Ralph Compton Death Along the Cimarron (10 page)

Even as the sheriffs pistol shots whistled past them, Avery McRoy gigged his spurs to his horse's sides, drew his pistol, and shouted, “He nailed that sucker right through the heart, good as ever I've seen.”

Hearing the gunfire from his shop, the blacksmith dropped his hammer. “What the hell?” he said, and hurried out the front door in time to see the horsemen descend upon the town like a pack of ravaging wolves. Three shots thumped into the front of his shop, forcing him back inside. But not for long. Grabbing a double-barreled shotgun from against the wall, he ran outside again. This time he stood his ground long enough to fire both barrels into the oncoming flurry of men, guns, and horses.

Sherman Fentress's horse took most of the double blast of buckshot in its side. Fentress felt his left leg ripped to shreds as the horse whinnied painfully and slammed into the horse beside it, the horse Ellen Waddell was riding, being led at a full run by Cherokee Earl.

All Ellen could do was hold on to the saddle horn with all her strength. Sherman Fentress's horse tried to right itself but couldn't. With Fentress himself badly wounded and barely able to stay in his saddle, the poor horse veered away blindly, still at a run, until it hit the edge of the boardwalk and rolled up onto it. Fentress left the saddle and crashed through the front plank wall of the telegraph office, landing spread-eagle on the operator's desk, sending the telegraph machine across the room.

The telegraph clerk had heard the shooting and luckily had just pushed his chair back from his desk to go see what was happening in the street. Seeing the bloody man land on his desk in a spray of broken boards, the clerk gasped and sat frozen, his hands held chest high as if he were being robbed. Fentress groaned and lay staring at the clerk, his leg chewed to the bone by buckshot, bloody face and chest filled with splinters. “God ... I'm hurt,” he managed to say.

The sound of Fentress's voice caused the telegraph clerk to snap out of his dazed state. He sprang from his chair and ran shrieking from his office out into the roaring gunfire. Six bullets pounded into him no sooner than he'd leaped out into the street. He only had time to see the bodies of the sheriff, the deputy, the blacksmith, and two other townsmen before he crumbled to the ground and joined them in death.

Cherokee Earl had stepped down from his horse and forced Ellen Waddell to step down and stand beside him, his left arm wrapped firmly around her thin waist. Inside the town's bank, Arnold Flekner, the bank president, hurriedly locked the front door. Seeing him through the glass, Cherokee Earl chuckled and said to Jorge Sentores, “Get around there, Jorge, and take care of him.” Then Earl pressed his face to Ellen's hair, took a deep breath, and said to her, “Watch this.... He'll try running out the back door any minute now. But Jorge will smoke him.”

Ellen shuddered, filled with horror by all that had just gone on around her. Yet she stood in wide-eyed silence, unable to turn her eyes from the carnage.

Jorge raced his horse alongside the brick and wood bank building, sliding the animal to a halt just in time to catch the bank president as he ran away from the back door, a ring of keys in his hand.

“No! No! Please!” the hapless banker pleaded. “Here, take the keys!” He flung them up to Jorge, but Jorge let them fall to the ground. “The money's all yours! But please don't kill me!”

Jorge shrugged. “Okay, I won't kill you. Now you go, take off, get out of here,
pronto
!”

“Oh God, thank you! Thank you!” the poor man sobbed, turning as he moved away, his legs visibly shaking through his black trousers.

“Here comes the fun part,” Earl whispered into Ellen's hair, his breath hot against her skin.

Ellen managed to squeeze her eyes shut as Jorge extended his pistol down at the fleeing banker's head. Three shots resounded, followed by Earl's low laughter near her ringing ear. “See? Jorge was just funning with him.... I knew he'd kill him.”

Ellen felt a bitter sickness well up at the back of her throat. She fought to hold it down and did, taking a deep breath and reminding herself that the only way she could survive this lot that had been cast upon her was to refuse to let this or anything else get to her. She knew this was only the beginning. There were worse things ahead of her, and if she wanted to live through this, she had to prepare herself mentally.
You can do it! You can do it!
she repeated to herself. By sheer determination, she forced herself to block out Earl's words as his raspy voice whispered to her. She forced herself to no longer smell his hot breath or feel his smothering, hot arm around her.

“Hey! Hey! Wake up now! You're missing everything!” Earl chuckled, shaking her back and forth against him. Her eyes had dosed slightly. But now she stared silently up at the grinning, beard-stubbled face held so close to hers. “You're riding with a rough bunch, darling. It ain't going to get no better, so you might as well learn to take it.”

As he shook her, she felt the edge of a pistol butt dig into her side. It was the pistol that he'd taken from her husband and shoved down into his belt. She had a sudden urge to grab the pistol and use it on herself before he could stop her. But something kept her from doing it.
You don't deserve this,
she told herself.
You're not the one who should die.
She put the notion of grabbing the pistol out of her mind for now and said in a meek voice, “I'll be all right.” Then, biting her tongue to keep from shouting it aloud, she said to herself as she imagined her hand closing around the pistol butt the first chance she had when he wasn't looking,
I'll take anything a worthless pig like you can dish out.

For more than two hours Cherokee Earl's men pillaged and terrorized the helpless town. With a bullet through his right shoulder and another through his left hip, Sheriff Oscar Matheson could do no more than get out of the gunmen's way and stay out of their sight. Avery McRoy and Dirty Joe forced the town doctor, Latimar Callaway, to clean and dress Sherman Fentress's leg wound and the many cuts, scraps, and broken ribs Fentress had received when he'd blasted headlong through the front wall of the telegraph office. Once the doctor had finished, he left Fentress lying on the billiard table and nursing a bottle of red rye in the New Royal Saloon. Making sure no one was watching, the old doctor hurried from the saloon to the livery barn, where he'd left Sheriff Matheson resting on a pile of fresh straw.

“Who goes there?” Sheriff Matheson asked, hearing the barn door creak open as a sliver of sunlight striped across the dirt floor.

Dr. Callaway whispered as he closed the door and heard the sound of a pistol cock in the grainy darkness, “It's me, Oscar, dang it! Don't cock that hammer at me. The shape you're in, that thing could go off. Then who'd be left here to look after you?”

“Sorry, Doc,” Sheriff Matheson said in a weak voice. Lying with his back propped against a stall post, he let the cocked pistol drop across his lap. The doctor stepped into the stall and frowned, seeing the pistol in the faint striped sunlight through the cracks in the barn wall. “Give me that,” Dr. Callaway said, stooping and taking the gun from Matheson's hand. He let the hammer down and shoved the pistol into the holster lying by Matheson's side. “Confounded guns!” he growled. “They're the cause of all the trouble in this world.”

“Don't start on guns, Doc,” Sheriff Matheson said in a voice labored with pain. “If I hadn't had this with me a while ago, I reckon I'd be dead right now.”

“I suppose,” the doctor grumbled, already opening the dressing on the sheriff's upper right chest. “Of course, if those jackasses didn't have guns, they couldn't have shot you in the first place. That's how a more civilized man would reason with it.”

“I'm all for civilization, Doc,” Matheson said, offering a tired, painful smile. He nodded toward the street beyond the dark, quiet shelter of the barn. Distant laughter rose above the sound of breaking glass. “How bad is it out there?” Two pistol shots roared from the direction of the saloon.

“It's bad enough,” the doctor said, shaking his head as he examined the sheriffs wounds. “The blacksmith buckshot one of them, sending him sailing. The ringleader laid up at the Crown Hotel with some woman under his arm before the smoke cleared. Poor Gerald's dead, so's our telegraph clerk ... our banker, the blacksmith too. We didn't have many folks here to begin with. This will just about do us in.”

“The Crown Hotel, huh?” said Matheson.

“I saw him go there,” the doctor replied. “Can't say the woman looked real happy. They might've just had a lovers' spat or something.”

Thinking about it for a moment, Sheriff Matheson said, “I sure did let this town down, didn't I?”

“Hush, Sheriff,” said the doctor, “you know better than that. You did the best you could. Nobody will ever fault you for what's happened here.”

“I fault myself,” said Matheson.

“Then I reckon that's your own stubborn lawman's prerogative,” said the doctor, looking closely at the wound before closing the sheriffs shirt over the bloodstained bandage, “so I won't waste my breath arguing with you. I won't change this dressing until it clots up some more.” He turned his attention to the dressing beneath the sheriffs split trouser leg. “Lucky this one didn't hit the bone. A feller your age gets a shattered hip bone, he's ready for the pasture, if he can even walk out to it.”

“Yeah, a feller
my age...”
Matheson let his words trail in contemplation.

“No offense, Sheriff,” said Doc Callaway. “But like myself, you've grown long in the tooth.”

“I reckon I have, Doc.” A silence passed as the doctor spread the split on the sheriffs trouser leg, pulled back the comer of the bloody bandage, and looked at the wound. Sheriff Matheson let out a long breath. “I was getting ready to retire, hand in my badge, you know.”

The doctor turned his eyes upward, looking at the sheriff above his spectacle rims. “I had no idea.”

“Well, it's true,” said Matheson. “I've got a daughter I ain't seen since she was nine ... when her ma up and left me in Abilene. She's married to a rancher out in California. They've got two freckle-faced kids. She wrote me, said, ‘Pa, come on out, meet your grandchildren.' ” He nodded and gazed off across the darkened barn. “That's where I was retiring to.”

“Well ... you still can, can't you?” the old doctor inquired, closing the bandage, then the split trousers.

Sheriff Matheson continued staring off as he spoke. “She said they've got a room off to the side of the house where I could stay—close the door and be left alone days I didn't want to talk to nobody.” He grinned. “I reckon folks with grandchildren never get lonesome for talk or for getting their stories listened to.”

“I reckon not,” said the doctor. “You could go there, say, a week from now, maybe two. Lay low for now. Let this bunch of trash clear out of here. Give these wounds time to heal, and then head for California. Nothing's stopping you.”

“I know it,” said Matheson: His fingertips brushed the tin star on his chest. “My daughter said you can ride less than three miles from her front door and stand on a cliff that looks out over the ocean. Can you imagine that, Doctor?”

“Sounds real fine, Sheriff,” said Dr. Callaway. “I envy you.”

Another silence passed, and the doctor saw the trace of a tear in the sheriff's tired, distant eyes. “Well, hell, Sheriff,” he said with resolve. “I suppose you'll want me to bring you a shotgun?”

“Yep. The biggest 10-gauge double-barrel you can find, Doc,” said Sheriff Matheson. “I'd hate going out with whimper instead of a bang.”

“But can you get on your feet and walk by yourself?” the doctor inquired.

“I'll walk on my own when the time comes. I might need you to help me to my feet.” The sheriff managed a thin, tight smile. “I reckon you'll do that much for the only man in town who ever kept his bill paid.”

Dr. Callaway returned the thin smile. “Well, I can see you're feeling much better.” He patted a hand on the sheriffs good shoulder as he closed his black bag and stood up. “I want you to know I'm not the kind of man who can shoot a person, Sheriff, no matter how justifiable the situation.”

“I understand, Doc,” said Matheson. “I'd never ask you to. Just get me a shotgun and get me on my feet. Wearing this badge has always meant I'd be the one to take the bullet ... or give it, however way the chips fall.”

The old doctor nodded as he backed away toward the door. “I'll be back as quick as I can.”

Sheriff Matheson watched the door open a crack then dose. Outside, Dr. Callaway slipped unnoticed along the backs of the buildings toward the New Royal Saloon, where he knew the owner kept a spare loaded shotgun stuck beneath a whiskey pallet in the stockroom. On his way to the back door of the saloon, the doctor saw the first steam of smoke rise atop the buildings from the direction of the telegraph office. “Sonsabitches,” he whispered to himself, hearing hoots of drunken laughter from the street.

Finding the rear door to the saloon unlocked, the old doctor slipped inside and held his breath as he passed the open stockroom door and saw Sherman Fentress lying atop the billiard table, drunk and waving a cocked pistol back and forth aimlessly. Dr. Callaway kept an eye on the wounded gunman as he slipped over to a darkened corner where a wooden pallet lay supporting a half dozen whiskey crates. Before his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, the doctor reached a hand out to the crates. But instead of feeling the rough wood, he felt the familiar round hardness of a knee bone and jerked his hand back, startled, as a deep voice said, “Doc, what're you looking for, slipping around back here?”