Mankiller, Colorado

CHAPTER 12

It was late in the morning, so Lucinda needed to reopen the café for the lunch rush. She needed every bit of profit she could make in order to pay off the Deverys and keep going. The meeting had served its purpose anyway.

As the businessmen filed out of the café, Bo spoke quietly to Lucinda. “You might want to see about forming a real town council, Mrs. Bonner, with a mayor and everything. That way you can pass local ordinances you want enforced. Right now, all Scratch and I can do is enforce the state laws.”

“That’s a good idea,” Lucinda agreed. “I’ll talk to everyone. In the meantime, enforcing the state laws will be a good start. That will cover murder and robbery, anyway.”

Bo nodded. “Yes, ma’am, it will.”

He and Scratch left with Biscuits O’Brien and Abner Malden. The storekeeper escorted them up the street to his establishment. It felt good to be walking openly along the street again, rather than slinking through alleys. That sort of furtiveness really went against the grain for the Texans.

It was entirely possible, even likely, that some of the men they passed in the crowded street were members of the Devery family. Some of them might have even been members of the group that had attacked the Texans in the livery stable.

Bo and Scratch couldn’t worry about being recognized now. If they were going to function as deputies, they couldn’t hide.

But both of them were going to feel better once they had loaded guns on their hips again.

They reached Malden’s store and went inside. As they looked over the selection of guns the storekeeper had on display, Bo asked, “Have there ever been any deputies here in Mankiller before?”

Malden looked like he didn’t want to answer that question, but finally he said, “Well, yes. And a couple of sheriffs before Biscuits—I mean Sheriff O’Brien—too.”

“What happened to ’em?” Scratch asked. “And I got a feelin’ I ain’t gonna like the answer.”

“Some of them quit,” Malden said. “They were attacked…jumped in the night and roughed up. No one knows who was responsible for that.”

“Or at least nobody wanted to admit knowing,” Bo said.

Malden shrugged. “Around here, it amounts to the same thing.”

“How about the ones who didn’t quit?”

Again, Malden hesitated before saying, “No one really knows. Maybe they left in the middle of the night. All that’s certain is that they weren’t around anymore.”

Scratch said, “What you mean is that the Deverys’ hogs got ’em.”

“If that was the case, there wouldn’t be any proof left, would there?”

Bo said, “How do you know Scratch and I won’t wind up the same way?”

“To be honest, we don’t. But we’re hoping that you and Mr. Morton will be able to take care of yourselves better than those other men.”

“Yeah, we hope so, too,” Scratch said.

Bo looked over at O’Brien, who had sat down on a cracker barrel and appeared to have dozed off. “How did Biscuits wind up being sheriff?”

“Well, as you can imagine, after everything that had happened, no one really wanted the job,” Malden explained. “Then Pa Devery came up with the idea of giving it to Biscuits. I’m not sure why. Maybe he just thought it was funny.”

“Yeah,” Scratch said. “Hilarious.”

“Anyway, Biscuits was living pretty much hand to mouth, at that point. He was glad to get the wages, plus a place to sleep.” Malden’s mouth tightened in disapproval. “He spends most nights in one of the cells, sleeping off his latest bender.”

“Does he ever try to enforce the law?”

“Not really. Sometimes the Deverys will come and get him and take him along when they confront someone who hasn’t paid them their share of the profits. I suppose they think it gives their actions an air of legitimacy, just in case any real law ever comes in here. Of course, Biscuits just does whatever the Deverys tell him.”

Bo shook his head. “Sounds like a mighty sorry situation.”

“It is,” Malden agreed. “Why do you think we were so desperate to hire the two of you? Mankiller needs to have some real law, if it’s ever going to be a real town.”

Bo wasn’t sure that goal was even possible as long as the Deverys were around. But he and Scratch would do their best, he thought as he spun the cylinder of a Colt he had picked up.

At the very least, the next time they confronted any of the Deverys, they would be armed again.

When they left the general store a few minutes later, Bo had a new Colt just like the one he had lost to the Deverys snugged in his holster. Malden didn’t have any Remingtons like the ones Scratch carried, and he assured the silver-haired Texan that Lionel Gaines didn’t carry them, either. Since Scratch couldn’t get the sort of fancy smokepoles he preferred, he had also gotten a new gun belt and holster from Malden and carried the same model Colt that Bo had.

Each of the Texans wore a new hat similar to the ones they had lost, as well. Bo recalled that there was a rack in the sheriff’s office with rifles and shotguns in it, so they had decided to wait until they could check out those weapons before deciding if they needed any more.

Biscuits O’Brien shambled along with them like some sort of drunken bear. “Still think this is a bad idea,” he muttered. “Don’t want no trouble with nobody, though.”

“Leave the trouble to us,” Bo said. “Do you know if there are any deputy badges in your desk?”

Biscuits shook his head. “Could be. I ain’t ever looked through all the drawers.”

They reached the office and went inside. Scratch went to the rifle rack right away and began checking the weapons. He found a couple of Winchesters that appeared to be in decent shape, although they really needed cleaning because they hadn’t been used for a long time.

Meanwhile, Bo went through the desk, sitting in the chair behind it while Biscuits stretched out on a lumpy sofa under the front window. “Got boxes of .44-40s for those Winchesters,” he told Scratch as he pawed through one of the drawers. He set one of the cardboard boxes of ammunition on top of the desk and resumed his search.

One of the other drawers was crammed so full of wanted posters that Bo had trouble getting it open. He pulled out the thick wads of paper and stacked the reward notices on top of the desk as well. They were turned every which direction. As Bo straightened them, he asked the sheriff, “Don’t you ever go through these?”

“Huh?” Biscuits looked from the sofa and blinked at him in confusion. “Oh, you mean all them reward dodgers. No, they just keep sendin’ ’em to me, and I shove ’em in the drawer. As long as folks behave theirselves in Mankiller, it ain’t none o’my business what they might’a done somewheres else.”

Bo sighed. Biscuits really was a sorry excuse for a lawman.

“We’ll have to go through these later,” he told Scratch. “There’s a good chance some fugitives are in town.”

Scratch was peering down the twin barrels of a shotgun he had broken open. He snapped the weapon closed, then said, “You’re gonna take it seriously, aren’t you?”

“Take what seriously?”

“This deputyin’ job. Just like when we pinned on those badges in Whiskey Flats a while back, you think we ought to be act like real deputies.”

“We are real deputies,” Bo pointed out. “The town’s going to pay us and everything.”

“All I care about is settlin’ the score with those damned Deverys.”

Biscuits clapped his hands over his ears and moaned. “Oh, don’t talk like that!” he said. “I don’t wanna hear anything like that!”

Bo looked at his partner. “We’ve got a chance to do some real good here, not just get back at the Deverys.”

“And since when do we owe this town anything?”

“We don’t,” Bo admitted. “But the people who live here are counting on us, and that’s important. I don’t want to let them down.”

Scratch put the shotgun he’d been looking at back on the rack. “Well, I wouldn’t want to disappoint Mrs. Bonner…”

“There you go. Look at it that way.”

Scratch grinned. “All right, I will. Those Greeners look all right. You run across any shotgun shells in there?”

“Not yet.” Bo returned to his search of the desk. The next thing he found was a drawer full of empty whiskey bottles, along with one that was still half full. He looked in disapproval at Biscuits, who just ignored him. The sheriff had started to snore softly.

Under a welter of papers in another drawer, Bo found four deputy badges. He took out two of them and tossed one to Scratch, saying, “Here you go.”

Scratch caught it and pinned it on to his shirt. “You reckon the sheriff ought to swear us in?”

“Probably,” Bo said as he fastened on his own badge, “but I think we might have a hard time waking him up to do it. How about we swear each other in?”

“Fine by me. Hold up your hand.”

Bo lifted his hand.

Scratch said, “You swear to uphold the law, arrest any varmints who break it, and ventilate every Devery who gives you a good excuse to do it?”

Bo chuckled. “I swear. How about you?”

Scratch raised his hand and said, “I swear the same thing. I reckon we’re real lawmen now, Bo, or at least as close to it as this town is gonna get.”

Bo came out from behind the desk. “Maybe we’d better get started on our first patrol. Seems like it’s our duty to let the citizens of Mankiller know that there are a couple of new deputies looking out for them.”

They left Biscuits snoring on the sofa. People had seen them walking from the café to the store and from the store to the sheriff’s office, but at that time the Texans had just been a couple of strangers, and unarmed strangers at that, before visiting Abner Malden’s establishment.

Now they were armed, and not only that, they had law badges pinned to their shirts. Sure, the law badges were just cheap tin stars on which someone had done a fairly crude job of engraving the words DEPUTY SHERIFF.

It wasn’t the badges themselves, however, that were important, but what they represented. The badges were symbols of law, of progress, of civilization, and of human decency itself. It was as true on the frontier as elsewhere that some of the men who wore such badges were corrupt or incompetent or both, but that didn’t mean that what they stood for was worthless. The badges just needed the right sort of men behind them.

Bo and Scratch hadn’t gone very far down the street before they began to attract attention. They saw men staring at them and heard the increased buzz of conversation behind them. They were walking toward the river, and they hadn’t quite reached the bottom of the slope and the eastern end of Main Street when several men who were in front of them suddenly got out of the way in a hurry. That alerted the Texans that something was wrong. They stopped, hands poised near their guns just in case.

Two men appeared in the gap that opened up in the crowded street. Bo recognized them instantly: red-bearded, bare-chested Luke Devery and his ugly, lantern-jawed cousin Thad. Both Deverys came to an abrupt halt, their hands tightening on the rifles they carried.