Gun Law

At dawn, Sherman Dahl walked out of the widow’s shack and stood in its weedy, rock-strewn yard. He carried his rifle in the crook of his arm. To his left stood the main street leading into Kindred. To his right, a dusty trail ran out across the rocky flatlands. He studied the skyline of the town for a moment, then turned and walked in the direction of the flatlands.

The pain in his chest had diminished greatly; the purple skin color had already begun to lighten and heal. He could ride, he was certain. But he was in no hurry. He liked it here. He liked Sara Cayes, he told himself, and that was as much as he wanted to make of it.

Out beyond the front yard, he found the hoofprints of the two horses from the night before. At a point where he saw the prints turn full circle and head back the way they’d come, he stooped down, picked up the busted boot heel and looked it over in his palm.

No, not Kern himself, he told himself. Maybe someone he’d sent, just to keep an eye on things.

All right. . . . He could abide that. Kindred was the marshal’s town. Kern had a right to send someone snooping if he thought it was necessary. In that case, Dahl thought, he was glad no one got shot last night. That could have complicated matters. After a moment he pitched the broken heel away, dusted his hands together and walked back to the shack. Silvery sunlight had begun to ascend, wreathing the eastern horizon.

When Dahl and Sara had finished breakfast, and the only two plates and eating utensils Sara owned were washed and dried and put away, they walked to the rickety, weathered barn where Dahl’s horse stood in the only usable stall.

“I bought some hay and some grain from the livery barn,” Sara said, gesturing toward the fresh pile and the small feed sack of grain sitting beside it. “The liveryman delivered it.”

“You think of everything,” Dahl said. Before he left, he would pay her for the hay, the grain and everything else she’d done for him. But now was not the time to discuss it.

“I try to,” she said proudly. She walked over and untied the top of the grain sack, pulling out a small wooden scoop. “See?”

Dahl walked over, took the scoop from her hand and gathered up a generous portion for his horse. He walked to the stall, reached over the rail and poured the grain into a gnawed-down feed box. The big tan dun took to the grain.

“How long have you been coming here, getting this place back into shape?” he asked.

“For a while,” Sara said, “but I don’t know if you can call this getting it back into shape.”

“At the brothel,” she said, keeping nothing back from him. “Jake Jellico’s Lucky Devil is a saloon and brothel, remember?” she said.

“I remember.” Dahl nodded, rubbing the dun’s head as the animal munched on grain.

“Anyway,” Sara said, “I managed to save back enough of my own money and get the bedding, the curtains, the plates and dinnerware. The rest was mostly just cleaning up and fixing up a few things.”

Dahl looked at her. “You’ve done quite a lot,” he said. He wondered exactly why she’d gone to so much effort—what was motivating her—yet he wasn’t about to ask.

But as if she had seen the question in his eyes, Sara began to explain. “I know it seems foolish, a dove coming here, spending her free time . . . her money doing all this.” She gestured a hand to indicate the entire run-down patch of land and its weathered buildings. “But I figured, who knows, maybe someday things will change for me. I might not be a whore all my life.” She smiled with optimism. “Does that make any sense?”

“Yes, it does,” Dahl said. He knew few doves ever worked their way out of the brothels and moved on to more respectable lives. But it was not for him to say. He had started his adult life as a small-town schoolteacher. Look at him now, he thought. A man killer, a fighting man, a gun for hire available to the highest bidder.

Sara shrugged. “Anyway, not everything we do has to make perfect sense. Have you ever done something just because it felt like the right thing to do?”

“Yes, I have,” Dahl said, “but it seems like a long time ago.” He offered a thin smile.

Sara saw the weariness in his face. She reached out and brushed a strand of his long wheat-colored hair out of his face.

“It probably wasn’t as long ago as you think,” she said, gazing into his cold blue eyes. Trying to fathom whatever secrets he kept there.

“Probably not, but it’s been a while,” Dahl said. He looked away for just a second, just long enough to keep himself from giving anything away.

“I’m not the person to say what’s good and what’s not.” He turned his eyes back to hers. “Sometimes what’s good take its time revealing itself to us.”

“I know,” she said softly. “But sometimes it’s all we get . . . just knowing that good might be coming to us.”

“I suppose,” he said. He tried to turn away again, but this time she pressed a hand to his cheek and held his gaze.

“Were you in the war, Sherman Dahl?” she asked, her tone trying to keep the question as light as possible. She gave a slight smile. “You remind me of men I’ve known who were in the war.”

“Just a sadness, a seriousness or something,” she said, still holding his face. She liked looking at him. He was a handsome man, she thought, appraising him. Hair the color of sunlight . . .

His eyes were pale blue and cold at a glance, but they warmed as she searched deeper into them. He wore a trimmed downturned mustache only a shade darker than his hair. The shadow of his beard stubble was a shade darker yet.

“Yes, I was in the war,” he said. “Before the war I taught school. When the war had ended I went back and taught, for a time anyway.” He paused as if wondering how much further to go about himself, his past.

“And . . . ?” she asked quietly, not pushing, but still encouraging him to take it as far as he felt comfortable.

“A band of men—the Peltry Gang—attacked the town where I taught school,” he explained. “They burned the schoolhouse to the ground and rode away. I rode with a posse led by Sheriff Abner Webb, and we hunted them down.” He looked away, then back to her and said, “Afterward, I never seemed able to get settled back into teaching. I’ve been a hired gun ever since—a fighting man, I call myself.”

His eyes snapped back to hers intently. “I can think of no more noble purpose in life than to acquire knowledge for the sake of passing it along to a child,” he said.

She stood waiting expectantly for more, but he turned away from her and gazed into the dark stall, one hand on the dun’s muzzle.

He did not turn his attention from the horse until he’d heard Sara’s footsteps leave his side and walk back to the house.

Inside, Sara sat at the table with her hands folded on her lap as he walked through the door and closed it behind himself. She looked up at him.

“Last year a man hired me to hunt down a gang of robbers led by Curly Joe Hobbs,” he said. “The gang killed the man’s young daughter during a bank robbery.”

Sara looked on quietly. “I’ve heard of Curly Joe Hobbs and his gang,” she said. “I heard they met their end, but I didn’t know who killed them. I just thought it was a posse, I suppose.”

“I killed them,” Dahl said quietly. “I brought back Curly Joe Hobbs’ head in a jar, just as I was asked. I brought the gang’s ears back on a string.”

“I thought you ought to hear it from me, instead of from somebody else,” Dahl said.

“I don’t want you to leave today,” she said, “unless it’s what you want to do.”

“I don’t want you to think that I’m a good man,” Dahl said. “I’m not. I doubt if I ever will be again.”

Sara gave only a trace of a smile. “I’ll be the judge of that. Thank you,” she said. She gestured a nod toward the bulletproof vest still hanging on the chair back. “I have some spare quilting. Why don’t I mend your shooting vest for you?”

In the afternoon, the Catlo brothers and Buck the Mule Jennings rode into Kindred from the south. Passing the widow’s shack along the way, they looked across the rocky flatland and saw clothes drying on a rope line. As they rode by, staring from thirty yards away, they saw a woman pull a garment down from the clothesline and walk back to the house, folding the clothing over her forearm.

“Is that a petticoat she’s carrying?” Jennings asked his two companions, riding a few feet behind them.

“Don’t go concerning yourself with it, whatever she’s carrying,” said Philbert. “You’ve run your string with the fairer sex for a while, the way I see it.”

“What do you mean by that?” Jennings asked with a scowl, staring hard at Philbert from behind.

“Jesus, Buck the Mule . . .” Philbert chuckled and shook his head without looking back. “Don’t you see you have no business around womenfolk? You beat them up, force yourself on them. Do things to them that would curdle bear’s milk—”

“You poke a broom handle in their husband’s eye,” Jason cut in, staring straight ahead.

“I told you I never done that,” said Jennings, getting irritated all over again about the matter.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Jennings repeated. “But it wasn’t me.” His voice turned harsh with rage.

Concerned, Philbert let his horse fall back beside the big dirty gunman in order to keep an eye on him. “Hey. He’s just funning you, Buck the Mule. We know you didn’t do it. Hell, for all we know the woman did it to him.”

“Don’t say that. She never done it either,” Jennings said, defending the woman he’d had his way with and then shot in the back. He’d grown irritated, and his grimy hand had poised close to his holstered revolver.

“All right.” Jason shrugged. “He might have poked it in his own eye, just for spite,” he said, smiling to himself, “knowing you were off romancing his woman.”

Philbert looked at him and said, “Tell us again, Buck the Mule, about the first time your pa tried to kill you.”

“I already told you,” Jennings said. Now that he had settled down, his hand moved away from the gun butt and rubbed back and forth on his trouser leg as if to wipe his big fingers clean.

“It’s the sort of story we never grow tired of hearing,” Jason put in. He let his horse drop back, flanking Jennings on his other side.

“All right,” said Jennings, “it wasn’t nothing really. I was just a baby. He tired to hit me in the head with a smithing hammer . . . but my ma stopped him. She grabbed the hammer from him and cracked the handle across his nose. Broke it all to hell!” He gave a wide grin and threw his head back in a laugh.

“Wait, hold it, look at this,” said Jason, cutting him off. He gestured toward a new hand-painted sign nailed to a post standing alongside the beginning of the main street into Kindred.

In large letters, the sign read:

GUN LAW

BY ORDER OF MARSHAL EMERSON KERN, NO FIREARMS ARE ALLOWED WITHIN THE TOWN LIMITS OF KINDRED TOWNSHIP. ALL GUNS MUST BE TURNED IN AT THE TOWN MARSHAL’S OFFICE FOR SAFEKEEPING. THIS LAW WILL BE STRINGENTLY ENFORCED.

“So, the idiot was right,” Jason said, after reading the new sign. “They really are banning guns.” He gave his brother a surprised grin. “Can you believe this?”

Philbert stared at the sign. He nudged his horse over and touched a finger to it, checking if the paint was dry.

“What does stringently mean?” he asked. He rubbed his finger and thumb together, seeing no wet paint on them.

“It means the same as—” Jason started to answer but stopped short, finding himself at a loss. “Hell, you know . . .” He shrugged.

“No, I don’t know,” said Philbert. “That’s why I asked. I thought you might.”

“Well, it means . . .” Jason gave up. “Hell, I don’t know what it means, all right?”

“It means strictly enforced,” said Jennings, sitting his horse off to the side, his big wrists crossed on his saddle horn, watching the two.

“Good work, Buck the Mule,” said Philbert. He looked at his brother and said, “You should have known that.”

“But I didn’t,” said Jason, getting a little irritated himself, “so let it go.”

“The thing is, I can’t believe this is true, a town with no guns allowed,” said Jason. He looked Buck the Mule Jennings up and down appraisingly, then his brother, Philbert. Looking back at the new sign, he shook his head and said, “Can you imagine the kind of no-good murderers and thugs this gun law is going to draw from all over the territory soon as they hear about it?”

Philbert looked at Jennings, then at his brother. He stifled an outright laugh and chuffed to himself. “Hell, I shudder to think of it,” he said.

The three turned their horses to the street and rode into town at a slow walk. They took note of a long line of townsmen standing out in front of the town marshal’s office, beneath a large wooden star that hung above the open door. The townsmen held rifles, shotguns and handguns, respectively.

“Look at this,” Philbert said in amazement, “they even stand in line to get rid of their shooting gear.” He chuckled and turned to Jason, whispering under his breath, “Tell me, brother, have I died and gone to heaven?”

From the window of his office, Marshal Emerson Kern watched the three men file past. They gazed at the shops, at the bank and at the telegraph office. Their caged eyes moved across the people along the boardwalk like hungry wolves sizing up a flock of sheep.

“Yeah? What makes you say so?” Tribold had just taken a short-barreled shotgun from an elderly townsman and laid it on a table with a stack of other guns. He looked out the window with the marshal, but he was too late to catch a glance of the three gunmen riding by.

“Arm yourselves . . . ?” an old townsman murmured. He gave the others in line a strange look.

“Marshal Kern, how will you know my Caroline from all the rest?” the old man asked. He’d just handed over his shotgun and watched as it was slung atop the anonymous stack of guns.

“Caroline?” said Kern. “Your shotgun has a name?” he asked, bemused by the idea.

“Yes,” said the old man. “Sweet Caroline’s been with me longer than any woman ever made it. I want to know how you’re going to recognize her in case I come to—”

“In case you want her back?” Kern asked, cutting him off in an intimidating tone of voice. “You mean in case you get drunk and mad, and want to cause harm to somebody?” He stared hard at the old man and said, “Because that’s the very thing we’re trying to prevent.”

The old man scratched his head, befuddled. “I don’t drink. I never get cross with anybody. Look at me. Do I look like I’m going to start trouble?”

“Well, Virgil, we’ve all heard those arguments too many times to count,” Kern said. He shook a finger at him. “This is for everybody’s good old-timer. Don’t be a hardhead.”

As Kern turned to the door, he said over his shoulder in a dismissing voice, “Well, we just won’t let you leave town. We’ll stick you in jail and sit on you until you starve to death. Because that’s the kind of low-down snakes us local government officials are.” He grinned and winked at the others in line. “Isn’t that right, fellows?”

The townsmen laughed at his joke, all except for the old man, who scratched his head again and shrugged. “I still don’t see how you’ll tell Caroline from all the others,” he said weakly.

“Don’t even trouble your mind thinking about it,” Kern said. “Let me do all the thinking around here. That’s my job.” He gave a wide, generous grin. “I’ve got everything on file, right up here.” He tapped himself on the side of his head.

Cooper and Bender looked at each other and grinned as they picked up their gun belts, unrolled them and strapped them on.

“Oh yeah, he’s a pistol all right,” said Cooper, his smile disappearing as he buckled his gun belt and slid his Colt up and down to loosen it.