Paper Sheriff (5 page)

Reese looked at Buddy who was holding his neckerchief to his still bleeding head. He had Callie's reddish hair and sallow skin, but he was a big-boned, feisty man who, Reese judged, probably jeered in his sleep.

“Well, you got yourself some company, Buddy. The three of you load him up. One take his feet, one grab his belt, one take his shoulders.”

“And take him where?” Buddy asked sullenly.

“Where you were going to start with, jail,” Reese said. He turned to Daley. “Get them moving, Jim. I'll be along with your horse. Where is it?”

Daley told him and now Reese shouldered through the silent bystanders. As Reese passed through he heard one man say, “That jail's turning into a boarding house for them damn Hoads.”

His companion said, “More like a home, seems to me.”

Tramping across the street, Reese mounted his horse and turned it around to pick up Daley's mount at the Best Bet tie-rail. Ty, Orville and Callie, of course, would blame him for this evening. He could almost hear them telling each other that it was a sorry day when four young fellows couldn't do a little sociable celebrating. He picked up Daley's horse and then, leading him, headed back toward the court-house. In this single day, he reflected, he had managed to alienate all the Hoads, and that included his wife.

Ty Hoad arrived at the Slash Seven in the mid-morning, reasonably sure that Reese would not be home and that Callie would. Earlier Buddy had come back to Ty's Diamond T after his night in jail and told Ty of his and his cousins' arrest. Buddy was mad and hung over and outraged as were his three cousins, even though Jim Daley and, Reese had filed no charges against them, letting them sleep off their drunk before freeing them.

By Ty's calculation, this would be a most appropriate time to deal with Callie, and when he rode up to the big house in the warm and windy morning, the place seemed deserted. Reese, he reckoned, had work to catch up on after the trial and was probably out with his crew. Ty dismounted by the house tie-rail under the cottonwoods and headed for the kitchen door. Out of his town suit and dressed in his working range clothes, he cut an absurd figure and he knew it. He was much more comfortable in congress gaiters than cowman's boots. His levis were too tight for him and the waistband cut into his soft, overhanging belly. His gloves protected white, fleshy hands that had never known a rope burn and his sand-colored Stetson was heavier and hotter than his panama. Still, a man who was a rancher had to dress like one, even down to the buttonless vest over a calico shirt.

As he tramped past the front door, angling toward the kitchen wing, he saw that Callie was doing her washing. The tub and rinse tub were outside on a bench, reasonably handy to the hot water on the inside stove. Her knuckles, muffled by clothes as she scrubbed, made such a racket on the washboard that she didn't hear him approach. He halted a little way from her and regarded her curiously. She was working in a quiet, sustained fury, like a man would work at chopping wood harmlessly to vent his anger. Her dress front and apron were wet from splashed water and her red hair was dishevelled and sparkling in the sun. She straightened up now, wiping the perspiration from her forehead with her forearm and only then saw her father watching her. “Why, Pa, how long have you been standing there?” she asked.

“Not long. It's always nice to see somebody else working.” He came up to her and gave her a gentle, sideways hug of affection. “Let's talk for a minute, Callie.”

“All right, but out here, Pa. The kitchen's a furnace.” She gestured to a pair of chairs, one a battered rocking chair, under the nearest cottonwood which they often used to escape the summer heat of the house. “You sit down. I've got some coffee on the stove.”

Ty moved over and sat down on the weathered rocker and presently Callie came out with two tin cups of coffee and joined him. Here in the shade the soft wind that rustled the leaves overhead was pleasant and cool. When Callie had seated herself on the straight chair, Ty put his cup on the ground beside his chair to let it cool and said, “That trial put everybody back a week's work. Reese too, I reckon.”

“Yes, he was up ahead of me, Pa. They're building a new line camp and corral at Lime Canyon. He'll be gone a week maybe.”

“Did you talk to him last night late?”

Callie frowned. “No. Why? What's happened?”

Ty took a cautious sip of his coffee, found the temperature right, took two swallows, then wiped the coffee off his already stained moustaches with his free hand. “Nothing much. He threw Buddy, June, Emmett and Big John into jail last night. As far as he's concerned,” he added wryly, “there's nothing too good for the Hoads.”

“What for?” Callie asked.

“Oh, they were drinking a little, making some noise. Jim Daley thought Buddy was kind of loud and tried to take him in. The boys wouldn't let him and some shooting started. Reese heard it and came over to break it up. He knocked Big John cold and then he made Buddy and the other two boys lug Big John to jail. He locked them all up overnight. Like I say, there's nothing too good for us Hoads.” He was watching Callie's face and saw it flush with anger.

“He's dead set against us, Pa. I don't know why, but he just is. I'm a good wife to him, but I don't think he even likes me.”

“Come back home if you want, Callie. You know you're always welcome.”

Callie shook her head shortly. “I can't, Pa. He did me a good turn, the best a man can do.”

“Does he give you money, Callie?” Ty asked with seeming irrelevance.

Callie shrugged. “Enough. I've never been used to much anyway. You know that.” Then the oddity of his question struck her. “Why d'you ask that, Pa?”

Ty finished off his coffee, then leaned back in his chair. “Well, Orv and me had an idea on how to make all us Hoads some money, pretty big money too. That includes you, Callie. Fact is we can't make it without your help.”

“My help?” Callie asked. “What can I do that somebody else can't do better?”

Matter of factly then Ty told her of the scheme. They would raid the herds on the National Trail, hide the beef in Copper Canyon and sell them through a cattle company of which she would be the president. Ty finished by saying, “We'll only be stealing from thieves, Callie. Them Texans stole the cattle originally from their neighbors, so stealing from them don't really mean stealing.”

Callie nodded. “But why me, Pa? Any one of you knows more about buying and selling cattle than I could learn in fifty years.”

“No, it has to be you, Callie. You have to sign all our bills of sale or the scheme won't work.”

Callie frowned. “I don't understand, Pa. Why couldn't you or Uncle Orv or even Buddy sign them?”

Ty leaned forward now with elbows on knees. “Because you're married to Reese Branham, Sheriff of Sutton County. If he catches us, he'll have to prosecute the company. That'll be you. Like a wife can't testify against her husband, a husband can't testify against his wife. Now d'you see?”

Callie was silent, staring past her father as she pondered this. Then a ghost of a smile touched her thin lips. “You mean him still being Sheriff couldn't do anything to me?”

“The law says he can't testify against you, just like you can't testify against him,” Ty repeated.

“Lordie,” Callie breathed softly.

Ty didn't push it. He waited, watching her, trying to read the fleeting emotions that crossed her face. Finally she said, “He won't like it, Pa.”

“What d'you care? He don't even like you, you said.”

“No,” Callie said softly, remembering.

“You can wind up kind of rich and independent as a hog on ice. It'll be your money, Callie, to buy your dresses to wear on your trips to the places you want to go.” He gestured toward her tubs. “You can pay for somebody even to wash for you.”

“That's not only why I'd do it, Pa,” Callie said quietly. “It's getting even that I'd like. He thinks us Hoads are trash. I wonder if he'd think a rich Hoad was trash.”

“Why, the rich are never trash, honey. Only the poor like us are trash.”

Callie nodded. “I'll do it, Pa. Now go through it all again. Slow.”

Ty did, answering all Callie's questions. Afterwards he told her that now she was willing to front for the Hoad Land & Cattle Company, he was on his way to Bale to see the lawyer, Martin Farmer, who had defended Orville. Farmer would draw up the papers of incorporation for her to sign. She would probably get them tomorrow and then Farmer would file them with the county clerk. Orville, June and Buddy would come to his house tonight and a list of the Hoad relations would be drawn up to be approached and asked to join. They would do that tomorrow while Big John and Emmett would head for the National Trail to find out what herds were moving up to it. It was easy enough to learn that because every trail boss and his hands knew whose herds had started ahead of him and whose were following him, since the herds were mostly made up at the same few Texas communities. Now he had to get on, Ty said, for there was much to do.

Callie walked him over to his horse and then returned, not to her washing, but to the battered rocking chair her father had just vacated. She wanted to think more about this since she knew instinctively this was the turning point in her married life.

Just what did she stand to lose by heading up this band? Almost nothing, she thought with a bitter candor. She was unloved, married to a stranger, childless and lonely and with no prospect of any of this ever changing to something else or for the better. She was not physically afraid of Reese because he was gentle with women, all women.

If that was all she stood to lose, what did she stand to gain? Well, money for one thing. She and Buddy had never suffered from want of enough to eat and wear. In spite of his poor-mouthing, her father had always earned a fair living back in Tennessee, trading, buying and selling stock or anything that could be moved, leaving their mother to take care of them and force their schooling and teach them pride. But still Callie had always had a hunger for physical possessions, the things she could feel and touch and look at and say to herself, “This is mine and mine alone.” It could be anything—a dress, a carved mirror, a pretty little mare or a man. She supposed this same craving for possessions was what drove most women into harlotry, but that didn't make it any the less real. She would like to be rich enough so that if she saw a woman in the street whose dress she admired, she could stop her and say, “I'll buy that”; or if she saw one of those beautiful, delicate buggies, with red-painted wheels as fragile as lace, she would like to be able to say, “It's got to be mine. I'll pay you whatever you ask.” Admittedly, Callie believed that possessions made people and that without them people weren't worth bothering much about. If one day she could appear before Reese in a rich dress with real jewels, would he love her again? She doubted that, but she knew one thing, he would place some value on her. All those preachers' admonitions to shun material things, that money is the root of all evil, that it was impossible for a rich man to get into heaven were just so much nonsense dreamed up by poor people for poor people. Why care if you couldn't get into heaven if you had heaven on earth?

Callie rose, suddenly feeling that this was a new kind of a day now. The Hoads, with herself heading them, would finally come into their own.

Exactly a week after Reese left the Slash Seven, he stood beside his foreman in the morning sunlight and both regarded the new line shack. It stood at the edge of a broad park high in the Wheeler range, whose foothills stretched down almost to the outskirts of Bale. Surrounding the big park that was already dotted with Slash Seven cattle were the towering spruce from which the line shack had been built. Its freshly peeled logs were yellow-pink in the morning sun and the ground around the new three-room building was littered with long strips of peeled bark. The new building abutted the old line shack and was three times its size. The smell of sun-warmed pitch was everywhere around it, inside and out.

“Well, there it is, even if it damn near killed us all,” Reese said.

Ames Tolliver was a dozen years older than Reese and built like a bank vault. Any shirt he bought was torn at the forearms and biceps after a day's wear, so it was his custom to saw off the shirtsleeves above the elbow to give his huge arms room to move. His face was square and homely, topped by iron-rimmed spectacles, which he had to wear if he wanted to move safely in an area as small as a room. The lenses magnified his blue eyes hugely so that he always seemed to wear a startled look. His range clothes were worn and smeared with pine pitch as were Reese's.

“It's too pretty to call a line shack, Reese. Too big, too.”

“It beats a tent,” Reese conceded. He looked down at his blistered and pitch-stained hands. The five of them had worked like fools this past week, cutting, hauling and splitting logs and shingles and digging post holes for the new corral across and down the creek. Glancing that way, Reese saw Sam Commery, the youngest crew member, heading up toward them afoot, driving a harnessed team. He was, Reese knew, heading for the loaded wagon by the old line shack that held their tools. Looking again at the house in quiet approval, Reese wondered again why he or his father years ago had not enlarged the single room shack. This high country was really Slash Seven's main house when the hot summer winds began to burn the lower range. It was cool here and the grass was plentiful and now, thanks to the new building, it would be habitable for the crew and for Callie and himself.

“We forgot something, Ames,” Reese said and he cut in front of his foreman, heading for the wagon. Standing between the wheels of its left side, he opened the big tool box and lifted out a hammer and some nails. From a keg in the wagon he lifted out a new horseshoe and then tramped over to the door of the new building. While Ames moved up to watch him, Reese nailed the shoe solidly to the lintel log above the door, wincing a little at each blow. He looked at his hands now and said, “Even that hurts.”