The Loner: Crossfire (20 page)
Read The Loner: Crossfire Online
Authors: J.A. Johnstone
Chapter Two
So there I was, still sheriff until they could get another. That sure was a mess. I’d just as soon have pinned my badge on Lawyer Stokes and let him do the rounds every night, making sure Doubtful was locked up tight.
I didn’t quite know how to spend my last days as sheriff, but I’d think of something. That whole business gave me a good excuse to visit the new opera house. That’s what they were calling the place, but it looked like a theater to me. It had been going up pretty fast, three or four months, with a swarm of carpenters banging it together.
The front of the place was pretty fancy, with fieldstone facing the street, but the rest was just another frame structure. The stage was pretty small, but it’d do in a little town like Doubtful. They’d gotten a wine-red velvet curtain hung up, and the carpenters were bolting down a mess of seats that came in on the freight wagons. I’d never been inside a theater before, so I was taking a real gander at the whole outfit. Now, take the way the floor rose so that people sitting in the back were higher than people in front, and everyone could see real fine. That sure was a marvel.
Sure enough, there was Cyrus Ralston overseeing the whole deal, wandering around in a black pinstripe suit. I’d never seen one before, and it sort of reminded me of a barber pole.
“Ah, it’s you, Sheriff,” Ralston said.
“Just poking around,” I said. “This place is as foreign to me as California.”
“Well, glad to have you. We’re close now. I’ve booked the first show for next week.”
“Going to be an opera, is it?”
“Opera? An opera? Oh, no, not at all. It’s a variety show. This is an opera house but that’s a figure of speech.”
“I’ve never seen a show, opera or other,” I said. “What’s the deal?”
“Lots of different shows around. Some come with music. Singers like Jenny Lind. Or Lotta Crabtree. Or dancers like Lola Montez.”
“I never heard of any of them.”
“Actresses, dancers, some of them quite, ah, bold.”
“I’d sure come and look,” I said.
“We’ll have some fine entertainers coming, Sheriff. They’re on the circuit.”
“What’s that?”
“Troupes go from one town to another, more or less prearranged by booking companies. That way they’ve got work ahead, and know where they’re going.”
“They’ll start rolling in, will they?”
“I’m working on it. Nothing’s easy, Sheriff. You’ve got to persuade the booking companies that they can make some money coming here.”
“Mess of fellers roll in and put on a show, is that it?”
“Gals, too, Sheriff.”
“Where do they stay?”
“Well, that’s a question. Some companies got their own little travel wagons with bunks. Most just book rooms in the town.”
“We hardly got any rooms here in Doubtful.”
“Yes, I’m working on that. It’s hard to book a show here because of it. I’ve told Belle to put a wing on her boardinghouse.”
I talked some with this Ralston, who seemed a lot smarter than anyone else in Doubtful, maybe because he was out of some big city somewheres. And I ended up with a pretty good idea of how this deal worked. Every couple of weeks a new troupe would arrive, and the old one would pack up and go to the next town.
“It sure took some figuring out,” I said.
He smiled and nodded. He actually had a kind of cold gaze that missed nothing, and I think he was sort of humoring me when he wanted to be doing something else. But I was still wearing a badge, and people usually will palaver with me when I’m looking to know something. So I got around to the question that was on my mind.
“Mr. Ralston, the county supervisors are saying you know a lot about crime waves.”
That sure got his attention. “They say that?”
“I mean, they’re going to get in touch with you about finding a new sheriff. They’re replacing me.”
“Why should I know anything about that? Ralston’s whole demeanor had changed, and he was suddenly wary. “And why are they replacing you?”
“I got robbed couple of nights ago, and they can’t stand it. Sheriff of Doubtful getting stole from.”
“And they’re going to consult me? About your replacement?”
“That’s what they were saying when they took the axe to me.”
Ralston laughed suddenly. “Sheriff, there’s some in the world, especially out here in the sticks, who think that show people are crooks and thieves and jailbirds. And that it takes someone like me, with some experience, to keep them toeing the line. That’s hardly true. There’s a lot of good troupes that cause no trouble; once in a while an outfit rolls in that’s looking for ways to fatten their purses and aren’t very careful how they do it. I can spot ’em, and I can usually keep the lid on. Time or two, I’ve cancelled the show and sent them out of town.”
“Where was that?”
“Oh, Cheyenne, Deadwood, Miles City, Golden, Laramie... .”
“Yeah, but why did you come to Doubtful? We ain’t half as big.”
“Doubtful’s future drew me. Some of the richest ranches in the state. Some mining in the Medicine Bow range. And the town’s a stageline hub, coaches going off in three directions. And I’m not forgetting the hot springs, either. Pretty soon now you’ll have the resort trade. So, naturally, all these good folks have some coin in their pockets and no place to spend it—at least not until I open up in a few days.”
Ralston seemed almost amused, and I didn’t much care for him. He seemed always to be talking down his nose, like I was a dummy. Well, maybe he was right. I’m slow. They all say it, starting with my ma.
“Well, the politicians are going to come talk to you about a new sheriff,” I said. “Why is that?”
“You’re all the sheriff I need, Pickens. I think you and I’ll get along fine. Anyone running a show house needs an accommodating sheriff around.”
“What’s that word mean?”
“Means, you just stay relaxed, and I’ll keep Doubtful happy. You look to be just the man I want, and if they come asking, I’ll tell ’em so.”
He was sort of smiling, but with cold eyes, and I figured I’d have to think about all this.
“You’re going to tell them to stick with me?”
“I’ll insist on it. You may not be aware of it, but I looked you over pretty closely even before I started business here. Having the right man wearing the star’s important to a business like mine. I sell good times, Sheriff. There’s lawmen that just don’t like anyone having a good time in their towns, and then there’s trouble. I wouldn’t want to lay out a small fortune to build an opera house in some town where the sheriff hasn’t got a happy bone in his body and doesn’t want anyone else to be happy either.”
“Yeah, well what’s that got to do with enforcing the law?”
“Everything, Sheriff.”
“I think I get it. If some actress wants to show a little leg you don’t want me pinching her.”
“Ah, you’re mastering it just fine, Pickens.”
“There’s something you said about some of these outfits causing trouble. What kind of trouble?”
“You’re a good man, Pickens. Asking the right questions. Every once in a while, there’s a confidence man, or woman, traveling in a troupe. They usually work in saloons, getting suckers to bite on some fake deal or other. Once a pickpocket blew into town with a troupe, working the standup bars. You can do me a favor, and the town a favor, keeping an eye on the saloons when a troupe’s playing.”
“You put up with it?”
Ralston shrugged. “I don’t control the acts. I book companies. If one’s coming this way, I’ll probably book it. That’s why I’m glad to have this little talk with you. Company comes in, and you’ll know what to look for, and you can collar the troublemakers. At the same time, you’ll see that all the good citizens of Doubtful will be enjoying life at these shows, getting some belly laughs, and that’s what I want. I want to sell tickets. Lots of tickets. I want to fill up the place every night. Sell out. SRO—that’s standing room only. SRO every single night. You keep the lid on, but let the show go on too. You treat the performers and artists right, and I’ll, say, make it worth your while.”
Well, he was talking that subtle stuff I never did figure out, but it sounded a little like a bribe to me. ‘Worth my while.’ What did he mean? And ‘treating the artists right?’ What did he mean? And telling the county supervisors I’m the right man for the job, what would he do that for? I couldn’t see he was doing anything wrong or causing trouble, but it sure got me to wondering some. I decided I’d keep an eye on the place, and the man. At least until the county supervisors pitched me to the dogs.
He got busy with the workmen, and I watched a while and headed into the sunlight, where it was a lot warmer than in that cold place. Doubtful was busy. There were carriages and wagons on the road. It hadn’t rained, so the road kicked up dust, which was better than mud. It was still a raw town, but it was growing, and it seemed like I was seeing new faces every day. The ranches were some of the finest in Wyoming, and all a rancher had to do was push some skinny cows out, and pretty soon they fattened up and grew, and without much help from anyone, either.
Maybe it was a good time for an entertainment palace to come in. There were even a few ladies in Doubtful, but not many. Women were scarce around this place. Maybe a show with a few sweethearts in it would be good business. All them cowboys, living in bunkhouses with lots of other cowboys, most of them with smelly feet, would take to the opera house. That would be fine with me, long as they didn’t shoot holes in the roof or scare the performers—Ralston was calling them artists—off that little stage.
I sure had learned a lot this day. I’d never heard of variety shows, and I still didn’t know what went on, but I’d find out soon enough. It amazed me that there were regular companies wheeling around in coaches and wagons, setting up their acts in town after town, and then pulling up stakes and heading for the next one. It’d be strange folks, traveling like that, not ever putting down roots, never settling in any place. They’d be a lonely bunch, traveling like that. It all made me wonder how anyone would become a player in a variety show. That would be a hard life, too, moving in all kinds of weather, getting bogged down in mud, or stuck without shelter somewhere. But I guess some people liked it, or they wouldn’t be doing it. Maybe a few even got rich, but I sort of doubted it.
So Doubtful was about to get a theater. I’d never met an actress in my life, and I decided I’d meet a few when they rolled in. What did they do for a living? I’d knowed a few female gamblers, slick with cards, and I’d met a few ladies of the night. I had a good idea of how them women got through life. But an actress, now that was a new side of beef for me. If they sang, if they danced, if they did little scenes, they must have gotten the practice of it somewheres.
All in all, I thought, Doubtful was about to get much better.
Chapter Three
Things were pretty quiet in Doubtful for a few days. I talked with a few barkeeps to see if anyone was spending that dollar and six bits, but no one was. I kept an eye out for thick, medium-high bandits with black bandanas, but there weren’t any walking around town.
My deputies, De Graff and Burtell, they must have got wind of what was about to befall me, because they quit being my pals and stared away from me whenever we gabbed in the office. Maybe the supervisors had been asking if I done good work.
The one thing that did change was the color of Doubtful. All of a sudden there was these big red and blue and green sheets plastered to the side of buildings. I didn’t know what to call them: playbills, or broadsides, or whatever, but Ralston was promoting his opera house and the opening show any way he could, and that meant posting these advertisements from one end of the county to the other.
He’d hung a sign on his new building, calling it “The Ralston.” I guess that was better than calling it the Doubtful Opera House. And he’d had some kind of get-together in there, with all the town’s bigwigs having a mint julep on stage. I wasn’t invited, not being a bigwig.
I don’t read so good, but I made out what was on them broadsheets. There was a lot of gorgeous women in that show, all dressed up in feathers. At least that’s what the pictures looked like. That would sure draw a crowd in woman-starved Puma County, where there were about ten men for every gal, and the gals were all married. This outfit on its way to Doubtful was called the Gildersleeve Variety Company, run by Madame Magenta Gildersleeve, of the Slovakian Royal Ballet. There would be twenty beauties, along with the well-known comedian and tap dancer Horace Van Der Platz, the maestro of the top hat, cane, and white spats. And there would be a breathtaking tableau, featuring the famed women in the paintings of Rubens, displayed exactly as they appeared in his art.
I didn’t know what a tableau was, but anything that displayed famous women would be worth a gander. I wondered if my badge would let me in free. Down there in the fine print it said the company traveled in thirty-six coaches, and had been the sensation of Prague, London, Cheyenne, Deadwood, and Denver.
Well, I had to hand it to that Ralston. He was going to fill his opera house, and maybe I’d even see this bevy of beauties a second time. Puma County was shy of beauties, although if Belle, who ran the boardinghouse, would lose a little flesh, she might qualify on a night when the light wasn’t too bright.
Then one fine day I spotted Ike Berg meandering along our main drag. He was the sheriff over in Medicine Bow County, and I didn’t need any help figuring out what he was doing in Doubtful. The super visors were looking him over for my job. But there he was, dressed in his usual black suit and starched white shirt and string tie. He was the skinniest man I’d ever seen, almost skeletal, and his face was nothing but parchment over skull. He didn’t have no flesh on him, just that parchment covering bone. But he was reputed to be as good as they ever got with his Peacemaker Colt. And there he was, grinning at me as we approached each other in front of the smithy.
“I guess I know what you’re here for, Ice,” I said. No one called him Ike. He was Ice Berg to the world.
“I hear you got a crime wave,” Ice Berg said.
“Stickup man cleaned my purse,” I said.
“Town fathers aren’t happy with it. They’re embarrassed. The sheriff got himself robbed.”
Berg smiled, baring even, white teeth. I wonder whether teeth like that came with skinny.
“That was careless of you.”
“You applying for my job?”
“The town’s foremost citizens sent for me, Pickens. I’m here to oblige them.”
He smiled again, like he knew things I didn’t know.
“They offering you the job?”
“We’re dickering about pay. I’m asking eighty a month and they won’t budge from seventy-five.”
“Seventy-five! I earn forty.”
“We’re usually worth what we’re paid, Pickens.”
His bony hand was actually hovering just over his piece, which sure made me wonder. Did he think I’d shoot him? Or was he just precautionary by nature? Shooting wouldn’t be a bad idea, but my ma always said, don’t shoot anyone unless it’s a good idea.
He was standing there in the sunlight, chewing a toothpick, looking kind of smirky, and I thought that shooting him might improve the peace on Main Street. But I didn’t, even though I knew I was faster than he’d ever be.
“When’ll you hear?” I asked, since it bore on my future.
“They said there’s a mess of petty crooks heading for town, theater riffraff, and they’re going to see which of us keeps the lid on.”
“You mean you’re a lawman around here for a while?”
“Unofficially.”
“I think I got the badge, Berg. No one’s took it from me yet.”
Berg, he just smiled and chewed on that toothpick.
I had to admit Berg would be a good man to have around if things got tough again. He’d come to Medicine City when it was a lawless mining camp, infested with every sort of crook and con man and bitch that ever set out to skin miners out of their metal. They all underestimated Ice Berg because he was so skinny, almost frail-looking. But he was quick and ruthless, and he slowly and almost secretly began locking up the worst, banging heads together, and causing a few funerals.
I’d done nothing like that, so maybe that’s why I didn’t get any more than some ranch cowboy was getting, but I got to live in town. But here he was, and I knew that Reggie Thimble and Ziggie Camp were studying on him. I don’t think he weighed ninety pounds, but a lot of lawman came in that skinny package.
And here he was, my rival. I felt kind of low about that. I’d always thought Ice Berg was as good as they get, and he had always been sort of an idol of mine. Time or two, I’d found myself wishing I could be good as him. But here he was, walking the streets of my town like he already owned it. I sure had mixed feelings about that.
“You know anything about this variety show, Cotton?” he asked.
“I’ll make a deal with you. You don’t call me Cotton and I won’t call you Ice.”
“But I like my name. You don’t like yours?”
“It got hung on my by my ma and pa, and I’ve always been a little tetched since they named me that. I’ve thought maybe I should get my name changed to Fat. Like Fat Pickens.”
“Just call me Iceberg,” he said. “It makes barflies shiver.”
“I never seed a variety show in my life, but Ralston, he owns the joint, says there’s gonna be pretty girls in it. To my mind, any girl’s pretty. And there’s so few women around that I can’t tell pretty from plain.”
“I don’t like women, Iceberg said. “I can live without ’em.”
“Can’t get born without ’em,” I said.
“Pickens, ain’t that real bright,” he said. He was smirking at me.
“Guess I’ll see you around,” I said.
“Maybe not,” he replied.
He drifted off, studying our metropolis like it was dead meat.
My ritual is to patrol Doubtful at odd hours, never on a set schedule, because that’s a good way to keep the peace. So that’s what I did next. I started down Main Street, but I only got as far as the Puma County Merchant Bank before Hubert Sanders waved at me from his front stoop. He was the banker. He’d started it up two years earlier because Doubtful needed a bank, and now he operated with one teller and one bookkeeper, and his bank was thriving along with Doubtful. Hubert was a doleful man and his wife was even more doleful. They both wore wire-rimmed spectacles and their lips looked like they had just eaten pickles. They had gotten in a preacher and started up a Methodist Church, the first house of worship in Doubtful, which I suppose I should have appreciated because it meant Doubtful was getting more civilized and less wild, but somehow, whenever I looked at that whitewashed wooden church I had an itch to get onto Critter and ride until I was about five counties away.
But there was Sanders, wiggling his skinny finger at me, as if he owned the plantation. I walked up the two stone steps into the red brick bank, eyed Willis the teller and Wally the bookkeeper with the green eyeshade and sleeve garters, and headed through a gate to the corner where Sanders had his desk and where he watched the world go by from his big glass window.
“Have a seat, Sheriff. I’ve been meaning to talk to you for some while now, he said, waving me to a hard oak chair. That was how Sanders operated. The harder the chair, the faster his visitors would get through their business and retreat before their tailbone howled at them.
“Perdition is arriving in Doubtful,” he said. “Ruin. Sodom and Gomorrah. We’ll all be fleeced.”
“Ralston?” I said.
“Of course, Ralston. Do you know how these traveling companies work? They come into a small town like ours, run a few shows, clean out every spare dime the town has, and then head to the next town that is foolish enough to let them in.” He eyed me with those owlish eyes. “The Ralston is a poverty machine. It is going to ruin our good ranchers and merchants. It is going to cause wealth to flee. It will empty my bank. My depositors will withdraw their funds and squander their cash on those theater hussies and vixens and worse. I tell you, Sheriff, this is a catastrophe in the making. And it gets worse. There never was a moral person treading the boards of a theater stage. We will have a Gomorrah here. There’ll be no one attending church, and no one putting money in the collection plate. The sulfurous smell of hades will waft through Doubtful, stinking up our fair, clean, lawful city.”
I was getting the drift, so I just nodded.
“It all depends on you, Cotton Pickens. It’ll be up to you to rescue Doubtful from sin and poverty and madness. It’ll be up to you not only to enforce the law in all respects, but to enforce the moral law. If those hussies on that stage bare anything more than an ankle, arrest them for violating public decency. If they dance, pinch them. Good people don’t dance. It’s against everything that proper people stand for.”
“I just enforce the law, such as the legislature gives us,” I said. “I got a book of it that I study sometimes.”
“You’re going to do more than that, Pickens. I’ll insist on it. If you don’t do what’s required, I’ll see about finding a man who will. You are going to find the means to shut down Ralston. That fellow is the devil incarnate. I didn’t realize at first what he was up to, building that sin palace right on the main street of Doubtful. He didn’t borrow a cent from me, and I don’t know where his cash came from, but find out. It’s probably tainted money.”
He stared straight at me through those wire-rimmed spectacles. “Shut him down. You’ll find reasons enough. A dozen reasons a night. Shut down any company that comes in. Shut them down for any reason you can think of. Arrest them. Charge them. Tell them to get out of town or they’ll face worse.”
So that was where Sanders was heading.
Me, I was feeling some heat from all sides. Ralston as much as said he’d welcome an open town, so people could have some fun. The supervisors were convinced a crime wave was cranking up. And now Sanders wanted me to shut the place down before it even got feet under it and started running. And there were a few vultures out there, or at least one anyway, looking to snatch my badge from me.
It sure was getting interesting.
“As long as they’re lawful, I don’t have any way to shut ’em down,” I said.
“You’ll find a way. Or a new sheriff will.”
“Here’s what you do, sir,” I said. “You tell the supervisors what laws you want, and if they enact them, then I’ll enforce them. It’s that simple. You want some new laws, you go get the elected officials to put them on the books. Meanwhile, I’ll do my best to keep this town as peaceful as I know how.”
Sanders arose abruptly. “You are dismissed,” he said.
So I was dismissed. I headed out into the sunlight and took a good look at them green-clad mountains off to the west, poking up into a bright blue heaven.
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