seth agreed.
“Will I have to remain in Box Elder for an inquest, Marshal?” Doc Christmas asked him.
“You will if the county attorney requests one, but that don’t seem likely under the circumstances. I’ll wire my report to his office in the morning. Don’t you be thinking of heading off until I get an answer.”
“I won’t. I certainly won’t. Homer and I are respectful of the law, aren’t we, Homer?”
“Sure are,” Homer said. “Mighty respectful.”
Seth sent me to wake up another citizen, the undertaker, Farley Dayne, but Farley was used to late-night pickup calls and he didn’t mind. Matter of fact, he was downright eager when I told him the name of the deceased. We rode back down to the flat in his wagon, and it took three of us, Seth and Homer and me, to hoist Patch’s heavy carcass into the bed. Seth and me rode back to the undertaking parlor with Farley and helped him unload. Then the marshal went back to bed, and after a while so did I.
I hadn’t seen any other citizens out and about on any of my back-and-forths, walking or riding, but I knew from past experience how quick word of a happening got around in Box Elder. By sunup half the town would know about the shooting, and by sundown it’d be just about everybody in the basin. And I’d give odds that there wouldn’t be a single mourner among ’em.
R. W. SATTERLEE
Give-a-Damn Jones was sitting on the nail-keg bench out front, doing something I had never seen a tramp printer do before—reading a book—when I came to open up the Banner office early Monday morning. Usually Dad was the one to open up, but he’d gone off to interview Marshal Jennison and Doc Christmas as soon as he received word of Elrod Patch’s death. A shooting was major news in Box Elder, cause for excitement and a front-page story under a banner headline in the next issue.
I was pretty excited myself. “Boy, oh boy, we’ve sure got our work cut out for us today, Artemas.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Haven’t you heard what happened last night?”
“No. What happened?”
“The painless dentist, Doc Christmas, killed Elrod Patch. Shot him dead down where his wagon’s parked on the flat.”
Artemas’s
only reaction was a raised eyebrow. He slipped the book into his pocket—a real book, small and leather-bound, not a dime-novel thriller like you’d expect a roadster to read if he read anything at all—but I was too worked up to pay attention to the title. “The doc been arrested for it?” he asked.
“No. Evidently it was self-defense.”
As we went inside I told him what I knew about it, which were just the bare facts Abner Dillard had come to the house to report to Dad. I must have sounded happy that Patch was gone because he said, “A man’s death is no cause for rejoicing, R.W.”
“Oh, I know that, and I’m not. It’s just that nothing much happens in Box Elder and a killing is important news, ’specially when the victim is a man like Elrod Patch.” I drew up the shades and turned the sign in the window around so that it read OPEN facing outward. “Anyhow, now that he’s gone to his judgment, you won’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“I wasn’t worrying about him. But I’ll admit it’s one less thing to think about.”
When we were in the press section, I said, “Dad said to tell you to put the sale-price ad for Box Elder Feed and Grain at the top of page two in two columns, instead of the bottom of page one. Mr. Flowers won’t like it, but reports on Doc Christmas’s arrival and then the shooting, plus this week’s editorial, will likely take up the entire front page.”
“Right-hand or left-hand columns for the ad?”
“He didn’t say. Left-hand, I guess.”
Artemas put on his leather apron, lifted an empty form onto the make-up table, settled himself on the tall printer’s stool, and picked up his brass composing stick and setting rule.
I sat down at Dad’s desk. My job this morning was to write up the minutes of last Friday’s town council meeting. Pretty dull work, but Dad said that if I wanted to be a newspaperman, I had to learn to write every kind of story. The only problem with that was, he gave most of the humdrum ones to me while he concentrated on his editorials and important events. Another thing he was fond of saying was that if I did a good job on whatever copy I was assigned to write, he would run it unedited. But that had yet to happen and I wondered if it ever would. Will Satterlee was finicky when it came to the journalism that appeared in his paper; he never let anything I or anybody else wrote stand without blue-penciling to his satisfaction.
I couldn’t seem to get started on the town council story; my mind was still abuzz with the news about Elrod Patch. I sat back after a time, chewing on the eraser on my pencil, and watched Artemas finish readying the front page—setting the masthead and slugging the surrounding white space with furniture—and then set the form aside. He put another empty on the table and started on page two with Mr. Flower’s sale-price ad. He was the fastest typographer we’d ever had, and I’d told him so more than once. The first time he’d shrugged and said, “There are plenty faster. You should have seen Charlie Weems and a fellow named Hull in their prime. Put me to shame.”
I had peppered him with questions about his trade and his travels, and he’d been patient with me, providing ready answers. I asked him another one now.
“Artemas, do you carry a weapon when you’re on the road?”
He gave me a sharp look. “What makes you ask that?”
“Just curious. Seems to me a fellow might need one for protection sometimes.”
“Sometimes.”
“So you do carry one? I would if I were a roadster like you.”
“But you’re not.”
“Someday I might be.”
“If you’re smart, you won’t. I told you that before.”
“You seem to like it just fine.”
“You don’t know me well enough to make that statement, R.W. Now put your mind on your work and let me get on with mine.”
“But you haven’t answered my question about a carrying a weapon—”
“No, and I’m not going to. My business, nobody else’s.”
I kept quiet after that. But my interest in the kind of life he led, the dangers he faced, was more than just idle curiosity. Prior to his coming, I had been uncertain about my future goals, whether following in Dad’s footsteps, taking over the Banner when he decided to retire, was what I really wanted to do with my life. Listening to Artemas had started me thinking that maybe I ought to give itinerant hand-pegging a try before I settled down to newspapering or some other pursuit. It sure seemed like an exciting, daredevil life.
Artemas had discouraged me when I brought it up before. For one thing, he said, you had to work hard along the way to learn the finer points of the trade. And while his was a world of new vistas and adventure, the freedom it offered was balanced by hardships; most who tried to live as he did couldn’t abide the loneliness and uncertainty, and quit sooner than later for tamer, settled pursuits. He himself had done some reporting here and there, and been told by a couple of editors that he showed promise, and one day he might just take up that line himself. But when I pressed him, he admitted it was more likely he would remain a tramp printer until he was too old and infirm to ride the rails and bear the other adversities a man encountered on the road. Chances were, he said with a shrug, he would die in a strange town and be buried without a marker in a potter’s field grave.
Well, that had given me pause. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the kind of fiddle-foot life he led. I’d have to think long and hard before I made any decisions about having a fling at it.
I finally thought of a lead for the town council story and wrote it down. That got me started and the rest began to follow easily enough. I was about half done when the bell over the door tinkled and Dad came hurrying in.
He was all a-quiver, the way he gets when something or somebody like Colonel Greathouse upsets him or a rare big news story breaks. He tossed his derby at the hat tree and said to me, “Go sit at the other desk, R.W. I have work to do.”
“What did you find out, Dad? Any new details about—”
“Don’t bother me with questions now. Read my story when I’ve written it, it will contain all pertinent information. Artemas, slug a three-column head in sixty-point bold for next week’s front page—Elrod Patch Slain. And a thirty-six bold subhead—Blacksmith Shot by Traveling Dentist in Self-Defense.”
“Right away, Mr. Satterlee.”
Dad pulled a sheet of copy paper over in front of him and began to write. When he was in a creative frenzy like this, he wrote longhand almost as fast as Artemas could set type. I was just in the way here; I went out front and finished my dull-as-dishwater town-council-meeting story standing up at the counter. But I could feel Dad’s excitement like electricity in the air. It made me wish I was the one writing what he was right now, and think that I probably was cut out to be a newspaper reporter and editor just like him.
JIM TARBEAUX
Most of Monday and Tuesday I spent looking for work.
Cattle and ranching were what I knew best, even though I was rusty after those five years in Deer Lodge, so I started with the small ranches near Keystone and then moved on to the few that were left on the other side of the river. A couple of the owners and hiring bosses were civil enough, the others wouldn’t have anything to do with me. The civil ones had full summer crews, skeleton mostly because of the losses they’d suffered during the Big Die and the low beef prices that hindered the rebuilding of their herds. One said he might be hiring for the fall roundup, but that was weeks away and even then it wasn’t likely I’d be picked over loose riders with a clean record. I was not too proud to turn down any other job that might have been offered—stablehand, handyman, cook’s helper—but none was.
I drove back to Keystone Monday night in a bleak mood. I’d set out with hope and determination, encouraged by Mary Beth’s love and unshakable faith, but the way the day had gone burned it out of me. I had to have some kind of job; I couldn’t get back on my feet, start to rebuild Keystone, without one. Well, there was another way—Mary Beth had again urged me to let her arrange a small low-interest loan through the banker fathe
r of a friend of hers in Billings. But she’d have to cosign in order for me to get it, and I couldn’t have that. Swallowing what’s left of your pride is one thing, choking on it another.
On Tuesday morning, feeling grim, I headed out to where the nesters had their half-section tracts along both sides of the river and the creeks that fed it. I knew damn well they’d all be too poor to afford a part-time hired hand for wages, but I went anyway. Driving the buckboard rather than riding the chestnut, on the notion that an unarmed man in an old wagon would be less threatening than one on horseback.
Quite a few farms had been established, separated from one another by jackleg fences, and others were in the process of being built. My first reaction to the sight of men with hand- and horse-drawn plows tearing furrows in the grassland was anger. Pa had been a cattleman most of his life, and like so many others he’d grazed part of his herd out this way. I remembered how pristine the rolling prairie had been in those days; now it was all scarred and altered in the name of progress, maybe for the better in the long run but then again maybe not. You couldn’t blame the surviving small ranchers, nor even Colonel Greathouse, for their dislike of sodbusters.
I stopped first at the farms that looked to have been there the longest and seemed as prosperous as could be hoped for in country like this—the ones with sod houses instead of mere shacks, and vegetable patches and chicken runs and newly planted fruit trees. The men were all wary of a stranger—I didn’t give my name or say where I was from—driving a buckboard and asking for work. Several had rifles or shotguns close to hand, after the trouble they’d had with night riders. Scandinavians and Germans, most first-generation immigrants who spoke little English, or pretended they did. The only ones who didn’t dismiss me in a few curt words were a German named Rheinmiller and his sons, but as reasonably polite as they were, providing me and the chestnut with drinks of water, they had neither the money nor the inclination to hire me.
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