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Short Stories & Tall Tales
DISTURBING THE PEACE
Elisabeth Foley
The shooting of Donny Perryman caused no more immediate reaction in the streets of Larksburg than such things usually did. Larksburg was a hardy little frontier town whose sturdy citizenry took the occasional bit of gunplay in good stride without absolutely condoning it.
Donny was seventeen; he was an orphan; he punched cows for the Cross B outfit. He had tousled sandy hair, a cheerful lopsided grin and a merry disposition; most everyone knew and liked him. There are always exceptions, of course, and it was Donny Perryman’s ill-luck to run afoul of the exception. This person, a noted bully with an ugly temper, took offense at an innocent quip from the youngster, something inconsequential that anyone else would have forgotten offhand, and sought drastic revenge.
He came upon his victim standing in line at the back of Switzer’s wagon one Saturday evening. Switzer had come into fashion during an explosion of hostilities between a short-lived temperance union and the town’s one saloon, which had to be closed for repairs. He was a canny merchant who retailed his own blend of coffee at exorbitant prices and collected gossip for nothing from the back of an ancient chuckwagon. Whether it was the coffee or the gossip that did it possibly not even Switzer himself knew, but there was always a crowd standing about when he set up on the side of Larksburg’s main street.
It was proof that the attacker had been imbibing something else besides Switzer’s coffee that he carried out his vendetta here, in the presence of fully a dozen other cowboys. From ten paces away he let loose three shotsone grazed Donny’s head and another struck him in the lower back; the third crashed into the wagon. The boy fell forward against the counter and then slid down to the street, taking most of Switzer’s wares with him, and his would-be murderer collapsed where he was. One of the cowboys had dropped him with a bullet less than half a second after he fired his third shot. It was all over before Sheriff Leo Coughlan arrived on the scene, and that was before the tin coffee cups had stopped rolling and clanging.
Donny Perryman lay facedown in the dust behind the wagon. Coughlan and Neal Rafferty, one of the assembled cowboys, gently turned him over and ascertained that he was still alive.
“Better take him to the jail; it’s closest,” said Neal.
“All right,” said Coughlan, who was as matter-of-fact a man as any in Larksburg. “Somebody go find Doc.”
They carried the unconscious boy into the jail and laid him on the narrow bunk in one of the empty cells. There was no bed or couch in the office, since Larksburg town jail had never housed a criminal dangerous enough that Coughlan felt it necessary to stay the night. Inside of ten minutes Doc Reynolds arrived and went straight into the cell without asking any questions, for he had already received a detailed account of the incident on his way there. While Doc worked Coughlan sat in the office chair, cleaning the Colt .45 he had not had a chance to use.
Leo Coughlan had been sheriff of Larksburg for five years. A tall well-built man in his early forties, he had dark hair and a handsome but generally impassive face. He was a bachelor, and that was probably all anyone in Larksburg could have told you about him. During the five years of his service he had an impeccable record as sheriff; he handled the occasional outbreaks of violence swiftly and smoothly and kept the town in perfect trim in times of peace. He had a head for figures and the town council relayed many of the record-keeping tasks to him. No man was better respected for his ability. But he kept to himself. Though he knew every inch of the town and everyone in it, it was by sight and casual greeting only. There were few who even knew his first namemost forgot it between elections, when they read it on the unopposed ticket.
Doc Reynolds rose from his knees by the low bunk and came out of the cell into the office, his fingers already feeling in his coat pocket for a match to light his ever-present cigar. “I think he’ll pull through,” he said to Coughlan. “Head wound’s nothinghe could have got worse riding into a tree branch. The other one’s more of a questiondrilled him clean through and cracked a rib, though I don’t think there’s any internal injury. But he shouldn’t be moved for a while yet.”
Doc shook out his match and looked at his watch through the cigar smoke. “I’ll be back shortly,” he said. “Mrs. Ballard’s having a baby tonight. When Cal came and told us Donny had been shot she told me to go along and tend to him. She said she’s had five little ones already and I’m just a formality by now.”
He went out, laughing, and Coughlan got up to hang his gunbelt on the rack by the door. The street outside was empty and quiet now. He returned to his desk and had just sat down and picked up his newspaper when he heard quick footsteps approaching the doorway from outside and a man came in. He wore high riding boots and a faded coat and carried a quirt in his hand; he had a thin, dark, angular face and small sharp eyes. Coughlan recognized him with some surprise. It was Seth Bond, a rancher from just outside the town limits, a man with a reputation for bad temper and blunt speech. He walked rapidly past Coughlan without speaking to him and into the open cell, where he stopped a moment and surveyed the wounded boy who lay there. Bond’s thin face was hard as always.
“Doc thinks he’ll make it,” observed Coughlan over his folded paper.
Seth Bond made a short sound that might have been acknowledgement. He turned and came out.
“A dirty shame,” he remarked tersely, jerking his head over his shoulder toward the cell. “Glad Cal gave the skunk that did it what he deserved. Otherwise you might have had a hard time keeping the boys from lynching him before it was time to hang him.”
With which enigmatic pronouncement he stalked out.
Coughlan looked after him with just a mild bit of surprise. It was not what he would have expected from Seth Bond. But he dismissed it easily from his mind and leaned back in his chair, crossing one leg over the other and settling in to read his paper while he waited for Doc Reynolds.
*
Coughlan awoke with a start. He had slept in the office chair, a thing that had never happened before in his recollection. It was all on account of losing sleep the past two nights, he remembered, rubbing his hand over his eyes as he pieced back together the events since the Saturday night shooting. Donny’s condition had been worse than Doc Reynolds first expected, so Doc had to sit up with him in the jail that night and a part of the next, with Coughlan bearing him company most of the time. It had been touch-and-go with the injured boy for a while, but on the preceding evening Doc had finally pronounced him out of danger and gone home, whereupon Coughlan simply and unintentionally fell asleep in his chair, tired out from the combined effect of the unaccustomed wakeful hours and the drowsiness induced by Doc’s continual clouds of cigar smoke.
He was not fully awake yet when he became aware of a knocking sound, which he located as coming from a hand rapping on the open door of the jail. He jumped slightly as his sleep-blurred eyes encountered the looming apparition silhouetted against the morning sunlight pouring in through the doorway, which thankfully resolved itself into a lady wearing a large hat and carrying a covered basket on her arm. This was Aunt Penny McKie, the proprietress of an efficient boarding-house at the end of Main Street. Aunt Penny, a short, buxom middle-aged woman with an extensive pompadour of blond hair, knew every cowboy within a fifty-mile radius and was held in high regard among them for her excellent cooking and her sensible, frank counsel offered freely in matters ranging from lariats to love.
“Good morning to you, Sheriff,” she said, advancing upon him with a rustle of voluminous skirts, and Coughlan blinked himself more awake and pulled together a polite smile and nod, the universal greeting. Aunt Penny set the basket down on the desk on top of the minutes from last month’s town council meeting. “I just stopped in for a minute to see how Donny was and to leave these things. He isn’t awake yet? Then I’ll only take a little peep at him and be going.”
When she had taken it she came rustling back. “The poor lamb,” she said with a little quiver of sympathy and a touch of indignation in her voice that for some reason reminded Coughlan of Seth Bond. “You take good care of him, Sheriff. I must be getting back to deal with breakfast.” She laid her hands on the basket. “There’s some of my chicken soup in here, and a few other little things for when he’s feeling better. You can keep the basket,” she added.
“What on earth am I going to do with a basket?” wondered Coughlan to himself, irrelevantly, as Aunt Penny rustled out.
Aunt Penny’s baskets were something like a circulating library in Larksburg. Anyone who was sick or in trouble received one, with contents tailored to their particular needs, and they usually found further good use for it. Sometimes they wound up back in Aunt Penny’s kitchen containing a testament of the original recipient’s gratitude. All Sheriff Coughlan knew of this was that Aunt Penny often had a covered basket on her arm when he tipped his hat to her in the street.
He got up and opened all the windows, for there was still a little essence of Doc lingering in the air. The door always stood open when Coughlan was in the office.
The sheriff of Larksburg usually spent a well-ordered and uneventful day. Barring any untoward disturbances of the peace he passed a good part of it in the office, working on official papers or reading, and the remainder making his rounds of the town. Unexpected visitors to the office were few.
As the sun rose higher the town awoke and unfolded and brought its usual sounds of activity to the streets. But on this Tuesday morning, the storekeeper from across the way came over in his apron shortly after opening up his store to ask how Donny was. Mr. Greenwood, a stout member of the town council, put his derby hat and bow tie and a portion of his wide shirtfront in at the door to ask the same question as he was passing by. Switzer the coffee merchant, who had a powerful pair of lungs, shouted his inquiry from the seat of his wagon in the middle of the street. Before mid-morning Leo Coughlan had had the surprising experience of looking up to see yet another person stepping through the door half a dozen times. Some made their visit brief, going out immediately upon receiving their answer, and others stepped in for a few minutes to talk to Donny, who was awake now, though still weak and in a good deal of pain. In spite of this he was cheerful, and even managed to joke with the postman about his narrow brush with disaster.
Coughlan was at the desk working on a report of the month’s official activities. It was a familiar task and not a difficult one, and yet he was making very little headway. Each time he looked up to acknowledge the presence of a newcomer and answer their questions his attention was broken away from his work, and it was a roundabout way back. But that was not the only thingto put it simply, he was puzzled. The faces he knew, and the names, but why did he feel that he was seeing these people for the first time? What was it about their interest in young Donny Perryman’s welfare that made them seem so differentor, if one looked more closely at Coughlan’s thoughtsthat made him feel so far removed from them?
Whatever it was, he could not put his finger on it, and that coupled with the fact that his comfortable routine was in shambles prompted the growing exasperation with which he laid down his pen every time a new shadow fell across his paper.
He did not blame Donny; it was certainly not his fault that he had been shot in the back and was in no condition to be moved. He did not blame Neal Rafferty for suggesting that they take Donny to the jail, nor Doc Reynolds for decreeing that he must stay there. He was too just to blame anyone else for his own vexations. Still, they existed. The peace of his office and his mind had been disturbed and he did not especially like it.
In the middle of the afternoon Coughlan looked up to see a little girl, about ten or eleven years old, standing in the doorway. She stood hesitantly on one foot, tapping the heel of her scuffed button boot with the toe of the other one, and twisted her hands together as she looked at him shyly. Coughlan involuntarily smiled at her, and her little face brightened with an answering smile as she took this as a signal to scamper past him through the office into the cell. He heard her greet Donny enthusiastically; it seemed she was yet another of his particular friends.
He returned to his work. There was nothing to prevent him…and yet in five minutes he had written only a sentence, and found himself listening to the small clear voice rising from the inner part of the jail.
“Mr. Langley’s got your pony over at the livery stable. He said he’d keep him until you’re better and won’t charge you for feeding him. I took him an apple today like you always do, and Mr. Langley let me go in and give it to him.”
Coughlan had to listen a little closer for Donny’s voice. “That’s swell. Tell you what, when I’m back on my feet again I’ll let you ride him.”
“By myself?” she said, delighted.
“You bet. You look after him for me, will you?”
“Oh, Donny, I will! I’ll take good care of him. I’ve got to go home now. I’ll go and see him again after school tomorrow and then come and tell you about it.”
When she had gone Sheriff Coughlan awoke to the fact that he had spent the greater part of the morning and afternoon composing two paragraphs of a report. Clearly something had to be done about this. He got up from his desk and went over and shut the door, something he never did. Back to the desk he went and settled down to work in earnest, and in peace and quiet.
Less than five minutes later came a thump of vigorous footsteps outside. The door swung open and Neal Rafferty strode in, booted and spurred and bringing with him all the fresh air and wide-openness of the range. Coughlan dropped his pen. He had not the presence of mind to return the cowboy’s nod of greeting as he passed, but the omission was not noticed.
“Hiya, kid!” said Neal brightly as he stopped by Donny’s bunk. “How’re you making it?”
“All right, I reckon.”
“Good! We’ve been combing the brush for strays up above the Gulch all dayslow work, let me tell you! Thought I’d swing by on my way home and look in on you.”
While Neal talked on about the particulars of the work, to which Donny listened with eager interest, Coughlan did a little private calculation. The Gulch was a good hour’s ride from Bevan’s home ranch, and Larksburg lay well out of the way from one to the other. Rafferty had nearly doubled his time on the road in order to come and see his friend, and if he had knocked off work early to do so it was certainly not without his boss’s knowledge or approval.
“Bevan’s cracking the whip,” observed Neal as he put his hat on, “but he’s square. He’s promised us all a bonus if we get the whole herd in and accounted for by the end of October. We’re a little short-handed right now. Be all the better if we could have you back on the job before fall roundup’s over, Donny boy.” He grinned at him. “You hang in there, all right? I’ll be seeing you.”
As he went out Neal gave Coughlan another cordial nod and wished him good afternoon. After the sound of hoofbeats had faded down the street Coughlan made a half motion to get up, to close the door again, but he abandoned it. It was no use, really. He took up the pen…and then put it down again. That was no use either. The brief presence of the younger man had left something of his energetic spirit in the atmosphere, tangible as Doc’s cigar smoke, that was not conducive to such a sedentary occupation as writing. Odd that he should be so susceptible to it; ordinarily he was not a sensitive or impressionable man.
He put the report away in a drawer of the deskit was not due till the first of next month, after all.
*
Quiet prevailed at last as dusk lowered itself upon the streets of Larksburg. Coughlan shut the windowsand the door. He went back and sat down with a little bit of a sigh, leaning his elbow on the wooden arm of his chair and resting his chin in the palm of his hand reflectively. It was beginning to come to him, slowly, what had been bothering him all day.
To him Larksburg had always been a smoothly-running machine whose wheels he helped to oil, and its inhabitants merely the works. They had always been polite and even friendly to himmore so, perhaps, in the early days of his tenure. But today he had seen something more than politeness in the people who invaded his office to ask after a freckle-faced boy who seemed to have the gift of making friends wherever he went. More than being mere wheels and springs, this town was made up of flesh and blood, and it had a heart.
They nodded to Coughlan as they passed his desk, but he was simply there as was any other piece of furniture in the office. He was merely part of the works.
Could it be, he wondered with dawning comprehension, that Larksburg had ceased to share its collective heart with him because he had never volunteered the information that he possessed such an organ himself?
A slight sound interrupted his meditations. He sat up in his chair and leaned forward to look into the back of the jail. Donny had fallen into a restless sleep, and lay hunched uncomfortably on his side, his forehead drawn into a slight frown of pain. From time to time he moaned softly in his sleep.
Coughlan stood and went back into the cell, and bending over him he laid a hand on his shoulder. Donny’s eyes opened and he stared silently up at him. There was a bandage on the side of his head and another patch on his cheekbone where a splinter struck from the wagon had cut him.
“Here, this isn’t good,” said Coughlan with unwonted gentleness. “Doc said you ought to lay flat for a while.”
The boy’s face twisted briefly again as Coughlan eased him over into a more comfortable position; he bit his lip and shut his eyes for a second, then opened them again. “Itit hurts some, Sheriff,” he said faintly, with the air of one making a confession.
His eyes seemed to wander for a minute, then focused on Coughlan’s face. “Reckon I’m kind of in the way,” he said. “It ain’t too much trouble having me around here, is it?”
Coughlan arraigned, tried and convicted himself in half a second. He wondered if Donny had witnessed the irritation he had tried to conceal that day. He remembered the impatient way he had stood up and marched across the room to shut the door…but no, there was no accusation in the pale freckled face.
Leo Coughlan shook his head and smiled. “Not at all,” he said.
Donny did not answer, but he smiled backa painfully weak approximation of his endearing one-sided grin. Coughlan felt his throat tighten unexpectedly. He had his answer to the riddle of Larksburg.
He could have left him then. Instead, he hearkened to some instinct that told him the boy was tired and in pain and in need of a comforting presence of some kind, even that of a stolid sheriff who was a stranger, and he sat down on the edge of the bunk and began to talk to him. He talked in a low even voice of light and soothingly ordinary things, in sentences that did not require more than a monosyllabic answer. His efforts were rewarded; in a little while Donny’s eyes closed gradually and he was asleep.
Coughlan quietly checked to see if Doc’s bandages were still secure, then got up and went into the outer office, where he stood for a while in the middle of the room rather as if he had forgotten what he came there for. Then by long force of habit he walked slowly around the desk, sat down and took up his newspaper. He looked at it without reading it.
He realized suddenly that the room was entirely still. After a whole day of wishing for it he could finally enjoy the peace. He listened.
Perhaps it was because his ears had become so accustomed to noise that they caught the slightest sounds, reaching outside the walls of the jail of their own accord. The town’s subdued nighttime noises were all around him, though dimmed by the wooden walls that enclosed him. The slow clop of a horse at a walk drew closer and faded. Voices in conversation somewhere nearby…he wondered who they belonged to and what they were saying. Further away someone was playing a harmonica. What tune was that? Coughlan listened intently, straining to catch the breathy lowest notes, but with the door closed they just escaped his ears.
A door creaked and slammed…somewhere across the street someone laughed. A window-shutter was thrown back with a clatter, and he heard faint steps across a wood floor. But in here it was quiet.
Sheriff Coughlan got up and opened the door.
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