by Paul Lederer
‘I don’t think anyone in this town thinks at all,’ Chad said, tilting back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. He glanced at the wall clock. A quarter to eight. Nearly time for Starr to begin his rounds.
‘You may be right, but look at it this way, Chad: we’ve got two more of the enemy out of the way.’
‘Three if you count Domino Jones,’ Chad said, mulling that. ‘But how many are left out there? I’ve heard that Glen Walker can easily raise a dozen men.’
‘Well, we’ll just have to take care of business as it comes up. No sense worrying ourselves sick about every possibility.’
‘No, I suppose you’re right.’ Chad sighed and leaned forward, placing his hands on his desk.
‘Do you think this Reg Hicks is going to help us out any?’ Starr asked. ‘Sooner or later we’re going to have to start collecting taxes or get thrown out on our ears.’
‘I don’t know what he’s going to do. He may not be inclined to try, or he just might not be able to do anything.’
‘I hope he can get something done,’ Starr said, reaching for his hat. ‘This town would settle down and be a fair place to live if the tax code went back to the way it used to be.’
‘You sound like you’re thinking of staying here,’ Chad said as he watched Starr adjust his gunbelt.
‘Maybe I am. I could find myself in worse situations.’
‘And you could still find the county sheriff on your doorstep.’
Starr froze his movements. His eyes went hard. ‘Don’t think I’m not aware of that, Chad. Some sins ride with a man his whole life, don’t they?’
Without waiting for an answer, Starr turned, walked through the door and out onto the sundown streets of Las Palmas.
Chad was not far behind him. He was tired and hungry. Candida would be there at the end of his ride home. Or would she? The bright-eyed little woman had not been there to join him at the dinner table the night before. Was she cooling off toward him?
Perhaps she had never held any feelings at all for Chad. Maybe it was all in his imagination. He hadn’t known many women and it was difficult for him to judge. She might have just been being friendly because they shared a house. He might have unknowingly given her some hint of how he felt about her, a hint that had caused her to back away from him.
Stepping into the buckskin’s saddle he forced thoughts of Candida away and returned his thinking to the problems of the town.
He got no further thinking about that than he had with his thoughts of Candida. No matter how he was trying, he still did not know enough about the politics and connections of the men in Las Palmas even to know who was who. Who among them were Walker men? Anyone could walk up to him on the street to shake his hand, then pull out a pistol while he was smiling at him. He supposed that Ben Cody would know their faces and the affiliations of almost any man in town, but Ben Cody’s time had come and gone, primarily because of his knowledge of the way the town worked.
Chad shook his head and shifted his thoughts again. The sky had changed. On his ride home there was a sheer purple veil of cloud overhead, pierced by pinpoints of silver stars. It would be a pleasant evening, in other times, in which to sit on the front porch until night settled and the air cooled. If a man had someone to sit there with.
Gloomily he rode on, approaching the adobe house. He had not really accomplished anything on this day. He somehow doubted that Candida would be there to welcome him. And he knew with certainty that Byron Starr had been correct.
If they did not soon start collecting the new taxes, they would be out on their ears and a new batch of men, willing to work only for the money, would be brought in to take their places. Then the war for Las Palmas would begin in earnest.
ELEVEN
The new sun was angled so low that its beams only struck the ceiling and the roof beams in Chad’s bedroom the next morning. It was very early, but he had accustomed himself to rising early by now. He yawned, glanced at his open window and smiled. A bold mockingbird had perched on the ledge and was now hopping back and forth as if trying to decide whether or not to enter the room.
‘You wouldn’t like it here,’ Chad growled as he rose, and the bird gave a single squawk before flying away on white-banded wings.
He dressed morosely. He had again not seen Candida the evening before, although he had heard her talking somewhere in the house. Pulling on his shirt, Chad wondered once more what he might have done to drive her away.
There was something simmering in a huge black kettle in the kitchen, but neither of the aunts was around. Unhappily, Chad crossed the yard and headed toward the canyon. The goat, now tethered, watched his progress. Slipping down the bank of the canyon wall, he again went to his practice range. His improvement had been steady but slow, and Chad figured he could still use all the practice he could get.
He drew and fired at the white rock. Drew and fired twice. Drew again and fired. He watched with satisfaction as the white dust from the rock drifted away in the wind. He turned toward where Candida had been standing the past two mornings, wanting to ask for her approval. But she was not there. It was as if she had vanished from his life.
Chad could smell coffee boiling even before he swung down from the buckskin in front of Ben Cody’s neat little white house. As he approached the door he caught the scent of pork sausage frying. Ben Cody, in his apron, answered the door before Chad had knocked. He carried a huge yellow mixing bowl and a wooden spoon.
‘I heard your horse,’ Cody told him. ‘Besides, I’m getting used to you coming by at breakfast time. I thought I’d try my hand at sausage and hotcakes this morning.’ He stirred the batter in the yellow bowl. ‘Want to give it a try?’
‘No, thanks, Cody. Just coffee if you don’t mind. I came by to see what you’ve found out.’
In the kitchen, Cody poured Chad a steaming cup of coffee and returned to his batter mixing. ‘Well, this is the way it’s going to go, Marshal,’ Cody said, dribbling the batter onto a hot steel sheet where it formed six small hotcakes, ‘I talked to Art Spykes over at the Wagonwheel yesterday, and he’s more than a little peeved about the new tax law. He’s willing to back you up if you’re willing to take on Glen Walker, Mayor Swanson and Judge Lambert.’
‘I’m going to give it a try. A lot depends on Reg Hicks.’
‘He’ll go along with you,’ Cody said, flipping the griddle cakes over. ‘Hicks is not a brave man, but he’s a decent one. I’m sure he must have been a little reluctant. But it was a lot to dump in his lap at once.’
‘I can see that,’ Chad said, sipping at his coffee. ‘What help does Art Spykes think he can be?’
‘I’m supposed to tell you that,’ Cody said, looking at the underside of the hotcakes. Assured that they were cooked well enough, he took his spatula and shoveled them onto a large platter before arranging six more dollops of batter to form replacements for them. Chad waited patiently.
‘Art’s sending ten or twelve of his men into Las Palmas, to watch things until this is over one way or the other. If Reg Hicks can organize a recall election, everything might just work out. But if Glen Walker takes to the streets with all of his men, no one is going to come out to vote.’
‘I guess not,’ Chad acknowledged. He hadn’t really thought of that. ‘Look, Cody, I don’t know any of the Wagonwheel riders either. How will I recognize them, and what will they be doing?’
‘Spykes thought of that. He’s going to have all of his men wearing identical red bandannas. They’ll spread themselves out along the main street, at every corner, just keeping their eyes open.’ Cody smiled and flipped the new batch of hotcakes. ‘We wouldn’t want anybody gunning down our new marshal on the eve of the election.’
‘No,’ Chad answered numbly. ‘We wouldn’t want that.’
‘So get along now, Dempster, if you don’t want to eat. You’ve got a town to nursemaid and a dozen volunteer deputies to help you keep it safe until the new elections.’
‘If this all works out.…�
� Chad said rising from his chair.
‘Even if it doesn’t, no one can say you didn’t give it your best shot, Marshal.’
Back at the office Starr was still awake and alert. Chad told him what was happening.
‘I was wondering,’ Byron Starr said. ‘Just as I reached the office I saw a group of cowhands drifting into town in twos and threes. It seemed sort of strange to me, so I watched them for a while, wondering if they were some wild bunch with an idea of trying to tree this town, but they just sort of fanned out. Later I saw them standing on the corners up and down the street. I’d never seen anything like that and I almost asked them who the hell they were, but I thought I’d better let you handle it.
‘And now that you mention it, that is what caught my eye – every single one was wearing a red kerchief around his neck.’
‘You’d better get some sleep,’ Chad suggested.
‘Not today,’ Starr objected. ‘It seems there’s going to be a lot happening.’
They heard a tentative knock on the doorframe and turned to find Reg Hicks standing there, his face flushed. The blue eyes behind his spectacles looked excited and fearful at once. ‘Well, here you are,’ the lawyer said and handed Chad a bulletin with the bold heading:
SPECIAL ELECTION
Chad sat down at his desk and scanned the bulletin. Ballots could be obtained at the courthouse that morning for a key vote on an initiative to reject the new business tax, as well as whether or not the people wished to retain Mayor Swanson or recall him.
‘It didn’t take you long to get moving on this after you made up your mind,’ Chad said, handing the bulletin to Starr to read.
‘Not once I got hold of Kennedy and Walsh, the other councilmen who voted against the ordinance in the first place. They’ve both been feeling miserable about the way the law was passed, how it looked for them.
‘Can the mayor pull the same trick as he did last time?’
‘Not while he’s under the shadow of a recall, no. He can’t vote on a referendum on whether to boot him out of office.’
‘What about the judge?’ Starr asked.
‘It’s going to take a little longer to get rid of him, but we have begun working on the impeachment papers. I think we can show judicial malfeasance. Meanwhile, he wouldn’t dare interfere with the special election. They’d probably string him up.’
‘Today seems a little hasty to hold the election,’ Chad said.
‘Does it?’ Hicks asked with surprise. It was Chad who had wanted to charge ahead with matters. ‘The sooner the better. There are men gathering – strangers who look like they’ve been brought in to interfere with the election.’
‘If you’re talking about the men on the corners wearing red kerchiefs,’ Chad told Hicks, ‘they’re cowboys from Wagonwheel. Art Spykes sent them over as special deputies.’
‘Is that who they are?’ Hicks said with a smile of relief. ‘I thought I recognized Corey Bates. I once did some business for him in the matter of a stolen horse. They’ll help keep a lid on things, but they aren’t the men I was talking about. There must be ten or even twenty men gathered behind the Barbarossa stable. I recognized a couple of them, but I don’t know their names. They’re all Walker riders, that’s all I know.’
Both Chad and Starr tensed on hearing this news. Starr had already walked to the rifle rack, had already withdrawn a box of cartridges from the desk drawer. It was time. They hadn’t had to do a lot of fighting since they had been hired. Now it seemed that their time had come.
‘Better get out and spread some of these around,’ Chad said, thumping a finger on the bulletin on his desk. ‘We’ll want the citizens on our side as well.’
‘I’ve got half a dozen boys ready to deliver them to all the shops, the saloons. We’re just waiting for the printer to finish the batch. Then he’s going to start on the ballots.’
‘I’m grateful to you, Hicks. We couldn’t have gotten this far without you.’
‘It’s my town too,’ Reg Hicks said. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better get back over to the print shop.’
‘We’re in for it,’ Starr said, tossing a rifle to Chad. ‘How do you want to handle it?’
‘First we let Hicks’s boys deliver their bulletins. Then, if anything starts up, the people in this town will have an idea what it’s all about.’
‘I’m not very good at waiting,’ Starr said.
Chad grinned. ‘And I’m not very good at rushing ten or more men and trying to disarm them.’
Starr sat on the desk, Winchester on his knees. ‘I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Glen Walker already knew what was happening.’
‘I told you once, Glen Walker knows everything that goes on in this town. He might have gotten the word from a Wagonwheel man, it might have been a printer’s devil, someone in the house of Councilman Kennedy or Walsh. Who knows? Everyone knows that Glen Walker is willing to pay for any useful information.’
‘And he wasn’t just bragging when he said he could call in a dozen armed men anytime he wanted to.’
‘No,’ Chad said heavily. ‘He wasn’t just bragging about that.’
If the Wagonwheel riders just held their positions they were forming a sort of safe corridor through which voters could pass on their way to the courthouse. Chad had no idea what Walker’s plan of action was; he only knew that by now the town manager must be in a furious mood. He was paying a lot of men a lot of money for a very dangerous job. At least one man would be charged with eliminating Chad Dempster, of that he was sure.
They had kept the door to the jailhouse closed, but an hour after Reg Hicks’s visit they could look out of the window and see five or six boys between the ages of eleven and fourteen fanning out across the town, sheaves of bulletins under their arms. They went into the Silver Eagle, the Clipper, the FitzRoy and every shop in between: haberdashers, dressmakers, the candy store, the blacksmith’s shop, the general store, hardware emporium, bootmaker’s, gunsmith, stables, feed-and-grain store. Not missing any place of business.
It didn’t take long to start a reaction. Half an hour later men and women from all the various businesses could be seen walking along Main Street in the direction of the courthouse.
‘Now it’s going to start,’ Byron Starr said soberly. ‘We’d better get out there and keep an eye on things, Chad.’
He was right. Almost before he had finished speaking they heard a shot ring out. Another answered it. Up the street to the west they could see a band of Glen Walker riders walking up the street. A man with a red kerchief lay sprawled in the dust and one of the marchers was limping badly.
‘Let’s cut across the street,’ Chad said. ‘Those Wagonwheel cowboys are going to open up.’
With one of their own shot down, that indeed was what they did. All along the street the men with the red scarves opened up from places of concealment, behind water barrels and from alleyways. Glen Walker’s thugs were forced to dive for whatever cover they could find.
Chad saw another Wagonwheel cowboy take a shot in the leg and be spun around only to steady himself and fire back at the Walker men, catching one of them in the chest. The Walker rider howled and hit the ground face first. There was no one to drag him out of the street. All of his friends had rushed toward cover and were now firing back furiously at the Wagonwheel crew.
Two of the Walker men tried to take shelter in the FitzRoy saloon, but Chad heard the roar of the barkeep’s shotgun and saw one of them turn away to fall on the boardwalk while the other took to his heels, diving for the alley entrance.
‘Come on!’ Chad shouted to Starr. ‘We’d better keep moving.’
Starr’s answer was a panting question as they rushed up the alley beside Meyer the blacksmith’s open-air forge. ‘Where are we going?’
‘The back of the Barbarossa stable – that’s where they left their horses,’ Chad said, pausing as Starr slowed and caught up with him at a walk.
‘Chad,’ Starr said sincerely, ‘you don’t want to d
o that.’
‘It’s where they’ll run if the Wagonwheel men beat them back.’
‘Exactly,’ Starr said. He was bent over at the waist, trying to suck air into his lungs. Starr was obviously not in shape for sprinting. ‘Tell me, Chad, what do you want these men to do?’
‘I want them out of my town,’ Chad said angrily.
‘That’s right,’ Starr commented. ‘That’s what I want, too. But if we cut them off from their ponies, they’ll have no choice but to fight to the last man. Don’t you see? Let them have their horses.’
Chad pondered this for only a few seconds before he nodded and said, ‘You’re right, Starr. In that case, we’d better get back to Main Street and see if we can help out the Wagonwheel men.’
They turned then and started back toward the center of town where the guns still fired continuously. There was a lot of ammunition being burned in the streets of Las Palmas on this morning.
Four or five strides on he stepped out of the shadows.
Glen Walker’s expression was wolfish, his eyes glittering. He still wore his ivory-colored suit, his scarlet cravat, but the tie was disarranged, the suit smudged badly. There was a pistol in his hand and he held it with deadly intent.
‘You interfering snake. You ungrateful stumble-bum,’ he said as he braced himself not far from Meyer’s glowing forge. ‘You’ve ruined everything.’
He gave no other warning, Chad saw Glen Walker thumb back the hammer of his Colt, and Chad drew as rapidly as he could. Still it seemed he was moving under water, his movements in slow dream-time as he pulled his own pistol from its holster and fired. A distant roar overwhelmed his ears and sudden violent pain coursed through his shoulder as if red-hot iron from Meyer’s forge had been run through his body.
He felt his knees come undone. They buckled and he fell to the ground, sprawled against the oily sand of the alley. The sun was in his eyes when he opened them, a piercing desert sun. His legs had begun to twitch uncontrollably.
Starr was beside him on his knees, bent over him, trying to do something with his yellow bandanna. Chad tried to smile, but it hurt. He only had enough strength to ask:
