A Time For Hanging (16 page)

"What about Willie?" he said.

"Nothin' much.
 
She just asked me about him.
 
Asked me if it was true about the way his wife and kid died.
 
I think he cried on her shoulder now and then."

"You shoulda told me this sooner, Jack."

"I know it, Sheriff.
 
I just thought . . . I don't know what I thought.
 
When I saw she was dead, I felt so bad, and then there was the Morales boy.
 
Ever'body was yellin' that he done it, and it was all confusin'."

"You stopped 'em from killin' him," Vincent said.
 
"Why'd you do that, Jack?"

Jack looked puzzled again.
 
"What d'you mean?"

"What I said.
 
Why'd you stop 'em?"

"'Cause it was wrong.
 
He mighta done it, but there was no call for them to string him up.
 
He oughta have a trial, just like anybody.
 
You know that."

"And that's the only reason?"

"What other reason would there be?" Jack said.

Vincent didn't answer him.
 
He was wondering if Jack had stopped them because he knew Paco was innocent, knew it because maybe he'd been the one to kill the girl.
 
Suppose he'd made advances to her and she'd laughed at him, said somethin' about his face.
 
There were men who'd killed for less than that, though Jack didn't seem like the kind to do it.

"No other reason," Vincent said, getting up from behind the desk.
 
"You did the right thing, Jack.
 
I'm proud of you."

"Thanks, Sheriff," Jack said.
 
He got up too, and walked to the door of the jail with Vincent.

"I'm goin' to see about Paco," Vincent said.
 
"You stay here, but don't tell anybody where I'm gone.
 
Just say I'll be back soon."

"Right," Jack said.
 
"I got it, Sheriff."

Vincent slipped the reins off the hitch rail and swung himself up into the saddle.
 
The leather creaked as he settled himself, and he rode on out of town.

When he looked back, he could still see Jack, standing in the doorway of the jail.

#

The sun was hot on Vincent's back as he rode and he could feel the sweat soaking into his shirt.
 
It was one of the hottest days of the summer, so far, and getting hotter all the time.

He was thinking about Jack Simkins, wondering if the deputy was telling the truth, and wondering at the same time why he was doubting him.
 
Jack had never shown any inclination to lie.
 
Why would he begin now?

Of course, Vincent knew the answer to that one.
 
Anybody who would kill would certainly lie, and Jack had never killed before, either, at least as far as Vincent knew.

Vincent knew the story about Jack losing his eye and getting his face so messed up, though it wasn't told around town much any more.
 
Folks had told it in the past to explain why Jack was a little hesitant when it came to fighting.
 
Now they didn't think about that much; they just accepted Jack as being that way.

It hadn't happened in Dry Springs.
 
It had happened down close to the border somewhere, and according to the story Jack Simkins had been in a hell of a fight.

Vincent jumped in the saddle a bit as he remembered that the fight had supposedly been over a woman.
 
Jack hadn't killed anybody though.
 
He'd come close to it, and he'd nearly gotten killed himself, but he hadn't killed anybody.
 
That was Jack's version of the story, anyhow.

There had been a woman named Estrella -- "Means Star," Jack had told him one time.
 
"I don't think it was her real name, though.
 
She was sure a pretty woman, and she was workin' in a little cantina down there.
 
She talked to me mighty sweet, which a lot of women did in those days.
 
I didn't look like I do now. Anyhow, I didn't know she was talkin' to two or three other fellas the same way when I wasn't around.
 
I guess she thought they were pretty good lookin', too."

He had found out about the other men the hard way.
 
One night while he was sitting in the cantina with Estrella on his lap, the other three men had all come in.
 
Seems they'd gotten together in some other bar, drinking and talking, and discovered that they were all in love with women who had the same name.
 
It didn't take them too long to get from there to figuring out that it wasn't different women, that it was the same woman.
 
They decided to confront her and make her choose among them.

So they all came through the door, and there was Jack with the woman on his lap.
  
They had figured three men for one woman was bad enough, and they sure hadn't figured on a fourth.
 
Jack always smiled when he told that part, though it wasn't really very funny.

"All of a sudden they musta decided that they weren't mad at each other any more, but they were mad as hell at Estrella.
 
And they were damn sure mad at me."

They pulled their guns and started to blaze away.
 
Jack had the woman on his lap and couldn't get her off to get to his gun, but that problem was taken care of when one of the shots from the other men hit her in the side of the head.

"It was an accident, I think," Jack said.
 
"But it was awful bad, all the same.
 
That beautiful face, all that black hair, well, there wasn't hardly anything left of it.
 
Blood splattered all over me.
 
I woulda been sick if I hadn't been so scared."

Estrella fell sideways off his lap and he managed to get to his pistol.
 
Except for the three men with pistols, everyone else in the place was long gone, out the door, out the windows, or hiding under the bar and the tables.
 
Bullets were flying everywhere, but fortunately the men were so drunk that no one else was hit, not even by accident.
 
They broke the mirror behind the bar, and blew a lot of bottles of whiskey all to hell, and even put a couple of holes in the piano, however.

Jack winged one of the men, knocking him out of the fight, and the other two were out of bullets by then.
 
The fight should have been over, but the men were so mad about having killed the woman that they charged Jack, who got off a couple of shots and missed with both of them.

Then the two men were all over him, hitting him with everything they had, including their pistol barrels and butts.
 
It was a pistol sight ripping down his face that had put the long scar there, and it was a pistol barrel that put his eye out.

"I was doin' my best to keep 'em from killin' me," Jack said, "which they were bound and determined to do, I guess.
 
I got the ear of one of 'em in my teeth and just about got it tore off when he stuck his gun barrel in my eye."

As with the killing of the woman, the eye-gouging had apparently been an accident.
 
The man was swinging wildly, trying to do anything to free his ear, and had stuck the pistol barrel in exactly the right spot.

"That eye popped out like it was a grape, slick as you please," Jack said.
 
"Hurt like hell, too, and it hurt even worse when I rolled over and saw it with my good eye.
 
It was lyin' there on the table, lookin' back at me."

The sight had given Jack a strength he didn't know he had.
 
He had kept his teeth on the man's ear and thrown him halfway across the cantina.

"The sound of that ear rippin' off was enough to stop me," he said, "not to mention the blood.
 
You wouldn't think a ear could bleed that much.
 
I spit it on the floor and cold-cocked the other fella with my own pistol.
 
That was the end of it.
 
Lookin' at that ear on the floor and my own eye on the table was enough to make me puke, and there was Estrella, lyin' there with the whole side of her head blowed off.
 
I just wanted to get outta there."

He was a little crazy by then, he admitted.
 
"Took my eye off the table and put it in my pocket.
 
Don't know what the hell good I thought it'd do me, but I took it just the same."

He went out of the cantina, and there were men there, the sheriff of the little town and a few of the citizens he'd deputized for the occasion after someone had run to the jail with news of the gun battle that was raging down the street, but for some reason nobody tried to stop him.

"I guess they were scared to," Jack said.
 
"I musta looked like the wrath of God, covered with blood, blood runnin' down my face from where the gunsight raked me and pourin' outta my eye socket.
 
Hell, there was plenty of Estrella's blood on me, too, and prob'ly part of her head.
 
Anyhow, that bunch just split down the middle and I walked right through 'em.
 
There wasn't a one of 'em that didn't stand aside.
 
Nobody even made a move to stop me.
 
Nobody put a hand out."

Jack found his horse and rode away from there that very night, never even stopping for a doctor to see about his eye or the wound on his face.

"Had a bottle of whiskey in my saddlebags," he said.
 
"I used to drink a bit in those days, so I always had a bottle around with me somewhere, wrapped up in a saddle blanket so as not to break it."

He stopped a few miles out of town, got out the whiskey, and tied up his horse.
 
Then he lay down under a tree and poured the whiskey in his eye and on his face, after first cleaning himself up as best he could with his bandanna.

"Burn?" he said.
 
"I guess it did.
 
Not for long, though, 'cause I flat just passed out from the hurtin'.
 
Just as well.
 
I don't never want to feel anything like that again.
 
That's about as near to dyin' as I've ever been, and I don't want to get that near again for a long time.
 
I was all right by the next day, but by the time I remembered that I had my eye in my pocket it was in bad shape.
 
Didn't look anything like a eye, to tell the truth.
 
I pitched it away in a patch of cactus."

After that, Jack drifted around the border for a while, picking up the glass eye along the way, then worked his way north and wound up in Dry Springs.
 
He'd taken the deputy's job because it was something to do and because Ward Vincent had assured him there was no danger in it, despite the way the last sheriff had died.

"Nothin' ever happens here," Vincent said.
 
"Worst scrape you might get into would be some drunk cowboy tryin' to force his affections on some saloon girl that's too tired to fool with him that night.
 
And how often do you think that would happen?"

"Never, prob'ly," Jack said.

"That's right.
 
You do the job right, you'll never have to worry about gettin' shot up or losin' that other eye."

That was just fine by Jack, who admitted himself, though only to Vincent, that what had happened to him down on the border had changed his outlook on a whole lot of things.

"I don't know what it was," he said.
 
"Whether it was my eye, or bitin' that fella's ear off, or the way Estrella looked lyin' there on the floor.
 
She'd been so pretty before, so happy, tellin' me about how she was gonna leave that cantina some day with a big, good-lookin' fella like me and go off and have a house full of kids and cook and get fat.
 
Then there she was, dead and bloody and ugly, never goin' anywhere again, much less with me."

Things like that happened more often than you'd think in the bars and cantinas, and they bothered lots of people less than they bothered Jack.
 
He was the kind who took the whole episode to heart.

"Seems like I just never had the stomach for killin' after that," he said.
 
"Or even for fightin' much.
 
I can hold down the deputy job, though, if it's as easy as you say."

It was, and Jack had done a good job over the years.
 
There had never been any call for him to engage in violence, and he never had.