by R. W. Stone
They looked at each other before the other man replied. “No, you misunderstand. Let me introduce myself, also,” the man with the suit said calmly. “I’m Herman Franklin, the bank manager. It was my son who was killed by a robber recently. I believe you are one of the men who rode out with the posse, and since they have yet to return, we were wondering … is that the man who killed my boy?”
My whole attitude suddenly changed. I rose quickly and stuck out my hand to shake his. “I’m sorry for being rude. Yes, sir, he is. I separated from the rest of the posse some time back and went my own way. I caught up with the robber about a week ago. He’s the one. No doubt about it.” I reached under the table and brought out a set of saddlebags. “The money from the bank is in these bags,” I said. I handed them over to Mr. Franklin. “It’s all there,” I added.
Mayor Hobbs was elated. “My boy, that’s outstanding. I am personally going to see to it you get anything you want during your stay here.”
I looked down at my plate. “Breakfast would be nice.”
Mayor Hobbs laughed. “Of course. That one is on me personally. Least I can do. Enjoy. And after you relax and freshen up to your satisfaction, come and look for me. Meanwhile, I’ll take care of the arrangements for the body. You can find me over at the sheriff’s office later.”
“And I will of course arrange for your reward,” the banker added.
“Sorry again about your son,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Thank you,” he said sadly. “He was worth more than all the money the bank ever had.”
As it turned out, the robber was also wanted elsewhere for shooting a bartender and robbing an express station. There were outstanding rewards from those incidents as well. By the time I was ready to leave town, I had more money in my pocket than I’d made during all my time in the army.
Before leaving, I offered my condolences to the boy’s mother. It was a very uncomfortable experience. I tried to sound hopeful and offered a few platitudes that I’d heard used far too often during the war, but I recognized the signs of depression. They were beginning to call this sort of thing shock. The woman was hardly responsive, and after a short visit to her home, I left. Hell, fled would be a much more accurate term. I’m sorry to say I have never been at ease under such circumstances.
I was tightening the cinch on my Appaloosa, preparing to ride out, when Mayor Hobbs approached. “Sorry to see you go, lad,” he said sincerely. “Stick around. Next election we might even convince you to run for sheriff.” He laughed.
“I’m not much for town living,” I said, shaking my head. I patted my pocket. “With this, I can get a start on a ranch I’ve been planning for four years.”
“Well, the town’s eternally grateful,” the mayor explained. “Anything we can do in the future, just ask.”
“There is one more thing,” I said.
“Just name it, Badger.”
“The bank robber’s horse? Any claims on it?” I asked.
“No family to claim him, as far as I know,” Mayor Hobbs replied. “You want him, he’s yours. Just take him. No one will say a word about it, I promise you. Spoils of war, so to speak.”
“Nothing quite like that,” I replied. “It’s just that he’s a nice strong stallion and gets along well with my gelding. I want him to have a good home, and I was thinking he might help me start a herd on that ranch I was telling you about.”
The mayor nodded. “Good luck with that. We wish you well. By the way, mind if I ask you one last thing?
“Shoot away.”
“I was just wondering. Why do they call you Badger?”
I chuckled and swung up into the saddle. “Let’s just say, if I don’t get my way, I can be a real pest about it.”
The mayor laughed. “Wouldn’t surprise me a bit, but in your case you’d be hard-pressed to get folks around here to consider that a negative.”
“They obviously don’t know me well enough,” I replied. “Adios, Mayor.”
I retrieved the Morgan stallion from the town’s livery and then rode out with one more addition. With some of my reward money, I’d purchased a large black jack mule and loaded a pack on him with extra supplies. As I left town, I never even glanced back. I’d always felt better out on the trail and was anxious to get back to my valley.
About a mile out of town, I passed a large group of men riding back into town. They were dirty, dusty, and seemed all played out. It was the posse. As we passed each other, they looked over at me, puzzled. Not a word was exchanged. I merely tipped my hat and rode on. I was, however, smiling deeply.
Chapter Five
Most Western towns of the day were hardly what an Easterner would call glamorous, but this one, recently renamed Cooper’s Crossing after the only successful miner in the whole area, was downright miserable. The main street, if you could call it such, was full of mud, horse droppings, refuse, and anything else that humans used for waste. On top of being an eyesore, the place stank to high heaven, and if that wasn’t enough, the day I rode in, there was a cold drizzle blowing that seeped into your clothing and chilled you right down to the bone. Unusual for that time of year.
By that point in time, the war had been over for many years, but I was still riding an Appaloosa gelding. This one was gray and black with the usual white spotted blanket pattern over its rump. I now trailed another big pack mule, and on this particular day had a chestnut mare walking behind the jack and tied to the back of its pack saddle. My jacket collar was turned up, and my old fedora was pulled down low over my face. Even so, I felt like someone had dropped an icicle down my shirt. Off to my right, a mud-covered mutt followed me. He looked like something the cat dragged in, and for Lobo that’s saying a lot.
Lobo was a dog-wolf mix, weighed about a buck twenty-five, and with everyone but me had the disposition of a plains buffalo on a bad day. I’d found him as a stray pup about four years back and raised him on canned goat’s milk till he was able to fend for himself. Usually that’s just what he did when I was out of sight. Then, sooner or later, no matter where I was, he’d eventually show up, acting like the return of the prodigal son. That was fine with me. Out on the trail, I enjoyed his company, such as it was, and there’s no denying his phenomenal sense of smell had come in handy on more than one occasion.
I rode on down the street looking for the sheriff’s office. I was anxious to rid myself of the load I was carrying, tied crosswise over that chestnut mare, and experience had taught me that the quickest place for that sort of transaction was the office of the local law enforcement officer. Off to the right about ten buildings away was the sign I was looking for. I nudged the Appaloosa over and came to a stop at a hitching rail staked out in front of the jail.
“Stay, Lobo,” I said, cautioning my shaggy canine traveling companion. “None of your shenanigans while we’re here in town. Got it?” Lobo looked up at me with a sort of perpetual half smile and then walked up onto the sidewalk planking and curled up near the railing. Sometimes I doubted he ever understood a word I said.
I pulled a Springfield Model 1873 Trapdoor .45-70 rifle from my saddle scabbard, stepped up onto the walk, opened the door to the sheriff’s office, and took a quick look around. Over the years I’d been in hundreds of such offices and couldn’t help but notice that they varied very little. This one, like so many others, had a large L-shaped desk against the right wall, and just in back of it in the far corner was a small, round potbellied stove. As expected there was an old, beat-up coffee pot on it.
If experience counted for anything, my guess was that the sheriff’s coffee pot held the only decent brew in this whole town. Off to the left side of the room was a wall rack that held a half-dozen rifles. I caught a glimpse of a couple of Winchester ’73s, two shotguns, and some Burnside carbines. Below the rack was a series of wooden pegs from which hung a belt with a double holster and a brace of Remington sin
gle-action revolvers.
In the back of the room, directly facing the front door, was a passageway that led to the cells in back. I’d been here before and knew there were four such jail cells. The passageway was open at the time, but it could be closed up tight with a large swinging metal door, complete with a locking dead bolt.
Sitting behind the desk was Jake Finley, the town sheriff. More accurately, he was leaning backward with his arms behind his head and his feet up on the desk. Jake was probably in his mid-thirties, although it was hard to tell precisely, because he had a large set of whiskered sideburns that covered much of his face. He was about average height but with a set of wide shoulders, and, as I well remember, he had a very strong grip.
“Keep doing that, and your spurs will scratch up that desk,” I remarked, slapping the rain from my coat and pants. “Taxpayers might not like the misuse of public property.”
The sheriff lifted his bare boots up and nodded his head in the direction of the gun rack, where a closer examination revealed a pair of spurs lying on the shelf that was directly under the rifles. “You know the rules in here,” he answered dryly. “You’re supposed to put the gear up before coming in.”
I shrugged. “I told you before, I have to come in first before I can hang it up.”
“Whatever,” he replied, shaking his head. “Just take the rig off and hang it up.”
I set the rifle in the corner and removed my rig, as the sheriff had put it. I now wore a wide black belt with a series of cartridge loops of different sizes. Some were sized to hold .45-70 shells, while a few others were larger and fit 12-gauge shotgun shells or slugs.
The belt had a rather substantial buckle, and hanging low on the right side was a large holster. Actually, it was more of a sewn-up leather boot top that was cut from an old cavalry officer’s riding outfit. Resting in its holster was a drastically cut-down side-by-side double-barreled 12-gauge express gun. After removing the belt, I rebuckled it and hung it on one of the wall pegs. When I turned around, the sheriff lowered his arms from behind his head.
Surprisingly, his right hand held what is known as a Shopkeeper’s Peacemaker. Essentially it was a Colt Single-Action Army Model 1873 with its barrel shaved down to about two and a half inches and with its ejector rod and housing removed. Lately they had been making them to hold a variety of shell sizes, but the sheriff’s retained the original .45 long Colt caliber.
“Gonna shoot or offer me some coffee?” I asked, shaking the water off my hat.
“Have to consider it a moment,” he answered with a chuckle. The sheriff eventually opened a desk drawer and put the pistol away. “Oh, go ahead and pour yourself a cup,” he added, shrugging. “And stop shaking water all over the place.”
“Don’t want me to ruin such fine furniture?” I quipped.
“So,” the sheriff asked, ignoring my remark, “did you find him?”
I took a long sip of the coffee and nodded. “He’s outside.”
“Do I have to hurry?” Finley asked. I suspected he already knew the answer.
I shook my head slowly. “Not on his account, you don’t.”
Jake Finley and I had known each other for a few years. Back in 1860 he and I had worked together on the Bar-Double-D spread, pushing cattle and wrangling horses. Jake was close to my age or maybe even a year or two older. I never really asked him. At the time we worked together, we were still teenagers, so a lot of the older hands used to kid us. Because there is safety in numbers, we sort of hung together.
Back then Jake was sparking a pretty little thing named Marie Alcott. I remember her name even today, because her father ran the local gun shop, and I was always hanging around, trying to learn as much as I could about firearms. The fact that she was blonde and blue-eyed didn’t hurt any, either, but Jake was sweet on her, and I didn’t believe in cutting in on a friend’s territory. At least, that’s how I remember it.
The Bar-Double-D was run by the O’Connell family and was a fairly large ranch. It was so big, in fact, that it had several cabins built at the various extremes of its range, so cowhands could stay overnight rather than have to ride back late at night or camp out in the rain. Sometimes we had long, hard chores assigned to us, such as mending fences or branding cattle, that could take several days, so those line cabins came in right handy.
One time Jake and I were over on the north forty when we found a steer that had been brought down by a puma. While losing stock to wildlife isn’t all that unusual, what with all the wolves, bears, and such, this time it made us sit up and take notice. The tracks of this particular cat were special, as there was an extra toe on both of the two rear paws.
Jake and I had both heard the stories around the bunkhouse and in town of an immensely large cougar with extra toes that had hunted this range for years. He had evaded all attempts to trap or shoot him. The locals called him Old Shredder, because the carcasses of his prey had all been shredded to pieces.
“I’d sure like to get that cat in my sights,” Jake had said that evening back in the cabin.
“Wow. That’s the first time I heard you talk about anything other than Marie,” I had joked.
“Think about it, Badger,” Jake had said, ignoring my comment. “They’ve been hunting that cat for years, and they’ve all come up empty-handed. Every single time.”
“So?”
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m getting downright tired of all those bunkhouse jokes.”
I had shrugged my shoulders. “I try to ignore them. They’re harmless enough.”
“I don’t care. I don’t like ’em,” Jake had replied. “But just think about it. If we get that cat, the other men will have to look at us differently. They’ll end up saying … look, there go the two men who got Old Shredder!”
I had smiled at him. “Yeah, I’ll have to admit, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
Oh the innocence of youth.
For the rest of the night, Jake and I had planned our hunt. We had decided to leave at dawn and to ride the high ground. The idea was to split up. One of us would climb as high as he could and work his way down, while the other would work his way up. That way we would trap the cat between us.
Admittedly, there was some risk in the plan, besides the obvious one presented by the big cat. For one thing, with one man above and one below, we might end up shooting in each other’s direction. Both of us realized that and decided it was still worth the risk. We also agreed that if we got Old Shredder, we would share the credit, regardless of who made the kill shot.
We drew straws, and I got the short one, so Jake got to choose, deciding he’d go high and work down. Come morning I’d be working my way uphill.
As planned, we started climbing early. Actually, I was doing all the climbing, and as far as I was concerned, it seemed to be all straight up. Jake, on the other hand, was riding his buckskin behind the hills where trails lead up and around. The plan was for him to tie his horse up as high in the hills as possible and then work his way down.
On this side of the Bar-Double-D, the hills had a lot of caves, and as I was climbing, it occurred to me that the cat could be hiding in any one of them. All it would take would be a swipe from one of his paws to send me flying down that cliff. I had my rifle slung over my shoulder. The idea was to reach a certain rock shelf about halfway up the hill. If the cat didn’t show by then, I’d start making noise and try to drive it upward into Jake’s sights.
It never occurred to us that instead of retreating back up the hill, that cat might actually attack downward. That stupid little miscalculation almost cost me my life.
I reached the shelf without incident and waited. I didn’t carry a watch, so I can only estimate the amount time I sat watching the pockmarked hillside for signs of movement. It must have been about three hours before I finally spotted Jake standing up at the crest of the hill.
I got ready to
shoot and then started screaming. I fired my rifle in the air. All that ruckus was intended to spook the cat, but instead of charging up the hill right into Jake’s sights as we’d planned, Old Shredder bolted out of the crevice he’d been hiding in and came downhill, jumping from rock to rock, so that Jake never had a chance to get a bead on him.
Back then my rifle was a single-shot, not a repeater, and I was still in the process of reloading when the cougar leaped right for me. Trust me, there is nothing as terrifying as the thought of being eaten. Well, that’s not precisely true. The one thing that is more terrifying is actually being eaten.
Old Shredder was huge and more than lived up to his reputation. That cat landed right on top of me, knocking me backward. He slashed my right shoulder, and, as I raised my forearm to protect myself, he bit down hard on it. Jake fired, but the shot missed. In hindsight that shot was, to say the least, pretty stupid, since I was positioned right under the cat. I don’t really remember what happened next, because I had already passed out.
According to what Jake later told me—and I now take anything he says with a grain of salt—his shot, even though it missed, chipped a nearby rock. Supposedly, the rock chips ricocheted and scared the cat. Personally, I don’t think anything could scare that cat. Then, as Jake tells it, Old Shredder let out a growl and bounded away downhill against a hail of gunfire from Jake. How the hell he produced a hail of gunfire is beyond me, since he carried a single-shot rifle like I did.
Regardless of what Jake’s shot really did or why Old Shredder decided to run instead of chew me to pieces, when I woke up, I found myself spread-eagled over my horse. Jake had managed to secure a rope and then lower me down off that rock shelf. Eventually he got me over to my horse and then led me back to the cabin. He tended to my wound and poured some “Who Hit Joe” down me. He stayed with me for three full days, until I was well enough to sit a saddle. Now that I think about it, I realize that Jake may have been so considerate because he felt guilty about how everything had turned out. Regardless of his reasons, I was still grateful to him.
