This Violent Land

Muley Stratton was in the office of the town’s only newspaper as the week’s edition was being printed. He watched as the editor, Harold Denham, pulled one sheet off the Washington Hand Press, put it on the stack of papers already printed, then put a blank page on the bed and pulled down the typeset platen to print the next copy of what would be a two-hundred-copy press run.

SHOOT-OUT IN THE
STREETS OF BAYHORSE

Two Men Killed

Gunshots rang out in the street of Bayhorse Thursday last, when two local men, Harry Carson and Wade Phillips, confronted Buck West. Though West was a stranger to the citizens of the town, he has inscribed his name indelibly in the memory of all who witnessed the gunfight.

Challenged by Carson and Phillips, it is reported that West made every effort to avoid gunplay, even offering, as an act of friendship, to buy a beer for each of the two men who accosted him. Carson and Phillips refused the offer and carried their challenge to fruition. Doing so was a fatal mistake on the part of the two men, for even though they drew first, West was able to dispatch them through the skillful and deadly employment of his pistol. Marshal Dooley, himself a witness to the events herein described, declared that as it was justifiable homicide. The gunfight clearly being an act of self-defense, no charges will be brought against West.

It is said that Buck West is a bounty hunter in search of the outlaw and murderer, Smoke Jensen. Jensen’s expert employment of the pistol is well known throughout the West, and though the name of Buck West is not yet known, those who observed his performance in the gunfight in the street of the town of Bayhorse are in agreement that his efficacy with the handgun must surely be commensurate with the proficiency so often demonstrated by Smoke Jensen.

“Why is it necessary for us to get in touch with him? According to the news articles that have appeared in papers all over the West, he is already looking for Smoke Jensen. If he finds him and kills him, then he’ll be coming here to see Sheriff Reece. When that happens, our troubles are over.”

In his office, Sheriff Dolan Reese was reading the same article that Josh Richards had just read. Reese tried unsuccessfully to place Buck West, but he couldn’t come up with a face to put with the name, and that was unusual. He knew most of the outlaws and gunhands throughout the West. He had been a sheriff in three other communities before coming to Bury.

But it wasn’t just because he was a sheriff and it was his job to know the outlaws, for he hadn’t always been a sheriff. In the past, he had ridden on the other side of the line as an outlaw. As a matter of fact, he had ridden the outlaw trail more times than he had worn the star of a lawman.

Reece knew about gunfighters because he was one of the best. He had been in gunfights as an outlaw and as a lawman, and he wasn’t against selling his guns to the highest bidder. In the past, he had taken a lawman’s job primarily as a way of hiding from the law, but most recently the highest bidder was the law, or at least the law as established by Potter, Stratton, and Richards. They had hired him and were paying him almost ten times more money than any other law position paid, no matter where it was located. In addition, there had been times when the “Big Three”, as they were often called, had paid him bonuses for special jobs.

“Well, first of all, like I said, we ain’t neither one of us ever heard of ’im. You, bein’ as good as you are, and bein’ as you’ve been almost ever’where, if he was really as good as the paper makes out in this story, why, you woulda heard of him. I mean, don’t you think?”

“Besides which, them two he kilt down in Bayhorse? Well, I knowed Harry Carson, and he was a big man what liked to fight, only mostly what he liked to fight with was his fists, is all. He warn’t no gun hand. If you ask me, this here Buck West is gettin’ hisself a reputation based on doin’ nothin’ more’n killin’ people that don’t know one end of the gun from the other.”