Law at Angel's Landing: A Western Story

by Wayne D. Overholser

  “You know what happened a week ago Saturday night when I arrested two of your men and shot Morgan,” I said. “This made Rip Yager so mad he could spit nickels. He cussed me for chasing some of his business away. He said men wouldn’t come to town Saturday nights if they expected to get shot and what we needed was a professional star toter.”

  Scully and Morgan laughed. Morgan said: “I wish to hell you had been a professional. I wouldn’t have this foot hurting like it is.”

  Scully nodded. “Yager’s a fool. What he don’t know is that you did something a professional probably wouldn’t have done. You bulled your way into it headfirst and risked your fool neck, but you got away with it. You made yourself a reputation and it will pay off. You didn’t have any trouble last night, did you?”

  “Nothing of importance,” I said, “but Yager doesn’t want the camp run that tight. Likewise Doc Jenner, Bailey, and Steele all feel the same way, so they’ve decided to send for a professional.”

  “I suppose a professional wouldn’t run as tight a camp as you will,” Scully said. “Who’d they send for?”

  “Captain John Wallace.”

  Scully had been adding a column of figures and half listening at the same time. Now he laid his pen down and placed both hands on the top of his desk and stared at me.

  Ten-Sleep Morgan said in a low, incredulous tone: “My God.”

  Scully didn’t say a word for a long time. He just sat there without moving a muscle, but his face wasn’t the pokerface I had thought it was. I couldn’t believe it, but the man was scared. Not the ordinary fear, the kind we all feel on occasions, but a panicky fear that makes a man tuck his tail and run like hell. I simply could not understand it. Ben Scully was a number of things, but being a coward was not one of them.

  Then Scully took a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and wiped his face. He slipped the handkerchief back into his pocket and yelled at me: “Why in the name of all that’s holy did you let them do it?”

  I yelled back: “I didn’t! They never told me what they were going to do. Yager sent for me and told me he had asked Wallace to come to Angel’s Landing. The other three had agreed.”

  “I suppose they want you to deputize Wallace.”

  “That’s right,” I said, “and I told them I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Well, that’s to your credit,” Scully said.

  He took a long cigar from his pocket, bit off the end, and lighted it, taking his time. Finally he asked: “Why did you come to me, Sheriff? I can’t give you any information or advice that will do you any good.”

  “Yes, you can,” I said. “All I know about Wallace is hearsay. I figured as much as you’d been around, you’d know something about him personally.”

  “Something?” Scully laughed shortly. “I know a whole hell of a lot about him, but I ain’t sure you want to hear it.”

  “Try me,” I said.

  He nodded. “All right, I will. I never started a business in a camp that Wallace was ramrodding, but in three camps I’ve had the bad luck of having some fool like your friend Yager send for Wallace.”

  Scully jabbed a forefinger at me. “I’ll tell you what kind of a man Wallace is, or was when I knew him, and I doubt that he’s changed. In every one of those three camps the men who brought him there were sorry they had, and then they had one hell of a time getting rid of him.”

  “Why was that?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you why,” he said bitterly. “He’s the one man on this green earth that I’m afraid of, and I’ve met a lot of hardcases. The reason I’m afraid of John Wallace is that he’s the only man I know who will kill another man for no good reason.”

  Scully hesitated, then went on. “I mean, no good reason the way you and I see it. There are no rules to the game he plays. He kills men because they’re in his way or to scare the living hell out of people in a camp when he gets there.” He jabbed a forefinger at me again. “I’ll lay you ten to one that the first night he works in Angel’s Landing he will kill a man.”

  I looked at Ben Scully and tried to swallow, but I couldn’t. I thought: It will put it up to me if he does that here. “How fast is he?” I asked.

  Ten-Sleep Morgan and Scully exchanged glances, then Morgan said: “He’s the fastest man I ever saw and I’ve seen them all. He’s older now, and he may have slowed up, but in his prime I don’t think Hickock or Earp or any of them could have matched him.”

  “A lot of fast men will use every bullet in their guns to hit anything,” I said. “A slower man who’s accurate can probably take them.”

  Morgan shook his head. “Not Wallace. He’ll shake five slugs out of his iron and place them all within six inches of each other in your brisket.” Morgan shook his head again. “No, Girard, he’s a killing son-of-a-bitch. I figure I’ve got more than an average man’s guts, but I walked away one time from a gunfight with Wallace. I never did that before or since, and I guess I’m ashamed of it, but then I know I wouldn’t be alive if I’d fought him.”

  “You see,” Scully said, “when he goes into a mining camp or a cow town, he levies a tax on every businessman in that camp or cow town. The money goes into his pocket. He’ll bring along a few plug-uglies who don’t admit they know him, and he won’t admit he knows them, so you can’t prove anything on Wallace or his men, but the funny thing is that the businessman who doesn’t pay the tax gets beaten up or has his place robbed or it burns down.” Scully spread his hands. “So it doesn’t take long for everybody to find out that the smart thing is to pay.”

  I couldn’t believe the situation would be as bad as they were claiming, but on the other hand they were hard-headed businessmen who didn’t scare easily, so I couldn’t discount what they said.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Sell out,” Scully said quickly, “if I can find a buyer. I won’t put up that building I was talking about. I’ve been in this business too long to risk my neck in a camp that might not last. When’s he coming?”

  “Rip didn’t say,” I said, and this time, when I looked at Scully’s tight-featured face, I knew the situation would be fully as bad as he and Morgan had said.

  “What are you going to do, Sheriff?” Scully asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, “but I won’t let him come in here and start killing people for no reason.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say,” Scully said. “Now I’ll give it to you straight. You’ve got two choices. Resign or let Wallace have the camp.”

  “I won’t do either,” I said. “I’ve got a third choice.”

  “That makes you a dead man,” Scully said.

  Morgan nodded somberly. “You’re dead and you’re beginning to stink.”

  I walked out of the tent, leaving enough gloom behind me to turn the day dark. I didn’t feel any better myself. I had never been one to worry about anything before it happened, but I figured that if men like Scully and Morgan were boogery about Wallace’s coming, then I had plenty of reason to be boogery, too. I’d be a fool if I didn’t, but I’d always been convinced that there was a solution to any problem if a man could see it.

  I had a terrible feeling that I’d been lucky all my life, but that fate had finally made the wrong shake of the dice for me. If there was a solution to this problem, I sure as hell couldn’t see it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  For the second time that afternoon I turned around before I reached my house. This time I went back to Yager’s Bar. I’d thought of something I needed to ask Rip. I found him sitting at a poker table, a half-filled whiskey bottle on the table in front of him. He was a little drunk, but not so drunk he couldn’t think or talk straight.

  He looked at me, his lips curling sourly under his white mustache. He said: “You come back to apologize for being so damned stinking about Wallace? Maybe you started remembering how we helped raise you from the time you was small enough to be crawdad bait.”

  “No, Rip,” I said, sitting down across the tab
le from him. “I thought you’d want to apologize.”

  “Me?” He sounded surprised. “I ain’t got nothing to apologize for. All me and the others was trying to do was to protect Angel’s Landing.”

  There was no point in arguing with Yager, but I couldn’t keep from saying: “What you’re really trying to tell me is that you insulted me and Ralston when you claimed we couldn’t do the job of protecting Angel’s Landing. We’ve done it so far, Rip. I figure we can go on doing it.”

  He sighed and for a moment I thought he was going to cry. He said: “Mark, we sure didn’t aim to insult you and Tug. I told you before and I’ll tell you again that it’s just a case of neither one of you having the experience you need.”

  “I’d understand that if you’d sent for anybody else but Captain John Wallace,” I said.

  I shut up, though there was plenty I wanted to say. I just sat there, looking at the old man, and then I began to feel sorry for him. He was so damned anxious to get all the business he could. So were the others, now that the opportunity had been dropped into their laps.

  Maybe Rip was honest in what he’d done; maybe I’d made a judgment about him I had no right to make. I was sore and I was hurt, and maybe that was the reason I had condemned him the way I had. Honest or not, he’d made one hell of a mistake, but he’d gone too far to back down.

  He stared at me, not saying a word for a time. The corners of his mouth were still quivering. Finally he said: “We figured we was doing you a favor, getting you and Tug out of a tough job.”

  Again he might have been honest in saying that. I knew very well that none of us had wanted this to happen, at least at first. Maybe they did now. I had accused them of wanting to fill their own pockets and none of them had really denied it, but I might have been wrong in condemning all of them.

  I started thinking about it in a little different light then, now that I was here with Rip Yager who had been a good friend through the years when I’d been growing up. I realized that my feelings had been governed by the fact that my old friends did not have any confidence in me, and that had hurt more than I had realized.

  “All right, Rip,” I said. “What I came back for was to ask you how you could pretend that Wallace has any authority to serve as a marshal if I don’t deputize him?”

  “I wish you didn’t feel the way you do about deputizing him,” Yager said, “but we thought you might, so we wrote to the county commissioners, telling them what we were doing and why we were doing it. They’re authorizing Wallace’s appointment as a special officer to serve in Angel’s Landing during the time of emergency, the length of the emergency to be decided by the four of us who asked Wallace to come.”

  “That’s not legal,” I said. “I’m the only man in Bremer County who can do that.”

  “Maybe it ain’t legal,” Yager said, “but by the time you or anybody else can take it to the Supreme Court, the state of emergency will be over and you and Tug can run things any damn’ way you want to.”

  I rose, knowing he was right about that. Anyhow, Wallace was the kind who would serve without even a hint of legal authority. I asked: “When is he getting here?”

  “He’ll come to Durango on the train Friday afternoon,” Yager said. “He’ll stay there that night and come to Angel’s Landing Saturday in time to handle the job that night. Meanwhile I’m letting everybody know about him. I figure that will get rid of most of the scum that’s moved in on us.”

  I turned toward the door.

  Yager called: “Mark, what are you going to do?”

  I stopped and looked back. “I don’t know, Rip. I honestly don’t know.”

  This time I did go back to the house. I smelled the good smell of cooking food the instant I stepped through the front door. I called: “What’s going on in here?”

  “It’s your good fairy,” Abbie answered from the kitchen. “It’s about time you got here. This fairy is getting mighty hungry.”

  I went into the kitchen and found Abbie standing beside the stove wearing a white apron decorated by a red band and equally red embroidery across the bottom. She had a dab of flour on her nose, the way a good cook should have; she was hot and her cheeks were flushed; and in that moment she seemed to me the loveliest woman in the world. Suddenly she became very important to me.

  I walked to her and hugged her and kissed her, and her arms came up around my neck as she kissed me back. When I let her go, I said: “I couldn’t have told you what love was when I asked you to marry me, but I do now. Let’s get married. I mean, in about two weeks.”

  She patted my cheeks and stared at me intently for several seconds. “Something’s happened,” she said. “Tell me about it.”

  I’d heard about women’s intuition, of having second sight, of being able to read men’s minds, but I had not believed it. I did now.

  “Why, it just looks as if Tug and I are off the hook,” I said. “Yager and the other old-timers have asked Captain John Wallace to come here to serve as town marshal. Of course we don’t have a town, but we pretend we do.”

  She was very sharp, sharper than I had thought she was. She knew what Wallace was. Not as much as I did, of course, but she knew his reputation. She said: “I see. What does that make you and Tug?”

  “Oh, we supervise the rest of the county,” I said casually.

  But she wasn’t to be put off. She said: “Yager and the others don’t believe you can take care of your job. Is that it?”

  “That’s about it,” I agreed.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I answered, “but I do know I’m not going to turn the town over to Wallace.”

  She motioned to the table. “Sit down. I’ve still got to make the gravy.”

  I sat down and filled and lighted my pipe. I hadn’t told her that Scully and Morgan had said I was a dead man and I didn’t intend to, but I underestimated her again. She brought the food to the table and ate in silence.

  The notion of being a walking dead man sent prickles up and down my back. It was an idea I just couldn’t get used to. Maybe I refused to accept it, although logically I didn’t know what I could do to stay alive.

  When we finished eating, Abbie said: “I’ve been the one who didn’t want to wait, but you’ve kept putting it off. What changed your mind?”

  “I’ve told you why I didn’t want to get married now,” I said. “I didn’t want to leave you pregnant and have you struggle to raise our child the way my mother struggled to raise me, but I’ve been thinking about it. I’m going to make a will in the morning and leave everything to you. You couldn’t run the stable, but with the camp booming like it is, you could sell for a good figure. Put that money with what’s in the bank and you would be taken care of for a while. After the child got older, you could go back to teaching.”

  “I agree to all of that,” Abbie said, “and I’d be happy to get married this minute if we could, but I think there’s more to it than that.”

  “I guess there is,” I said. “I’ve thought about dying the last few days more than I did before and I can’t bear the thought of dying before we have each other.”

  I had been looking at her, but I lowered my gaze, a new thought coming to me, a thought that must have been in my mind without my becoming fully conscious of it. I said: “All of a sudden it seems important to me to leave an heir. Maybe that’s the immortality the preachers talk about.”

  She rose and came around the table to me. “Oh, honey,” she said softly as she put an arm around me. “I want you to have an heir and maybe you’re right about it being immortality, but I can’t accept the idea that you’re going to die now. What put it into your head? You’ve never talked this way before.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that when you’re enforcing the law, you risk your life whenever you walk down the street.”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” she said. “I’ve thought of all of this before. It’s why I’ve been ding-donging at you to g
et married. I want to have your baby, but you’re doing a complete turnaround. It’s Wallace’s coming, isn’t it?”

  I hadn’t intended to tell her this much, but there didn’t seem to be any use to deny it. I nodded. “Yeah, it’s Wallace. He’s coming to Durango on Friday. He’ll be here on Saturday. I feel like I’m forking a bad horse. I can’t stay on and I’ll break my neck if I get off.”

  “Then let’s get married tomorrow,” she said.

  “I’ll see the preacher in the morning,” I said.

  I wasn’t as happy as a bridegroom should be, mostly because my mind wouldn’t leave Wallace. The only way to handle a man like that was to shoot him in the back. That was where I ran into a stone wall. I couldn’t do it to save my life or to save Angel’s Landing from a reign of terror.

  The whole thing seemed crazy. Here was a man who had no moral scruples whatever, a man who could murder me without thinking twice, a monster any way you looked at him. He deserved no more consideration than a mad dog, which in fact he was.

  Regardless of this, I could not murder him in cold blood because of my moral scruples. Even if I did, the town would have my hide. I’d get strung up because I’d be reversing the picture and making myself the monster and Wallace the victim, and that was no answer to my problem.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As it turned out, we had no wedding that day. During all the time I had lived in Angel’s Landing, we’d never had a preacher—I mean a resident preacher who regularly held church. We did have itinerant preachers who traveled through the country and stopped and held service in the schoolhouse or Yager’s Bar, then went on to any of the dozens of little mining camps scattered throughout the San Juans.

  If we had a real need for a preacher, a wedding or a funeral, we sent to Durango for one or went to Durango, which was usually the easiest and cheapest thing to do. Or, on a few occasions when we were faced with a death and the family could not afford to get a Durango preacher, Doc Jenner had served and had done a commendable job. Actually we’d had few such emergencies because we’d had few funerals and fewer weddings.