West Of Dodge (Ss) (1996) (20 page)

"Led's a bad man, McLane. He's an outlaw, but the law never caught up with him but once and he served his time for that. He's a mighty fast man with a gun. Tonight I'm going to see how fast. I'm going to tell him to leave us alone or start shooting."

"No." I spoke sharply. "I'm marshal here, actor or not. Maybe I'm an old fraud, but if you start trouble you'll go to jail. You leave Led Murry to me. He has assaulted a good woman. The next jury he stands in front of will send him away for life."

Melette looked at me like he figured I'd lost my good sense, and I knew there was no sense, good or otherwise, in what I had in mind. When a man has taken a marshal's salary for ten years, he can hide the first time real trouble shows. My whole life was based on being something I wasn't, but fool that I was, I hoped I wasn't a coward, too.

"You're crazy, McLane. You can't arrest him without shooting."

"Marshal?" Hanna Ross spoke up. "He knows . . . Led Murry knows that you . . . well, that you did that fake shooting in the Buffalo Bill show. I threatened to go to you when he showed up, and he said you were a fraud!"

"He'll kill you," Jim Melette said. "You leave him to me."

Before he could say more I turned my back on him and walked to the hitch rail where I could be alone.

This was my town. Sure, I'd become marshal because I could play the part, but in the ten years that passed I'd bought my own home, had shade for my porch, and flowers around the garden fence. When I walked along the street folks spoke to me with respect, and passed the time of day.

When first I came to this town I was an old actor, a man past his prime and with nowhere to go but down. For most of my life I'd been dressing in cold, draughty dressing rooms, playing worn-out roles in fourth-rate casts, and all that lay ahead of me was poorer and poorer roles and less and less work. But then I'd come to Canyon Gap.

There had been a time when I'd played with a few of the best, and in the olio between acts I'd do card tricks, juggle eight balls or eight dinner plates, or sing a fair song. The one thing I could still do best was juggle . . . there's a place it pays a man to keep up, keeps his hands fast and his eyes sure. Even a town marshal may someday have to give up and go back to doing what he knows.

When I first came to town, the boy that took my bags to my room saw a Colt pistol in my bag ... it had fourteen notches on it. That started the story that I was a gunfighter, but it was nothing more than a prop I'd carried when I was with the Bill show.

Whatever I was in the past, I was town marshal now, and I'd been playing the role too long to relinquish it. There was an old adage in the theater that the show must go on. Undoubtedly, that adage was thought up by some leading man who didn't want the understudy to get a chance at his part, but this show had to go on, and I wasn't going to fail the people who had trusted me.

There's something about playing the same role over and over again. After awhile a man can come to believe it himself, and over most of those ten years I'd been a good marshal because I'd come to believe I was the part I was playing. Only tonight I could fool myself no longer. I was going up against a man whom I couldn't hope to bluff.

So up the steps I went and into the schoolhouse, and I crossed the room to where Led Murry was sitting with his back to the wall. And as I was crossing the room I saw one of my problems eliminated.

Jim Melette saw me coming and knew what I was going to do, and he started across the room to stop me. He had taken only two steps when Brad Nolan stepped out in front of him. "Look here, Melette, I--"

Jim Melette hit him. He hit Brad in the belly and then he hit him on the chin, and Brad Nolan went down and he didn't make any show of getting up. What Brad had been looking for all these years he'd gotten in one lump, and it knocked all the muscle out of him.

"Led." I spoke clearly. "Get on your feet. You're under arrest."

He looked at me and he started to smile, but it was a mean smile. Nothing pleasant about it.

"Am I, now? Why, Marshal? Why me?"

"You've assaulted Hanna Ross, a citizen of this town. I'll have nothing of the sort in Canyon Gap. Get on your feet and drop your gun belts!"

He just sat there, smiling. "Marshal," he said, "you're a two-bit fraud. I'm going to show this town just what a fraud you are."

It was dead still in that room. Sweat trickled down my cheeks and I felt sick and empty inside. Why in the world' hadn't I stayed outside and let well enough alone?

"After I get through with you, I'll have a talk with good old Jim and Miss Hanna. But first I'm going to kill you, Marshal."

They were watching, all of them, and they were the people of Canyon Gap, the people of my town. To them I was tall, straight, and indomitable, and though I might be an old man, I was their marshal whom they believed to have killed fourteen men. To myself I was a man who loved peace, who had never drawn a gun in anger, and who had rarely fired one, and who was suddenly called upon to face the results of the role he had created.

My audience, and an audience it was, awaited my reply. Only an instant had passed, and I knew how these things were done, for often I had played roles like this upon the stage. Only to this one there could be but one end. Nonetheless, I owed it to myself, and to the people who had kept me marshal of their town, to play the role out.

"Led Murry," I said coolly, "stand up!"

He stared at me as if he were about to laugh, but there was a sort of astonished respect on his face, too. He stood, and then he went for his gun.

Fear grabbed at my stomach and I heard the smashing sound of a shot. Led Murry took an astonished step forward and fell to the floor, then rolled over on his back. The bullet had gone through his throat and broken his spine.

Then somebody was slapping me on the back and I looked down and there was a gun in my hand. A gun with fourteen notches filed in the butt, a gun that had fired more blank rounds than live.

There was still the scene. Coolly, I dropped the pistol into my holster and turned my back on Led Murry. Inside I was quivering like jelly. True, we had been only ten feet apart, and it was also true that all my life I'd worked at juggling, sleight of hand ... I'd had fifty years of practice.

"Marshal!" It was Lizzie Porter. "You were wonderful!"

"He was a danger to the community," I choked. "I deeply regret the necessity."

Inside I was shaking, more scared than I'd ever been in my life, but I was carrying it off ... I hoped.

It was Jim Melette who forgot himself. "McLane," he protested, "you were on the stage! You're no--!"

"Ah, the stage!" Interrupting him as quickly as I could, I handed him an old quote from the show, when I had appeared onstage as a companion of Buffalo Bill. " 'I was shotgun messenger for the Butterfteld stage, scouted for George Armstrong Custer, and rode for the Pony Express!' " I squeezed his arm hard and said, "Forget it, Jim. Please. Forget it."

And then I walked out into the night and started for home, my heels hitting the ground too hard, my head bobbing like I was drunk. Right then it hit me, and I was scared, scared like I'd never been in my life. I had no memory of drawing, no memory of firing . . . what if I hadn't been lucky?

No question about it, I was getting too old for this. It was time to retire.

Of course, I could always run for mayor.

*

Home Is the Hunter
.

Not even those who knew him best had ever suspected Bill Tanneman of a single human emotion. He had never drawn a gun but to shoot, and never shot but to kill.

He had slain his first man when a mere fourteen. He had ridden a horse without permission and the owner had gone after him with a whip.

Because of his youth and the fact that the horse's owner was a notorious bully, he was released without punishment, but from that day forward Bill Tanneman was accepted only with reservations.

He quit school and went to herding cattle, and he worked hard. Not then nor at any other time was he ever accused of being lazy. Yet he was keenly sensitive to the attitudes of those around him. He became a quiet, reserved boy who accepted willingly the hardest, loneliest jobs.

His second killing was that of a rustler caught in the act. Three of his outfit, including the foreman, came upon the rustler with a calf down and tied, a heated cinch ring between two sticks.

The rustler dropped the sticks and grabbed his gun, and young Bill, just turned fifteen, shot him where he stood.

"Never seen nothin' to match it," the foreman said later. "That rustler would have got one of us sure."

A month later he killed his third man before a dozen witnesses. The man was a stranger who was beating a horse. Bill, whose kindness to animals was as widely acknowledged as his gun skill, took the club from the stranger and knocked him down. The man got to his feet, gun in hand and took the first shot. He missed. Bill Tanneman did not miss.

Despite the fact that all three killings had been accepted as self-defense, people began to avoid him. Bill devoted himself to his work, and perhaps in his kindness to animals and their obvious affection for him he found some of that emotional release he could never seem to find with humans.

When riding jobs became scarce, Tanneman took a job as a marshal of a tough cow town and held it for two years. Many times he found himself striding down a dusty street to face thieves and troublemakers of every stripe. Always he found a strange and powerful energy building in him as he went to confront his adversaries. One look at that challenging light in his eyes was enough to back most of them down. Surprisingly enough, he killed not a single man in that time, but as the town was thoroughly pacified by the end of his two years, he found himself out of a job.

At thirty years of age he was six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty compact and bone-tough pounds. He had killed eleven men, but rumor reported it at twice the number. He had little money and no future, and all he could expect was a bullet in the back and a lonely grave on Boot Hill.

Kirk Blevin was young, handsome, and had several drinks under his belt. At nineteen he was his father's pride, an easygoing young roughneck who would someday inherit the vast BB holdings in land and cattle. Given to the rough horseplay of the frontier, he saw on this day a man riding toward him who wore a hard, flat-brimmed hat.

The hard hat caught his gleeful attention and a devil of humor leaped into his eyes. His gun leaped and blasted ... a bullet hole appeared in the rim . . . and Bill Tanneman shot him out of the saddle.

Tanneman's gun held the other riders, shocked by the unexpected action. From the dust at Tanneman's feet Kirk managed a whisper. "Sorry, stranger . . . never meant . . . harm."

The words affected Tanneman oddly. With a queer pain in his eyes he offered the only explanation of his life. "Figured him for some tinhorn, gunnin' for a reputation."
, Milligan, who rode segundo for Old Man Blevin, nodded. "He was a damn fool, but you better make tracks. Seventy men ride for Blevin, an' he loved this kid like nothin' else."

That Tanneman's reason for shooting had been the best would be no help against the sorrow and the wrath of the father. Curiously, Bill Tanneman's regret was occasioned by two things: that Kirk had shown no resentment, and that he had been a much-loved son.

For behind the granite-hard face of the gunfighter was a vast gulf of yearning. He wanted a son.

To see the handsome youngster die in the road had shocked him profoundly, and he was disturbed about the situation in general--he had no wish to fight against the man whose son he had accidentally killed. He thought of trying to speak to the old man, but did not intend to die, and the idea of having to shoot his way out of such a meeting chilled him to the core. The boy had given him no choice, but further tragedy must be avoided at all costs.

He swung swiftly into the hills, and with all the cunning of a rider of the lone trails, he covered the tracks and headed deeper and deeper into the wild vastness of the Guadalupes. He carried food, water, and ample ammunition, for he never started on the trail without going prepared for a long pursuit. When a man has lived by the gun he knows his enemies will be many and ruthless. Yet this time Bill Tanneman fled with an ache in his heart. No matter how justified his shooting, he had killed an innocent if reckless young man--the one bright spot in the life of the old rancher.

For weeks he lost himself in the wilderness, traveling the loneliest trails, living off the land, and only occasionally venturing down to an isolated homestead or mining claim for a brief meal and a moment or two of company.

Finally summer became autumn, and late one afternoon Bill Tanneman made his camp by a yellow-carpeted aspen grove in the shallow valley that split the end of a long ridge. From a rock-rimmed butte that stood like a watch-tower at the end of the line of mountains, he scanned the surrounding country. Below him the slope fell away to a wide grass-covered basin several miles across. On the far side, against a low ring of hills, there was a smear of wood smoke and a glint of reflected light that indicated a town. Here and there were a few clusters of farm or ranch buildings. Noting that human habitation was comfortingly close yet reassuringly far away, he retired to his fire and the silence of the valley.