The Mopper-Up (Short Story)

Chapter II

When Tom Bender hopped a train north he was wearing a white hat that had silk lining as red as the alegria stain that saves your face from the sun.

It was big and hadn't been broken in yet and felt like a house sitting on top of his head. He hated to break in a new hat but his old one wasn't fit to wear to a town like Austin after he got through with those vaqueros. One of them had pushed a .44 bullet through the crown and Tom Bender knew it was only by the grace of God it wasn't his skull.

They were as slick a gang of greasers as a man ever clapped an eye on and they fought like wildcats but he brought four of them in alive. They had been running wet hosses, stampeding them off a hacienda in Nuevo Leon and then cutting out a few to swim across the river and sell to shady dealers in Texas. The whole country knew about it and everybody told Tom Bender they were maldito Indios and that if he went after them he was in for a lot of trouble.

He trapped them on the mud flats south of Rinera where the river cuts through wide cottonwood bottoms and called on them to surrender. They wanted to fight, so he accommodated them, killing one and plugging another before the others stuck their hands in the air and quit. It was a hell of a battle and there was no reason for it because he already had his orders to come to Austin.

After he put them in jail he caught a train for the capital. He didn't know why the Adjutant-General had called him and he didn't care because summer was just around the bend in the south and the Rio Grande country in the summertime was hot and cruel. The air was like the devil's own breath and the ground got hard and a man's feet stayed blistered all the time. Any kind of a job anywhere else was a picnic and Tom Bender liked picnics.

He was the issue of a frontier ancestry that had driven the Indians west of the Pecos to clear settlements for log cabins, a civilization of contrasts: hard, kind and tragic. The measure of an aristocrat was the nerve he had and the speed with which he could bark an Injun in his tracks and pitch a buffalo on his head with one ball.

Tom Bender's people were aristocrats and when they died that was all the heritage they left him.

That was enough.

When he hit Austin his body throbbed happily and he had a song in his heart for it was a passionate attraction he felt for the city. He swung along the street with the gait of a man to whom the feel of a pavement is a strange and mysterious thing, and everybody's eye was on him. They could tell by the walk of him that he was a fighting man and they knew by the brown of his face that he was from the south. Women looked at him but he paid no attention because he didn't know women could talk with their eyes...

He went straight to the capitol and entered a dim, musty office in the east wing. Doubled up in a swivel-chair behind a massive desk was the Adjutant-General, lean and limber, and smoking a cigar. He said: “Hello, Tom,” in a preoccupied tone but didn't get up or offer to shake hands.

There was a bluish haze hanging from the low ceiling, the office reeked with the smell of cigars and Tom Bender knew that when the smoke hung thick like this the Adjutant-General was getting ready to crawl somebody's frame. The thing to do was to let him alone and say nothing.

Bender sat down inelegantly in a Jacobean chair and waited. After a while he lighted a cigarette and as he began to puff the Adjutant-General said he had a trip for him and it was too bad he couldn't give it to somebody he didn't like. Bender asked him how was that and the Adjutant-General said it just looked like a hell of a way to reward him for getting those vaqueros.

Tom Bender laughed and said that was all right, the look on the Rinera sheriffs face was enough.

Then the Adjutant-General got up and stood by the desk. He looked down at the brim of Tom Bender's new white hat and said he was glad of that because he had a lulu now and he didn't mean maybe. Hell was popping over at Rondora. The old settlers had got enough of gangsters and gamblers and were about to take things into their own hands. The Adjutant-General said it was vigilante stuff.

Tom Bender nodded and declared that was the way with them —boom towns. They were so busy trying to get rich that the riff-raff had the place by the tail before they knew it.

“That's it exactly,” the Adjutant-General said. “Last week a couple of bums put on a shooting match on the main stem and accidentally killed a twelve-year-old girl. Neither one of them was hit but a bullet ricocheted and got the daughter of Jeff Peebles. He couldn't get any satisfaction from the sheriff so he's got the whole town steamed up. It's a tough place.”

Tom Bender looked up, bared his teeth wisely and said they were all tough but that some were tougher.

“Then Rondora's tougher,” the Adjutant-General said. “I want you to get over there and head off trouble. There may be some even after you get there.”

Tom Bender looked up, bared his teeth a little and said: “Yeah— there may be at that.”

He was a good officer and scared of nothing but when he got in a tight corner he unlimbered his guns and started blasting.

The Adjutant-General glared down and snapped: “And, by—! I don't want you to make a shooting gallery out of that town, either!”

Tom Bender grinned and spread his hands placatingly.

“All right,” he said; ”—no shooting gallery.”

It was easy to agree to anything when a man's insides felt as if they had soaked up a lot of sunshine and he knew he had a day or two to play before he went back to work.

The Adjutant-General wrinkled his brow studiously and said: “I think maybe I better get Klepper down from Fort Worth to help you.”

“Naw,” said Bender, shaking his head; “you leave Klep be. I'll take a crack at it by myself. If I need help I'll holler.”

“Well—” said the Adjutant-General, “all right. But I want results. I want the place mopped up.”

“I'll mop 'er up,” Bender said. “I'll get right over there tomorrow.”

“No, you won't,” his superior said quickly. “You have lunch with me and I'll put you on the train. There's a 1:15 train out for Amarillo that makes connections. I'll take you myself—I want to know you're on it.”

Every time Tom Bender was turned loose in Austin he hit the high spots. He didn't get in often but when he did he took all they had and yelled for more.

“Don't rush me,” he said, grinning. “I just got here. I know a lot of people here. I got to say hello to my friends.”

The Adjutant-General frowned through a geyser of smoke.

“Tom,” he said slowly, “you're a hell of a good man but the next time you get tight and wake up in Oklahoma City I'm going to kick you off the staff if I get impeached for it.”

Bender grinned boyishly and slanted his head with his left eye closed from the thin finger of smoke that pried at it.

“Naw,” he said disdainfully; “I ain't gonna get tight. I just wanna look around. I'll catch that train for sure.”

“All right—but if you don't it'll be just too bad. I'm telling you, Rondora's hot. They're ready to start stringing 'em up to telephone poles.”

“That'd be swell,” Bender said; “yes, sir—that'd be swell.”

The Adjutant-General meditated a moment and then gave up trying to be serious.

“Hell,” he said, and sat down.