The Ballad of Dingus Magee

2

As a normal thing, SheriffC. L. Hoke Birdsill affected a cutaway frock coat, striped pants, and a vest with a chain from which the tiny gold star of his office was sported. He also wore a derby, usually brown.

It had not always been so. Indeed, Hoke was thirty-one, and if he allowed himself the vanity of such sartorial excesses it was because until less than one year before he had never owned much more than the shirt on his back, which smelled generally of cow. Nor had he been a sheriff then either.

But then one day he had awakened with a pain in his chest. He tried to ignore it, but when it persisted, and severely enough to keep him out of the saddle, meaning out of work as a trail hand, he visited a doctor in Santa Fe. The doctor diagnosed consumption and gave Hoke twelve months to live.

This staggered him, less because he did not particularly care to die than because he had no notion how to cope with his time until then (he had never been especially burdened with imagination). He drifted to Fort Worth, for no particular reason. He had very little cash, but he took to gambling anyway. So then an incredible run of luck was to dumfound him all the more. Within short weeks he had won eleven hundred dollars, more money than he had ever seen at one time in his life and certainly far more than he would need to get through the remaining days of it.

Perhaps he was conscious of the irony. In any case he decided he might as well live according to his new means, which was when he began buying the clothes. “At least I’ll be buried in style,” he told himself. He was a tall man with a long, leaden face who had always been rail-thin but now believed himself cadaverous, and he grew a mustache also, which came out orange (his hair was quite dark, almost black). He had sold his horse and saddle and virtually all the rest of his gear, save for a single Smith and Wesson.44-caliber revolver in its sheath that he infrequently wore. He took to strolling considerable distances about the town or sitting wordlessly on his hotel’s porch. Probably he looked thoughtful. Possibly he was. He wrote the projected date beneath his signature when he made arrangements with a bewildered local mortician and paid the man full cash in advance.

Then one morning he sat bolt upright in his bed some hours before dawn, startled by a realization that should have come to him weeks earlier, even before he had arrived in Forth Worth. His room was chilly, but when he undid his long woolen underwear, clutching at his chest, he found he was sweating. By the time he reached the stairway beyond his door, wholly without regard for sartorial propriety now, he was running, sprinting down through the darkened lobby and into the street. The nearest signboard he could recall was two blocks away, on a quiet side road, and he achieved it in no more than a minute. It was a woman who finally opened, and had she not been the wife of a doctor for forty years she might reasonably have taken Hoke Birdsill for mad. “Yes,” she said, “all right, he’s dressing, he won’t be a moment, perhaps if you would tell me what it is—”

But he had already sprung past her. The doctor was in his woolens, climbing into his trousers. “I ain’t got it,” Hoke said, or rather sobbed. Only the sight of a second turned-down bed, the woman’s, gave him pause. But if he hesitated long enough to catch his breath he made no move to back out again. “It’s a month and I ain’t,” he gasped. “I got so used to thinking about dying from it that I reckon I forgot all about having to live with it first, because—”

The doctor had paused with one leg raised, gawking. “What? Live with—?”

“Not for a month. More than that. I can’t remember when I had it last. Not when I sold my horse or won all that there money or went to the undertaker’s or—”

“What? Listen now, I still don’t… do you mean to say you’ve come barging in here at four o’clock in the morning to tell me about some pain you haven’t got, haven’t had since… what undertaker? Listen, are you all right? Do you feel—?”

The doctor had to throw him out, at the point of a Sharps Buffalo gun. Hoke did not notice until it finally materialized under his chin. So he waited until six o’clock for the next one, and then he saw three doctors in half as many hours. They all told him the same thing. If they weren’t positive about what it had been in Santa Fe (two suggested indigestion, one ventured gas) they were unanimous about what it wasn’t now. Hoke jumped a stage before noon.

He returned to Santa Fe first. He found the original doctor, in the same office. “That’s a shame,” he told the man, “you ought to have been gone.” The man did not recognize him. “Birdsill,” Hoke said. “C. L. Hoke Birdsill. I’m gonter die in ten months from the consumption.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” the doctor said, “I remember now. Well, and how are you feeling, Mr. Birdsoak?”

“Fine,” Hoke said, “and how do you feel, Doc?”

“I?” the doctor said, “oh, I’m fine, fine, never sick a day in my life.”

“You know the date?” Hoke asked him, “today’s date?” The doctor glanced at a calendar and read it off. “Remember it,” Hoke said. The doctor was an unassertive soul, an Easterner, and he began to tremble the moment Hoke took hold of his shirtfront. “Keep it in mind good,” Hoke said, “because on this same day next year, one full year from today, I’m gonter come back here and shoot you square between the ears.”

“But you’ll be dead by then yourself,” the doctor protested. “Then you’ll be jest lucky” Hoke told him.

Yet the truth of the matter was that Hoke actually owed the man a debt of gratitude, a fact which dawned on him about now. He was through punching cattle, nor was it simply a matter of the clothes. During his stay in Texas he had also discovered he liked the feel of a bed.

The next coach he took was posted for California. He picked California mainly because he had no idea what was to come next in his resurrected life, and that appeared as good a place to muse on it as any. One notion that had crossed his mind was that he might open a saloon. Another was that he might serve as a peace officer somewhere, though he had no idea how one went about this last. He had some eight hundred dollars left.

But he was not to achieve the coast, and only in part because old habit had made him too frugal to pay for more than piecemeal passage. It was at a meal stop some hours shy of a place called Yerkey’s Hole, which marked the limit of his current ticket, that nemesis entered Hoke Birdsill’s life to alter it for eternity.

Hoke was the only passenger on the run, and he was eating without haste since the horses were likewise to be fed. So he was still at the table when the gelding cantered up outside the cantina and the youth dismounted. Hoke recognized the fringed red-and-yellow Mexican vest at once. “Why, howdy there, Dingus,” he called.

“Well, will you look at Hoke Birdsill in the dude’s duds. You come into some riches now, did you?”

“A middling piece of luck,” Hoke allowed as the boy joined him. Hoke knew him only slightly, from random saloons. He thought him a pleasant lad. “Jest passing by, are you?”

Dingus gestured vaguely with a hand that Hoke now saw to be bandaged, or rather it was the wrist. “Thought I’d mosey over west fer some sporting life, maybe. Like as not try some stealing here and there too, I reckon.”

“I heard tell you’d gone bad,” Hoke said. “What do you want to perpetrate things that ain’t lawful for, now?”

Dingus removed his sombrero, fanning air across his merry face. “Hot, ain’t she?” he said. “Tell you the truth, Hoke, I don’t rightly approve on it much neither, but a feller’s got to live, and that’s the all of it.” He indicated the damaged wrist. “Sort of trying, too, what with lawmen taking pot shots at you like they do.”

“Honest Injun?” Hoke’s own forty-four had never served to enter contest with more than an occasional rattlesnake.

“Weren’t nothing, really,” Dingus said.

But abruptly Hoke grew uncomfortable. “That sure is a handsome-looking derby hat,” the lad was adding. “Always did want to git me one of those, and that’s a fact. Let’s try her, eh Hoke?”

“I reckon not,” Hoke said hastily. “I shed dandruff pretty bad.”

“Let me jest inspect how she’s manufactured then. I won’t put her on.”

“I reckon not,” Hoke said again.

“Well, now. And I always pegged you fer a accomodating sort of feller, too.”

“A man’s clothes is his castle, is all,” Hoke said, abandoning his meal. He called the proprietor. Deliberately, he withdrew a billfold in which he carried some seven paper dollars, allowing Dingus full scrutiny as he settled his accounting.

“Don’t look like much remaining of that there luck,” Dingus speculated.

Still distressed, Hoke said, “I were ill a spell in Fort Worth. I had to go to four doctors in one morning, it got so bad.” He arose all too casually and strolled toward the stage.

“Ain’t gonter climb back aboard without a pee, are you?” Dingus inquired, idly walking with him. “Gets right shaggy in a feller’s crotch, he sweats in a dusty coach all morning. Nice to air her out, like, even if she’s only got a little trickling to do.”

“I reckon you got a point,” Hoke admitted. They accompanied each other to a rear wall, reaching to unbutton in tandem.

“Jest keep a good strong holt there, Hoke,” Dingus suggested then.

“Huh—?”

But it was far too late. Jerking his head just enough to see a revolver in the hand he had trusted to be otherwise occupied, Hoke urinated on his boot.

“I’ll jest take a loan of that there derby hat, I reckon,” Dingus decided. “A desperado’s a desperado, but I kin leave a man his final few dollars, seeing as how you was sick.”

Terrified by the looming weapon, though heartsick over far more than Dingus knew, Hoke closed his eyes as the outlaw reached to the derby. He sobbed miserably as his eight hundred dollars fluttered from within it to the ground.

“Well, howdy do!”

“Aw now, Dingus. Aw now, Dingus—”

Dingus was already squatting. “Back off there a step like a good feller, will you, Hoke?” he requested. “You’re dribbling on some of my new twenties—”

So when he found himself stranded in Yerkey’s Hole there was no saloon to be opened — nor would there be a bed either, or not for long. But there was still the job of sheriff” to think about, urgently now and with certain expectations as it developed also, since the local man had only then struck it rich in the nearby mines and headed back east. Hoke sought out the town mayor.

“Who’re you?” the mayor said. “C. L. Hoke Birdsill,” Hoke told him. “Never heard of you,” the mayor said. “Is that important?” Hoke wanted to know. “Of course it’s important,” the mayor said. “What we do, we pick some outlaw with a real foul reputation for meanness, usually some killer’s been drove out of some other town and decides to raise a ruckus here. Safest that way. How do you think they picked that Wyatt Earp, over to Tombstone?”

“Oh,” Hoke said, ‘Svell, no harm in asking.”

“No harm ‘tall,” the mayor said. “Go get yourself a reputation, like say that feller Dingus Billy Magee, you mosey on back and we’ll make you sheriff in jig time. Right smart derby hat you got on there—”

And then it was the derby that saved him. Or rather the local madam did, once she had seen the hat.

Her name was Belle Nops. Hoke had met her on occasion through the years, although as a cowhand he had never spoken more than a dozen words to the woman, and those stricdy business. She intimidated him, as she did virtually everyone else. No one knew where she came from, although she had been something of a legend in the territory for a decade or more. She might have been forty, and she admitted to having been married once, if obscurely. She had arrived in Yerkey’s Hole with one covered wagon and two girls, both Mexicans, and had set up business in a tent near the mines. Now the tent had long since become a house of exceptional size and intricate design (evidently it had been built originally to accommodate six girls, with new rooms added haphazardly and askew as the six became twelve and fifteen and twenty; finally there were even additional stories) replete with saloon, parlors, and piano. Some of the girls were white these days also.

Not that Hoke could afford any of either classification in his present circumstances. So he was both confused and complimented when she propositioned him. “A manager?” he said. “Me? And anyways, what kind of a job is—?”

She was a bawdy, overwhelming woman built like a dray horse and homely as sin, almost as tall as Hoke himself, if with an astonishing bosom nearly as famous as her house. Hoke had been in the bordello itself perhaps three times during his first week in town, and then only to nurse a solitary glass of cheap Mexican pulque in its saloon each time, nor was he conscious that she was even aware of his presence until she appeared at his table peremptorily and without preliminaries on the third of those nights to say, “You, Birdsill, down on your luck, ain’t you? Come on—” She led him to a large room at the head of the main stairway which he expected to find an office and did, with a scarred desk in one corner and with a safe, but which was her bedroom also. Beneath a canopy of a sort Hoke had never seen except in pictures was a bed of a size he had not dreamed imaginable. He could not take his eyes from it. “What kind of manager?” he asked.

“Them duds,” she told him. “Listen, if there’s one thing on this earth a frazzle-peckered cowpoke or a dirty-bottomed miner respects, it’s somebody he instinctively thinks is better than he is. You hang around in those fancy pants and you won’t even have to tote a gun half the time.”

“Gun?” Hoke said. “Oh. What you mean, you want somebody to hold the drunks in line?”

“And to count the take and keep the bartenders from robbing me blind and to bash the girls around too, maybe, when they get to feeling skittish. It’s got too big; I can’t watch it all by myself. All you’d have to do, you’d be here nights. I’ll give you sixty a month, room and meals too, if you want that—”

“So I get to be a law officer, all right,” Hoke thought, “excepting it’s only in a whorehouse.” Aloud he said, “What I’m supposed to be, it’s a Colt-carrying pimp—”

“And what you mean is, you’re afraid the boys will call you that. All right, we won’t let anybody know you’re working for me at all then. I’ll make you sheriff of the whole ragged-assed town. Hell’s bells, I own nine-tenths of the sleazy place anyway. The official sheriff’s job pays forty—”

“But I thought a sheriff had to be—”

“What?”

“Never mind.” Hoke was only half-listening anyway. He kept glancing toward that bed.

“That forty, and twenty more from me,” Belle went on. “All right, it’s only money — leave it at the original sixty from the house. That’s a hundred altogether and you can live in the back room of the jail, and if you spend your nights here it’ll look legitimate because we get all the action anyway—” She was standing. Hoke arose also, holding his derby. “So it’s all set. I’ll talk to the mayor tomorrow. We—”

“Lissen,” Hoke said then. “That bed. Could I—?”

“Bed? Well naturally it’s a bed. What else did you think it would be, a—”

“No. I meant some night. Or some afternoon when you’re not here. Kin I jest try it out once, to see what it—”

“Some afternoon what? When I’m not where?” Belle Nops was scowling at him. “What are you talking about? Or rather what do you think I’m talking about? Come on now, and get shed of them duds. If they’re too fancy to throw over a chair you can use the closet there. It’s—”

“What?” Hoke said. “Use the—”

Belle Nops had already bent to disengage her skirts. “First man in the territory in half a year who looks like he’s had a bath since the war ended. Well, come on, come on, you figure on doing it from where you’re standing, maybe?”

“Oh,” Hoke said. “Oh. No. I were jest—” He set down the derby. “So that’s how a feller gets to be sheriff,” he said, watching her emerge.

So if he had lost his eight hundred dollars he at least had the job he wanted now, not to mention use of that remarkable bed, among other unanticipated developments. The jail itself contained three cells and an office, and as it turned out he enjoyed this aspect of his work too. Days, he spent most of his time contemplating the warrants and the reward circulars that crossed his desk, including several for Dingus Billy Magee who it developed was worth some three thousand dollars, if not yet quite important enough to be wanted both dead and/or alive. At times Hoke apprehended an occasional drunk. “But don’t let it get your johnny up,” Belle Nops told him. “Anything that smells like it might start to involve gun-shooting, you send a telegram to the federal marshal.”

“I aim to,” Hoke said.

Probably he did, since he was satisfied with the arrangement precisely as it stood, and with Belle Nops herself for that matter, even if she did continue to intimidate him. Her attitude toward him was hardly less brusque, nor would Hoke ever know when to expect a demand for his more personal services. Some nights he would find her staring at him from across a room almost dubiously, or certainly with nothing like interest in her expression, let alone heat, but then a nod, a gesture, even a ticlike curl of the mouth would indicate that he was wanted; or again he might feel a tap on his shoulder at a poker or monte table and glance up to see her already marching off, not looking back as she informed him curdy, “Business matter in the office, Sheriff.” Their actual conjunction would be equally grim also, still with no more than a nod of greeting at his appearance, although this would change at once; Hoke would begin to hear immediately the slow inexorable steady mouthing of the curses, the mounting vituperation and blasphemy which startled even him, ex-cowhand, in tones flat and vicious yet somehow finally perversely impassioned too, finally lost among the enormous calving sounds and the heaving breath, the culmination. Then before he himself could recover or think to remember what she had been calling him she would be dressed and gone again, once more indifferent and contemptuous and sour. It was a little like wrestling a bear, and to no decision. Thereafter Hoke would shrug and usually remain in the bed for a time before wandering off to wait bleakly for his next unforseeable summons. At other times he would go three or even four days without so much as a word or sign from her at all, often with no indication as they passed one another in the parlors or corridors that she even knew him by sight. Hoke was also somewhat chagrined by the second door in her room, which opened onto a narrow outside stairway at the rear of the house, although he had never actually seen anyone make use of it. “But it seems a feller ought to know he’s got it exclusive for a spell, especially since she don’t appear to admire it none,” he told himself.

Yet at moments like these he could not truly have said if it were jealousy he felt or whether he simply missed the bed itself. So then one night he lost bed and Belle both.

Then again by virtue of the same fateful occurrence he was to find himself no longer merely an anonymous territorial sheriff but a man of parts and of fame, and with a newspaper cutting to prove it that he would carry in his billfold for years:

Hanging of Desperado

Dingus Billy Magee, that notorious desperado who has been terrorizing folks throughout the New Mex. Territory, has been sentenced to hang, and good riddance say God-fearing people. As has been stated by reliable persons, said Magee was captured after a deadly gun battle in the Territory by a stalwart law officer, Mr. C. L. Hoke Birdbottom, and more power to the likes of him. It needed a brave man indeed to face up to that cowardly and murderous outlaw and Sheriff Birdbottom was just that man. He deserves his various reward money and then some.

It happened after Hoke had worn the star about eight weeks, on a quiet Wednesday (most of Belle’s trade came on weekends). Belle herself was holding court in one of the smaller parlors, dealing faro for Texas cattlemen in what experience had already taught Hoke would be an all-night session. He had himself dealt out of his own game, climbed the stairs, stripped to his woolens, and curled self-indulgendy among the luxurious silk sheets.

He had no idea how long he had been asleep when he sensed the sagging of the mattress as it took the extra weight, and then almost instantly the two impatient arms fetched him close.

Still drowsy, yet puzzled vaguely by the coarse, familiarly tacky garment his own groping hands now touched, he muttered, “Well say, now, what kind of night duds you took to wearing there, Belle?”

“Great gawd almighty!” said a voice that was decidedly not his employer’s. Nor was it even a woman’s. “Hoke Bird-sill? Is that Hoke? Well, I’ll be a mule-sniffing son of a—”

They got to their guns simultaneously, vaulting to opposite sides of the sprawling, improbable field.

“What the thunderation?”

“Why, howdy do, Hoke!”

Hoke ducked, trembling. He could see the gleam of the revolver facing him. He presumed Dingus could see his own equally well.

“Least you could do is wake a man up afore you crawl betwixt his blankets, durn it,” Hoke protested.

“Tell the truth, I weren’t rightly expecting you in there—”

“I oughter blast you where you’re squatting—”

“Don’t reckon you could hit much in this dark, not any better’n I would.”

Hoke thought about that. “I’ll stand up and back off if you will,” he suggested.

“We could hold a truce until we git some trousers on, I reckon.”

“That’s near to what I had in mind.”

“Except I don’t know as I could rightly trust you, Hoke. You still bearing a grudge about that money from your derby hat, are you?”

“I reckon I got the privilege.”

“Sure enough. But I reckon I ain’t gonter put aside this here Colt to climb into my pants then, neither.”

So they squatted some more. “We’ll just sort of hold tight ‘til daylight then,” Hoke said.

“Or ‘til Belle comes in and heaves us both out.”

“I never took you for a beau of Belle’s, Dingus.”

“Ain’t nothing. Older women always do sort of cotton to me, seems. It’s that boyish face I got, maybe. I never figured you for one, neither.”

“Well—” Hoke paused, the seed of a solution in his mind now. “Tell you the truth, Dingus, I ain’t no beau at that. I were jest sort of borrowing the bed fer a spell, is the truth of it.”

“How’s that?”

“Jest sleeping a spell.”

“Well say, now, you mean you ain’t come into any cash money since I divested that there chapeau? You mean things has got so bad you have to take the loan of a bed in a house of ill repute that ain’t in use?”

“Things is pretty bad, all right—”

They continued to squat. Still thinking hard, Hoke said, “jobs is difficult to come by hereabouts, Dingus. You’d know that if’n you’d been around. But you ain’t been around lately, have you?”

“Been over east.”

“Well, jobs is mighty scarce. Matter of fact, things is so bad — well, it jest come to me I’d like to throw in with you, if’n you ever take partners now and then?”

“I donno, Hoke. Sort of delicate, deciding to trust a feller bears you a grudge.”

“I could forget the grudge right soon, once we achieved us some cash money, I reckon.”

Dingus exhaled pensively, considering things. Hoke was still thinking for all he was worth. “My hand’s off’n my gun on the bed there, Dingus—”

Dingus raised himself cautiously. “Back off slow, Hoke—”

“I’m abackin’, Dingus—”

He saw the other weapon drop finally to the bed. They stood eyeing each other.

“Shucks,” Hoke said reassuringly, “I reckon you had to take my poke that time, once you was started robbing my hat.”

“Weren’t no way out’n it, jest by the ethics of the thing.”

“Sure. But meantimes, well, what’s the sense to keep up a grudge against a feller’s been my chum, even if I only knowed you here and yon? But say, I got to get this here bed tidied up before I go, or Belle is apt to skin me. You want to give me some assistance?”

“Thisaway? Durned if’n I ever tidied up a bed in my life.”

“Thataway’s pretty near. Wait’ll I come round and direct you. What you got to do, you lean over more, sort of not touching it at the same time, so’s you can leave the pillers all fluffed.”

“Feller never knows when he’s gonter learn something new, I reckon. This correct?”

“That’s right dandy there, Dingus,” Hoke told him. “And now jest sort of stay bent over a spell while I collect me your guns peaceable like, seeing as how I got my own aimed right into your miserable skull. What you jest learned, you polecat, it ain’t how to tidy up a bed, but jest what bed you should of rode clear of to start with. And you can consider yourself lucky we ain’t outside nowheres neither, or you can bet a cash dollar I’d make you pee down your woolens there too, jest to get us all the more evened up—”

But Hoke had been in the wrong bed also, or at least at the wrong time, because Belle Nops fired him the next morning. “But he’s jest that desperado,” Hoke pleaded, “he ought to be in jail anyways.”

“I don’t care if he’s Jesse James’s pet hound,” Belle told him. “What kind of sheriff do you think you are, galavanting around the countryside arresting outlaws when you were supposed to be keeping an eye on my whores!”

“Well, I weren’t even actually galavanting,” Hoke insisted, ‘we was jest—”

“Look, I don’t care if you tell me you found him in that bed of mine you spend so much time in, which as a matter of fact you likely did, since the horny little twerp has come sneaking in there and tried to assault my bloomers at least three times since he stole a key one night. Which is—”

“What?” Hoke said, “you mean he ain’t your—?”

“You’ll never knowjest what you lost, brother,” she said. “You can keep that badge if you want to; I don’t give a belch in a hot wind about that. But any juicy hocks you grab around here now, you’ll pay the going rate among the girls or else go dig yourself up a squaw somewheres.”

“But Belle,” Hoke said.

Yet it was considerably less calamitous than he thought, since there remained that reward money to compensate for the lost sinecure. First, however, a circuit judge had to be gotten hold of, to try Dingus. (The legalities themselves were remarkably informal. The judge arrived on mule-back, wearing a Remington revolver on each hip and with a Blackstone under one arm and a Bible beneath the other, and he confronted Dingus through the bars of his cell. “You Dingus Bobby Magee?” he asked. “I reckon that’s close,” Dingus allowed. “You assassinate all them critters we got warrants swore out to?” the judge asked. “How many assassinations you got?” Dingus said. “Guilty as charged,” the judge declaimed, “and I hereby sentence you to be strung up by die neck and left strung until you are dead, dead, dead.”

“And you kin go plumb to hell, hell, hell,” Dingus said.) But then the judge signed the execution order, and a deposition indicating that the said Magee was indeed in the custody of Sheriff C. L. Hoke Birdbill, Yerkey’s Hole, New Mex., and once the latter had been posted to Santa Fe Hoke received his three thousand dollars. He secured it in a locked strongbox beneath a cot in the smallest unused cell, the cell locked in turn.

And he began to find his conventional sheriffdom more gratifying then also, what with the abrupt fame that had accrued to it. A San Antonio newspaper, from which he would clip the most commendatory of the several accounts of the sentencing, reposed upon his desk throughout the weeks he awaited the hangman.

“You’re gonter get it memorized,” the condemned man remarked of Hoke’s attention to the paper, though with his new affluence Hoke had taken to browsing through a St. Louis mail-order catalog with almost equal frequency. Amused, or anyway unperturbed, Dingus lay with his boots off and a sombrero shading his eyes, on the cot within his cell. This was a Thursday night, with the execution finally but two days off.

“They do word it right pretty,” Hoke acknowledged.

“But all the reference to that there deadly gun battle,” Dingus speculated from beneath the hat; “you reckon that got wrote up too, I mean previous to this recenter story about the hanging?”

“I reckon,” Hoke said, not pursuing it.

“I sure wish we could get holt of that story.”

“Excepting it wouldn’t do you much good anyways,” Hoke said, “seeing as how you wouldn’t be in a condition to read it except betwixt now and Saturday, unfortunately, being deceased thereafter.”

“I reckon that’s true enough. But I’d still like to hear tell of that deadly gun battle.”

“Well, you ain’t gonter, alas.”

Hoke sat contentedly, less interested for the moment in the subject at hand than in his boots, which he believed he might replace with something in a soft, tooled calf. Meanwhile Dingus remained silent for a time. Then he interrupted Hoke’s reverie to ask, “What you gonter do with all that reward money anyways, Hoke?”

Hoke had his old boots on the desk. “Ain’t rightly thought,” he said.

“Leastways you don’t have to bear me that grudge no more, seeing as how you got your eight hundred dollars back. Way it turns out, you’re about twenty-two hundred dollars to the good.”

“I don’t hold you no more grudge, Dingus. None a-tall. I reckon now it’s your turn to hold one on me.”

“You was jest doing your job, was all. Sheriffs a sheriff, even in bed. Sort of a unglorious way to get took though, in a feller’s underdrawers.”

“I ain’t told nobody that aspect of it, Dingus.”

“I appreciate that, Hoke.”

Again Hoke was happy to see the subject drop. What he had failed to mention was that there must indeed have been a story about the capture, since several of the newspapers had long since written in request of his participant’s version of the episode. Hoke had replied with laudable modesty in each case, if with a certain cloudiness of detail.

Meanwhile Dingus had arisen, stretching. He stood rubbing his neck with his left hand.

That reminded Hoke of something. “Say now, how come you ain’t got no scar on your wrist there, from where you was all bandaged that time you robbed me?”

For a moment Dingus considered the wrist vacantly. Then he gestured in dismissal. “Oh, that — that weren’t but a slight puncture, was all. I always did heal pretty quick anyways.”

“You dint actually have it out with some peace officer, truly now? What I mean, not no authentic face-on gun shooting?”

“Weren’t nothing,” Dingus reiterated. “Couple fellers over to Tombstone, got a little rambunctious in a saloon one night and tried to draw down on me. Feller name of Earp, I believe it were, and one name of Holliday. Should of kilt ‘em both, most probably, but I were in a sort of playful mood, so I jest poked ‘em around with the butt end of a pistol, and then I—”

Hoke’s jaw had fallen. Wyatt Earp? And Doc Holliday?

Dingus shrugged. “Same fellers, doubtless. I don’t generally give such incidents too much notice, seeing as how they get to happening all the time. You know how it is, them little chaps trying to cut in on a bigger chap’s reputation—”

Dingus actually yawned then, while Hoke continued to stare. “Sure never thought they’d swing me at only a tender nineteen and a quarter years,” the youth went on.

“Happens that way, ‘times,” Hoke ventured, still impressed.

“Well, I had me some fun,” Dingus decided.

“I reckon you done, all right.”

“Seems a shame, though, jest when I were going right good. Year or so more, I could have got as notorious as the best, say like Billy the Kid hisself, maybe.”

“Well, the Kid were jest luckier’n you, insofar as he got to murder more folks. But you’re pretty notorious anyways.”

“I’d still like to read me the story about that deadly gun battle,” Dingus sighed. “Sort of a shame for you too, Hoke, when you stop to think.”

“How you calculate?”

“Not getting but only three thousand dollars. You ought to have waited a spell to capture me. Dint they get ten thousand when they shot down the Kid, up to Fort Sumner?”

“Well, I reckon Pat Garrett’s a luckier peace officer’n me, same as the Kid were a luckier outlaw’n you,” Hoke judged. “But what’s done is done, like they say.”

“Don’t rightly have to be, I reckon.”

“How’s that, now?”

“It jest come to me out’n the blue, Hoke, standing right here in my stocking feet. Be right interesting if’n I escaped from this here jail of yours. A couple months and I reckon there’d be all sorts of new warrants on me, seeing as how I don’t believe I’d change my rascal’s ways none. You capture me again, say in a year, and doubtless you could collect a whole ten thousand fer your strongbox that time.”

Hoke Birdsill was gazing at him narrowly. “Say that again?”

Dingus cocked the sombrero back on his fair head. “All I’m informing you, Hoke, is that right now you got yourself a holt of three thousand dollars, ain’t you? Ain’t no way they can take it back, is there?”

This time Hoke did not reply. He had swung around in his chair to squint at a tacked-up reward poster.

“Reward for the capture of ain’t that what it says?” Dingus asked. “Don’t say nothing about you need to get me hanged in addition, does it?”

Hoke Birdsill stood up, nibbling his mustache.

“Ain’t no rule says it can’t go to more’n ten thousand, neither,” Dingus added.

“But supposing it’s some other sheriff shoots you? Like say Mister Earp again, or—”

Dingus shrugged. “Feller needs to take some risk to get ahead in this world, I reckon. But you know for a fact I have a fondness for Yerkey’s Hole, especially with the attraction of Belle’s place to lure a man. On top of which, like you jest said without even thinking on it — now that I been sentenced, why, all you’d need next time, you’d murder me on sight.”

Hoke Birdsill scowled and scowled, watching Dingus watch him.

“How would be a good way to do it?”

“I could slug you, I reckon. I’d be gentle, nacherly, but there oughter be a lump.”

“I got a lump already, where I happened to bang my head in a outhouse this morning. Ain’t nobody saw that one.”

“Well, there you be, that’s half the job done then. It’s like a omen. So now all you got to do is lay low a spell, until I can appropriate a horse, and then you call out a posse and go west whilst I go east.”

Hoke folded his arms, gazing at the cell door.

“I ain’t never done nothing dishonest before,” he decided next. “I ain’t got the habit.”

“You ain’t never had ten thousand dollars to grab holt of, neither.”

“How kin I be sure it’ll get to ten thousand?”

“Supposing I took the notion to shoot up a whole town, one Wednesday? Or to rob me a train?”

“Rob one. Give me your sworn word of honor you’ll rob a train.”

“Got to travel a good ways north to do that, Hoke.”

“Well, you jest come on back fast afterwards. I’m taking chances anyways.”

“Hoke, you got my oath. And trains’ll get a feller up to ten thousand faster’n anything.”

Hoke was convinced. Hastily, with a furtive glance toward the street, he unlocked the cell. “There’s always horses hitched down near Belle’s,” he whispered.

“Jest as soon’s I climb into my boots,” Dingus said. “I’ll use the rear exit, I reckon.”

Hoke watched him depart, then almost snatched up a shotgun to halt him again even as the rear door closed. “Earp?” he repeated. Hoke swallowed. Then he shook his head, since it was too late now anyway. “But I’ll sure jest have to find him betwixt the bedsheets the next time round again also,” he decided. He paced nervously for some minutes, tasting the wax from his mustache now. Then, carefully, he set his derby upside down upon a moderately clean spot on the floor, wrinkled his shirt with regret, and smudged gun oil across his cheek and ran, stumbling, toward the nearest saloon. “Dingus!” he shouted, bursting through the batwing doors. “He clobbered me good, boys, he made his escape!”

But whether it was his own outcry or the sound of the gunfire which brought the few drinkers up short he did not know. There were exactly four shots, with a pause between the first two and the last, in the direction from which he himself had just come. Hoke whirled in confusion.

“What’s he shootin’ at if’n he already done got loose?” someone asked.

And then Hoke knew. Clutching at the key ring in his vest with one hand, he clapped the other against his forehead, and the moan came from deep in his throat.

He was the first one back to the jail, but when he raced past the smashed door of the smallest cell and saw the fractured lock on his private strongbox beneath the cot, he did not even have to look into the box itself. He sank to his knees, burying his face into the mattress. “I might have knowed,” he told himself, sobbing, “I might have knowed. And now probably he don’t intend to go rob that train, neither!”

That was when the outrage had begun for C. L. Hoke Birdsill. It ran deep now, refulgent and intractable, as he stood in the alley behind the Yerkey’s Hole livery stable six months later clutching the Smith and Wesson he had just emptied at the sight of that long-familiar and hateful Mexican vest, confronted by the sprawled form of a man who was not Dingus Billy Magee and not anyone else he had ever seen and whose name, he would learn, was Turkey Doolan. Hoke commenced to curse unremittingly.

There was gathering chaos about him now, however, and there were incalculably more people than the lone stable-hand with whom he had been talking when the shooting began, when he had heard the stablehand shout and had glanced up to see the fool he had taken for Dingus riding brazenly past the livery’s rear doorway and had flung himself behind the nearest animal, snatching at his revolver— townspeople collecting, come in their cautious good time now that the firing was patently done with. Hoke cursed them also.

“Who is it? Who’d Birdbrain go shooting this time?”

“Is it Dingus? Did he finally nail the critter?”

“Fooled him again, I reckon”

“Say, I know that feller — jest a Missouri drifter, name of Rooster something— “

“Hoke done shot up some chickens, you say?”

Hoke gazed at Turkey, who had been lying beatifically for several moments now, since muttering some words about his comradeship with Dingus Billy Magee. And then abruptly the youth began to scream.

“It’s stopped!” he cried. “The dripping’s stopped! All my blood is dripped out! I’m kilt, I’m kilt!”

People were kneeling near him. “Easy now, easy,” someone told him. “Hold him down, somebody!”

“Well, he sure ain’t dead, anyways,” Hoke said.

“I am dead!” Turkey screamed. “My blood is all dripped out! I could hear it dripping and now I can’t!”

“Does look like he’s lost a intolerable amount at that,” a cowboy remarked. Hoke could see it now also. “Lying in a whole flood of it there—”

“I told you!” Turkey wailed. “And now there ain’t no more to drip!”

“Can’t be from this here wound in his side. This ain’t nothing but a harmless crease.”

“I doubt if’n I hit more than the once,” Hoke said. “Durned forty-fours jest ain’t no account fer accuracy.”

“You think maybe he jest done peed in his pants with the fright of it?”

“I dint never pee!” Turkey cried. “I’m murdered!”

“Oh, thunderation, ain’t blood. Ain’t pee neither.” A man had lifted something from beneath him. “Ain’t nothing but his canteen been dripping here. It got punctured.”

Turkey fainted on the spot.

“Somebody lug him down to the doc’s,” Hoke said. He did not assist them. He had lost his derby while shooting and he went to retrieve it now. Then, still outraged, he was striding toward the main street when someone called to him.

“Hey, Sheriff, look here—”

“I got work to do,” Hoke snarled. “If that diaper-bottomed damn desperado thinks he can keep getting away with riding in here and making me shoot up innocent folks he’s got another think coming. And I don’t give a whorehouse hoot if’n he does face up to Wyatt Earp and the rest of them. I got to git back to my office and ponder what sort of mischief he’s most likely got in mind. Because this time I’m gonter—”

“You better look at this here blood first, I reckon—”

“I already seen it. I been hearing enough about it too. All that commotion over a little bullet hole in the belly—”

“Not this. This ain’t his’n.”

“This ain’t whose’n?”

“Here, where the second horse skittered afore it run off. Bring a lamp, somebody. This is too far aside to be that Turkey feller’s.”

Hoke gazed at the stains in the dim light. He ran his tongue across his mustache, which tasted faintly of gunpowder at the moment.

“What do you think, Hoke? You think maybe one of the five bullets that didn’t hit the one you thought was Dingus and was aiming at might of hit the one you didn’t think was, and wasn’t?”

“Unless it’s horse blood,” someone else speculated.

“Ain’t horse blood neither,” Hoke said, “but either way he ain’t going far, and that’s the Lord’s truth of it.” He started off once more, then whirled anew. “And you’re all witnesses to that blood now too,” he said, “jest in case he crawls into a dung pile somewheres and dies, and somebody else goes picking up the remains and claiming them rewards. Because he’s worked hisself all the way back up to nine thousand and five hundred dollars last I were informed, even without no train, and that money’s mine!”