Chapter Four: HARD-CASE DEPUTY

Johnny and the major ate with the hands in the cook-shack adjoining the bunkhouse. Only a sporadic visitor to the Bar 33 these days, Johnny was nevertheless surprised to see so many new faces among the hands. Hank Bunker and Morgan, blacksmith and water-mason, were the only familiar faces. Johnny asked the major about why the old band was gone.

“Simple,” the major said. “How did you feel when you were working here? You resented company rules—like no drinking, pay check every two months, no gun totin’, and such. There isn’t the freedom here of the old independent spread, and some of the men resented it. I didn’t blame them much, but then I’m only the manager. They got fed up and drifted on.”

“Speakin’ of guns,” Johnny said, “I come off without any. Reckon you could lend a pair till I get back?”

The major nodded. “Get back from where?”

“Campaignin’. I’m ridin’ over to Crockett at the Stirrup Bar, then I’ll drop down and see Kennicott. The whole bunch. I’m puttin’ them the same proposition I put you, and I’ll use your name for a starter.”

An hour later, Johnny and Soot, his black, were headed up for the trail under the Kiowa rim which would bring them to Crockett’s spread north of Cosmos by late afternoon. Another hour’s ride put him off the lush San Dimas into the rocks and, farther on, into the Snake Pit—this a corkscrew tangle of wind- and water-eroded sandstone, which, when viewed from the Kiowa rim, seemed a tangle of snakes caught writhing and petrified for eternity.

Johnny gave Soot his head and, reins over arm, rolled a cigarette. Pick always liked this stretch, said it had more color in it than his mother’s sewing-basket. Pick and color, they seemed to like each other. Color in rock and sky and life, even in mineral. Suddenly Johnny paused, match poised to discard. Color! If Pick had been working on one location and thought it good, certainly he would have packed some ore down to Hugo Miller’s in Cosmos. The color of the rock and ore might give a clue to Pick’s claim. The Calicoes held a hundred shades of red and purple, sullen grays, rusty orange, blacks, yellow and white sands and quartzes, miles of black malpais, miles more of these bile-tinted sandstone scarps, pinnacles, gargoyles, cattle rocks, and buttes that he was riding through now. Johnny didn’t know them all, but he knew a good many of them through his childhood years spent with Pick. It was a long shot, and would take an eternity, but if by some blind chance it should guide him to an encounter with the claim jumper and murderer, then he shouldn’t pass it up. If Pick only brought Hugo his—

Whang!

It scorched across his chest, slammed into his arm, and kited him out of the saddle onto the rocks, face down, before he could cry out. Play dead! something warned him. His mouth was bleeding, but he lay quietly, kicked one leg twice in a studied convulsion, then subsided.

His back loomed as big as a corral lot to the sky, inviting another shot. It crawled, shrunk, channeled sweat, but he did not move, waiting for that last blast to blow breath and life out of him.

Soot, good horse, stood still, and Johnny could hear his bridle chains jingle. He listened. No other sound. The seconds, loaded with lead, dragged by. Still no sound, and still Johnny did not move.

He’s waitin’, Johnny thought. He’s got a tip of that Buckhorn rear sight on each of my shoulder blades.

His ears began to ring until he was sure its rhythm made him move. He opened one eye, hair-width by hair-width—and looked at dirt. The man was on the other side of Soot, that much he was sure of, else why had the shot knocked him off to the left? He was up there in those rocks, and if Johnny stalled long enough, it might toll him down.

So he waited, listening. He waited and waited and waited until he could feel his arm aching painfully and his chest wetting his whole shirt front. He felt the sun hot on his neck and head, and sweat was soaking his hair. Still there was no sound, no noise of a gun being levered, however softly. Soot whickered a little in friendly protest, then subsided, and the quiet of the afternoon flowed over again like still water.

Had the gulcher gone, confident that his first shot had done the work? Johnny didn’t know, but he did know that he had to find out, to get off the ground before he bled so much he couldn’t make for help.

I’ll count sixty slow just fifteen times, then I’m movin’, gulcher or no gulcher. The counting helped to pass the time, and he clung at it doggedly, listening meanwhile with the other half of his attention. When he was finished, he had not heard a sound.

He let his head roll over until he was resting on his cheek, and it was done so slowly that it took almost fifteen minutes more. Six feet or so to the side of him was a low, flat sandstone slab that tilted up a little at the far side. It would be enough to shelter him. He gathered himself for the effort, took a deep breath, then rolled over swiftly, and lunged for the rock, sprawling on his face behind it.

No shot, no sound, even, except Soot’s slight shying at Johnny’s sudden movement.

Maybe he’s tollin’ me out in the open, he thought. Determined to find out, Johnny first stuck his guns out from behind the rock, and getting no shot, his hand, then both hands, then his arms, then his boots. Finally, disgusted, he decided to take a chance. He raised his head, kept it there for several seconds, then lowered it.

If there was a man there, he had the patience of an Indian. The thing to do was to get it over with.

So, gun in hand, he drew his knees under him, then leaped from his rock to another one. No sound yet. In short zigzags, always keeping to shelter, he worked his way around the stubby butte where he figured the shot had come from. Once behind it, he could see there was no one on the sloping top. Carefully, he walked up to the rim where the man had hidden. One burned match lay on the rock; that was all. Johnny squatted and looked at it.

He couldn’t have been here long—not even long enough to smoke down a quirly. And he was so sure of his first shot that he didn’t even eject the empty.

His first impulse, colored by a hot, smothering rage, was to ride the Snake Pit until he had found the man, but his judgment told him it would have been futile. The three quarters of an hour he had lain there waiting for the second slug had given the man time enough to lose himself in this mass of twisted rock. Then, strangely, for the first time he wondered who the man might have been. And fast on the heels of the question came suspicion.

“The Bar 33?” Even as he said it, he felt ashamed. No. Simply because several men at the Bar 33, including Fitz, knew where he was going, the blame for the gulching didn’t lie with them. Any clever killer could have followed Hank and him out from town, hung back out of sight at the ranch, seen the course Johnny was taking after dinner, and cut across to the Snake Pit to fort up and beef him. Of all the men he knew, Major Fitz was the most friendly and helpful and, looking at it in a cold, practical light, had the most to gain by preserving his life.

Could it have been Pick’s killer, skulking in the vicinity since Pick’s death and confident that sooner or later Johnny would show up to claim the body? That was more like it.

He took a whole hour out to examine the ground, looking over every inch of it for tracks. In a deep arroyo, forty yards behind the butte, he found what might have been tracks. The sand and rocks had been disturbed, but the arroyo was so rocky that he could tell nothing. It might even have been a stray beef. And all around it was rock, none of it scratched. Evidently, the gulcher had been at pains not to ride a shoed horse.

His face grim and hard, Johnny returned to Soot. This, then, was a foretaste of what he might expect.

“All right, pardner,” he said to Soot, his tone quiet. “Just once their luck is goin’ to trip. And if mine holds out to then, we’ll know a lot of things.”

He bandaged his arm, which had only a flesh wound, and mounted. The bullet furrow across his chest smarted a little; that was all.

Between the day Pick’s body was found and election, there remained seven days for Johnny to campaign. In three of these, he contrived to see ten ranchers, and they listened to his plan with an open-minded, if dubious, attentiveness. Things were too far gone, they said; there were too many bums in the county to hold an honest election. There was more of this talk, but each man pledged his support, and the support of his men and his friends. Moreover—and this was what Johnny was most concerned with—they agreed thoroughly with his suggestion that they mail in the names of the men they thought should be run out of the county.

Back in Cosmos, Johnny stabled his horse, got a shave, had Doc Palmer put a fresh bandage on the slight flesh wound across his chest and arm, and went over to see his Nora. She was folding napkins in the dining-room, and she greeted him warmly, concern in her eyes.

“I—I thought maybe something had happened to you,” she told him. Johnny sat down lazily and rolled a smoke. “You’ve changed, Johnny,” she told him suddenly. “I heard about your talk with Blue.”

“He’s told it, then?”

Nora nodded. “A few people in this town are going to vote for you—the decent ones.”

“And a few more aren’t,” Johnny said grimly.

“Nothing more about Pick—about his killers?” she asked hopefully, and Johnny told her no. He neglected to mention that he had been shot at. He listened to her chatter about Pick. She was recalling the many things done for her and others that showed Pick had not been the crotchety old man he was thought to be by some. Johnny knew she was trying to comfort him, but that part of him that had to do with Pick was buried deep within him, untouchable even by her. He would never feel he had done right by Pick until several things were squared. So he told her suddenly of what was uppermost in his mind now, but he went at it obliquely, starting with a question.

“If I’m elected sheriff, Nora, what do you think I ought to start out by doin’?”

Nora looked at him, puzzled. “But you said what you were going to do, Johnny—clean up the town and county.”

“How?”

“By hiring honest men, incorruptible men for your deputies.”

“Know any?”

“Fred McLain,” Nora suggested after a pause.

“He’s honest. He’s also dumb. How long do you think he’d stack up against a handy gunman?”

Nora frowned. “Not long, I’m afraid. He isn’t that kind of a fighter.”

“Know any of your honest men that are?”

Nora ceased her work and sat back in her chair, her serene face almost scowling. “Outside of yourself, no, I don’t.”

Johnny leaned forward, grinning. “How would you like to marry a sheriff that had the short end of a ninety-ten chance of livin’ a week?”

Nora smiled back at him, but her smile was not without apprehension. “Maybe I will marry you some day, Johnny—after you’ve proved you’re worth it.” And she added hastily, “Not because I think I’m a girl in a million, Johnny, but—”

“I do,” Johnny said, and rose and walked around the table and kissed her. Nora laughed, flustered, and pulled him into a chair.

“Not because I think that, but because I only want a few things—and I don’t guess I can be happy without them. One is a husband who won’t stand by and see the innocent trodden on and the decent, helpless people put in the wrong. How would you like to marry a wife and never be sure that she was safe? How would you like to have children grow up in a town like this—at the mercy of any drunken wretch with a gun? My husband’s got to be a fighter—and that’s the only thing worth fighting.”

Johnny nodded, grinning. “You’ll get him. Only, how do you expect to marry a saint and have him sheriff and still keep him alive?”

Nora looked worried now. “What are you trying to tell me, Johnny?”

“That I’ve got to have hardcases for deputies. They’ve got to be tough and hard to kill—and not pillars of the church.”

“I can see that,” Nora said slowly.

“Other folks won’t,” Johnny pointed out. “The day I’m elected sheriff, I’m goin’ to appoint some deputies that will get this whole county on my neck. And when I say the whole county, I mean it—good people and bad.” He looked steadily at her. “I just didn’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m out to clean up this county. If I do it kinda’ rough, it’ll be because I have to, understand?”

Nora patted his hand. “You know I do.”

With that encouragement, Johnny went ahead with his plan. Out on the porch of the Cosmos House, he surveyed the town with a kind of impersonal criticism. Its wide street, flanked by twin rows of unpainted, weather-scarred, false-front buildings, was always fetlock-deep in rutted dust or mud. Cans and paper littered it. Each of the dozen saloons in town was easily recognizable by the slatternly stack of empty beer barrels on its front boardwalk. Ore wagons, four teams to the wagon, plodded down the street in an almost unbroken line between the mines up the slope back of Cosmos to the stamp mill below the town. Saddle horses, buckboards, and spring wagons helped to clutter up the street. To a stranger unused to a modest boom town, it would have seemed a madhouse.

And to Johnny, his gaze skeptical, it seemed almost that now.

He picked his way across the traffic of the street and turned into the Kiowa Head. It was thronged, as usual, but the man he was looking for was not there. He proceeded down the street, stopping at the Melodian, the Legal Tender, the War Bonnet, the Drum Head, the Dry Camp, the First Chance. That put him at the head of the street. He crossed and went into the Gem, Prince’s Keno Parlor, and finally the Palace. Possibly because it was the largest and toughest of all the saloons, the Palace wore its name with a little more splendor than the others. Johnny saw the man he wanted standing over by a poker game in the far corner, watching the players. He was a burly, squat redhead, with a full, square jaw, cold blue eyes, and freckles that almost dyed his face the color of his hair.

Johnny walked up beside him and watched the game and, after a pause, looked up. “Hello, Turk,” he drawled, and Turk Hebron nodded curtly.

“Got a minute?” Johnny asked.

Turk looked at him suspiciously. “All day.”

Johnny flagged a waiter and ordered drinks, and they retired to a corner bench, well out of earshot of the main crowd.

Turk did not try to hide his skepticism. He drawled, as he sat down, “You must want somethin’.”

His blue eyes chilled a little as they looked at the deputy.

“I do.” Johnny grinned. “I wouldn’t buy a saddle tramp like you a drink if I didn’t.”

Turk grinned back. If he did not have any affection for Johnny Hendry, he at least respected him as a lawman who was blunt, to the point, and no pussyfooter. Turk said, “Is it about them horses that I stole from Cass Briggs?”

Johnny shook his head and frowned a little, “No, not about that. But now that you mention it, did you steal the horses?”

Turk looked around him and then said, “There ain’t a witness here to hear me. Sure I took ’em. I’ll take his hide some day and nail it on the fence, too.”

Johnny didn’t say anything until the drinks were set down before them. He leaned back against the wall and said, “Man to man, Turk, don’t you get fed up with this business? You ain’t with a bunch. They don’t want anything to do with you. The little smidgin of horses and cattle you steal, you got to drive a hundred miles to a market and do it alone. You’re tough enough that nobody bothers you, but on that account, nobody’ll work with you. I don’t savvy it.”

Turk said cautiously, “I don’t do so bad.”

“You do awful bad,” Johnny contradicted him. “You know it.”

Turk shrugged. “Not much choice, Johnny. I’m tough because I don’t want anybody to throw in with me. And I don’t want anybody to throw in with me because he’d be bound to get big ideas about stealin’ every horse and steer in the county. We’d get away with it for a while, and then we’d get caught. And then you rannies over at the sheriff’s office would start lookin’ through your reward posters and you’d ship me back over the mountains—if you didn’t hang me.” He shook his head. “Just a little suits me. You wouldn’t bother to run me down and, besides, you couldn’t.”

Johnny let that pass and went back to what Turk had said.

“I’ve seen some of those reward dodgers. You used to make big tracks, didn’t you?”

“Sort of.” Turk grinned.

“Tired of this penny-ante rustlin’?”

“Plenty,” Turk said flatly, “but a man’s got to live.”

“Ever try a job?”

“That’s a laugh,” Turk said wryly. “Every time I go near a mine, somebody picks up a shotgun and says, ‘The weather’ll get some hotter if you come any closer, Turk.’”

“What about ridin’ jobs?” Johnny asked him.

“Ranchers claim every one of their steers knows me on sight and will start a stampede when they see me.” He added, grinning, “Which is exaggeratin’ it a little, but then that’s the way they feel.”

“Still, you stick here,” Johnny pointed out.

Turk swallowed his drink and said mildly, “Thanks to you and Baily Blue. You could run me out if you wanted. You haven’t. I try to pay you back by not stealin’ the county blind. I don’t do half the thievin’ anybody else in my line would do.”

Johnny drank his whisky then, and set down his glass, regarding Turk with amiable curiosity. “Heard about my runnin’ for sheriff?”

“On a law-and-order platform, yeah. You better pull in your neck.”

“How’d you like to be my deputy after I’m elected, Turk?” Johnny said.

Turk raised his pale eyes to Johnny’s face. “It’s been a long time since I heard about Santa Claus. I thought he’d left the country.”

“I mean it,” Johnny said. “Before you start laughin’, think it over. If I’m elected, I don’t aim to write to every county in the Territory and ask for a list of their wanted men, then comb over this pack of hardcases and ship them home. I ain’t even interested in hangin’ the deadwood on anybody—least of all you. All I aim to do is move them out of here. If they don’t want to go, they got to prove they’re men enough to stay. That’s simple, ain’t it?”

“To say it, yeah,” Turk admitted.

“I’m sayin’ it, and I’m doin’ it. But I can’t do it alone. I need a deputy—at least one—who’s a scrapper and can beat these hardcases at their own game. I don’t care anything about his past. All he’s got to do is worry about his present. I’ll expect him to be honest, impartial, and willin’ to risk his neck for somethin’ he’s fought against most of his life.” Pausing, he regarded Turk closely. “It strikes me you’ve had just about enough of dodgin’ reward posters, Turk. Am I right?”

Turk fondled his glass with a square, hairy hand, his eyes musing. “How long will this job last?”

“Forever, if you’re on the level and I can work it for you. I won’t be sheriff forever, Turk, but I figure if I’m sheriff once, I’ll do enough for these ranchers that they’ll do me a favor. And one of those favors will include forgettin’ the old Turk Hebron and rememberin’ the new one.”

Turk said quietly, “I’ve never known you to go back on your word, Johnny. But can you promise that much?”

“I think so. You willin’ to throw in with me?”

Turk didn’t say anything for a moment. Johnny said softly, “I know what you’re thinkin’. You know plenty about the men that are robbin’ this county. You wouldn’t want to double-cross ’em, even if you did hate ’em. Isn’t that it?”

Turk nodded.

“If I get elected, I’m not goin’ to try and trap these birds on the first night. I’m goin’ to tell them I’ll give ’em twenty-four hours to clear out of the county. After that, anything goes. That’s fair enough, ain’t it?”

“Sure. But how about them that don’t take your little message to heart? Most of these birds have been told to get out of places before. But they don’t scare easy. If you was elected sheriff with such high notions, they might give you twenty-four hours to move on somewheres else.”

“I don’t scare very easy, either,” Johnny said. “And—I’m tellin’ you—I aim to have to help some customers that don’t move easy. That’s where you come in. How does it sound to you?”

“Interestin’,” said Turk.

“How about it, then? A hundred a month and horse keep—and brawls and shots at your back and gun fightin’ and ridin’ and plenty other misery.”

“You’re on,” Turk said briefly.

Johnny rose and said, “Come out in back a minute, Turk. There’s one other thing to settle.”

Turk rose and followed him out in back of the Palace. There was a bare square of hard-packed dirt between the Palace and the rear alley. Johnny looked around and saw no one in sight, and he reached up and unbuckled his gun belt and laid it on the step. Turk was watching curiously.

“I’ve had a notion,” Johnny drawled, “you think you ride a little higher and wider than me, Turk. In other words, if it come to a showdown, you think you could take care of me pretty easy. That right?”

“Not easy,” Turk murmured. “But I could take care of you. Not when it come to guns, though. You’d cut me to doll rags.”

“But fists,” Johnny drawled.

“I can take you.”

“Try it,” Johnny suggested. “I’m open to conviction.”

Turk laughed and shucked his belt, and they squared off and circled a moment. Then Turk, head down, sailed in, arms flailing. Johnny straightened him out with a blistering hook and stepped back.

“You ain’t fightin’,” Turk complained, shaking his head. “I can’t dance. But I can fight.”

“Here she comes,” Johnny murmured.

They rushed at each other. Turk hoped to make it a clinch, where his weight and heavily corded shoulder muscles could wrestle Johnny around while he ladled out punishment. But Johnny hacked down on Turk’s guard and sent five lashing blows—three in the midriff, two on the shelf of the chin—at Turk.

Turk went down, and on his back. When he got up, he was scowling and cursing furiously.

“Look at my tracks,” Johnny murmured. “I didn’t back up to do that.”

But Turk was mad now, and he wasn’t looking at anything but Johnny. He came in, shoulders lowered and rolling, and they collided. This time there was no science about it, nothing but vicious, body-weighted slugging. Toe to toe they stood, weaving a little, trying to dodge the worst blows, but so intent on hitting that each took them and grunted and gave them back. For perhaps forty seconds it went on that way, neither of them conceding an inch, taking the shock of the blows full on the body. But slowly Johnny was working out his plan. Turk’s chin was buried in his thick neck, where it was protected, and Johnny was pumping savage blows into Turk’s midriff. And slowly, from the pain of it, Turk was hauling his own blows in so that his elbows would protect him. And he was breathing hard. Suddenly, Johnny shifted a little to the right, so that he was at one side of Turk, and then he laced over a left that yanked Turk’s chin out of its cover. And then, savagely, putting every ounce of bone and muscle in him, Johnny drove the chin higher, until it shelved clear, and then he slugged hard and desperately, and there was a sound of skin-padded bone on knuckles.

Turk seemed to carom off Johnny’s fist into the dirt.

He lay there, absolutely motionless except for a little convulsive movement of his knees. Johnny, dragging in great gusts of breath, stood over him, watching. Then he picked up his hat and went over to a barrel standing under the eaves trough of the Palace and ladled out a hatful of water, which he doused on Turk’s face. Turk rolled over and dragged himself to his knees, then shook his head and looked around for Johnny.

“Enough?” Johnny murmured.

“Plenty,” Turk muttered, and then grinned. Johnny helped him to his feet, and they faced each other.

“Brother,” Turk said ruefully, “I’ve seen the hind legs of a mule that couldn’t do that.”

Johnny grinned and touched his ribs gingerly. “You’ve got five of my ribs between your fingers, it feels like.”

They both laughed, and Turk stuck out his hand. “By thunder, you will make a sheriff,” he said slowly.

Johnny stuck out his own. “With a hardcase, redheaded deputy, how could I help it?”

And then and there, behind the Palace, the pact was sealed.