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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Dirty Dan Digby and the Kid Sheriff
Tom Sheehan
Nathan Ormsby slipped out of his blanket at the first call of a morning bird that rolled up Tanner’s Hill and shared the early music of day with him. He also heard, as he did on most mornings, a few words from his grandfather who’d been a sheriff for a dozen years. That sage old veteran of a few wars of his own had said, “No matter where you find yourself of a mornin’, you’re at least half way from someplace and halfway to the place you’ll be on tomorrow mornin’.”
That particular morning, when they were on a long posse chase, ended disastrously when Dirty Dan Digby, wanted killer and bank thief, thought to be cornered in a blind canyon, had spent the night scaling a cliff, knifing the guard on the posse’s horses, and stealing the guard’s horse after he scattered all the other mounts of the posse from the tether line.
The guard was dead from Digby’s knife, his grandfather died a few days later of a severe heart attack, and Dirty Dan Digby had gone loose in the world.
That was six years ago, with Ormsby now wearing his own sheriff’s badge and word floating in the territory that Digby had returned from a far hideout in high Montana.
Ormsby’s left hip carried some memory of discomfort on a morning of steep gray light and an early vulture scaling the thermals. One stone that always seems to pop up in sleep found him during the night, where fatigue had bitten at his bones and muscles in an endless effort to keep him awake, and succeeded much of the time. It was only in the last two hours before the false dawn that his body had relaxed and settled into a deep sleep on his other hip; but the bird call came too loud just before dawn’s hazy and lazy entrance, as though it too stretched its arms into the stiff gray light.
Ormsby realized, as coffee stirred morning smells and a hard biscuit turned to a flash of blackened crust as it sat near his fire, that hunger was about to be appeased. On the slight draft of a cool breeze, he also knew, the aromas of his fire would drift and find someone inhaling the scents; it was inevitable with him … trouble, like the one stone in his sleep, would find him. As would those who’d smell the remnants of another’s breakfast, such as it was.
He hoped that someone was Digby.
The someone smelling his fire, he realized, could also be an Indian from a prairie tribe … the buffalo hunters, slicers, eaters, hide savers, and eventual sleepers under thick covers of those buffalo hides. They all came to him as parts of the good old earth he did not want to be interred too early in his young life: he was only 22, unknown to woman, unafraid of all that stood up in front of him on hind legs or on all legs. He was deadly with a pistol in his hands, or a rifle, so that his young name had ridden well ahead of him as he crisscrossed the vast territory of Colorado … in pursuit of all criminals, but especially Dirty Dan Digby.
Trouble followed him like he followed Digby and others like him.
Trouble seemed forever in his young life, until his grandfather opened his eyes. “Bein’ a lawman will reveal a cartload of wonders for you. You may find more troubles bein’ in the law, but most of them won’t be yours. You gotta chew on that when you’re sittin’ alone, out there in the grass or up there in the hills. The place don’t matter none, but the thinkin’ sure does.” The old gent had paused at that point, the self-announced punctuation working in his speech, and finally broke the deep silence, his eyes steady as a good aim on him, with a few more words: “Always remember that life may end quick and deadly, so don’t hurry to make it yours that’s endin’, nor someone carryin’ only innocence in his saddlebags.”
Those words made him think late into succeeding nights until, as his grandfather put it, “You see the lights gettin’ lit up by themselves.”
Ormsby’s thinking, and his memory, was always caught up in two people, the old sheriff and a young girl caught in the folds of harsh life.
Ormsby, as some people in Colorado found out a long time later, had departed the jail at Independence, Missouri in the middle of the night, after a mistaken arrest the sheriff would not admit to, with Casey Kelly, a young lass, slipping the cell key to him as she snuggled with a deputy whose head was buried in her deep folds.
She had seen Ormsby first, ahead of all the other ladies of the Tower Hill Saloon, and wanted him forever. He was an unimpaired, handsome, smiling youngster who stirred all of her person, all of her make-up, all of her wants, so that she’d have laid down her life for him.
Casey Kelly thought she’d never see him again.
He had gone off to Colorado and his own eventual tour of lawful duties, a young man with an open mind on most all matters except sworn testimonies by credible people. For her, that secondary, harmless, little-sought interruption in her life of passing on the cell key was no obstacle to comprehend. When Ormsby asked her for help, “to get me out of a situation I did not start, know nothing about, and feel the sheriff has it in for me,” she agreed quickly.
Was he not the handsomest boy she had ever seen … and did not know? Not yet. She was counting on the “yet,” for her dreams were insatiable, about a little cabin in a lovely valley where prairie flowers spoke their minds to the sun every morning, and to anybody who’d listen. The true stirrings were endless … but he was gone into the darkness that fateful night.
The darkness was lifting this morning as he thought of his grandfather’s words, his father’s short life, and the girl of his dreams back in Independence. He had not forgotten her for any length of time, being a sheriff having certain demands on him most wakeful hours.
The last report he’d received on Digby was from an elderly mountain man having his usual monthly or so stop in the Teamster Saloon in Dover Pass. Passing his time with the bartender before the place got too busy, and where he counted on getting a few drinks he might not have to pay for because of his story telling prowess, the mountain man cut loose with his latest when the name of Dirty Dan Digby came up.
“Whoa there, my man,” he said. “Don’t pass too fast on that cutthroat. He come in here he’d steal you blind as a ground critter, tap the till, empty the tank and then walk off like he never been here in the first place. That man’s wanted from here to both oceans and the whole Mex nation down below us and all the Crow nation up north of here in Canady. Man’s a scoundrel of the worst cut.”
“You ever see the man?” the bartender said.
“Hell, yes I did, and less than about a month ago, measurin’ time without a stiff drink as I do, when he came into Scagg’s place on the Vermouth Trail. Man thought I didn’t know him, even know of him, but I’d seen him once outside the jail the night he broke his pal Loud Charlie Bragman from the iron room in Tolliver before the whole place went down to ghost dust. Saw him plain as the hind end of my mule. That scar on his face scared a few folks, I’ll bet. Mean as a cut can look on the upside of healin’.”
A few drinks broke loose from the bartender who was anxious to tell the kid sheriff Ormsby that he heard news about Dirty Dan. All the good works he could stack up in his own favor might serve him down the line someday. The kid sheriff seemed to remember everything.
When he passed that information on to Ormsby, the sheriff of Dover Pass was off and running after he checked his guns, his ammo belt, his horse, and left a note for his deputy to watch the town while me was gone. He’d be on his way to Scagg’s Place out on the Vermouth Trail.
He rode nearly half a day under the July sun, and stopped to water his horse and wet down his hot body in a handy stream near the trail. From a decent distance, and up on a slow rise crowded with outcroppings, he checked out Scagg’s Place with his long-look glass. It was little more than a small cabin built against a steep and sudden rise where Alonzo Scagg had survived some terrible attacks by Indians and renegades looking for the drink. He heard that Scagg, very early in the construction, had built the place against a cave or deep depression into the land itself, one that provided a secure and safe retreat where it was difficult to get to him or displace him and most of his goods.
This view showed two horses tied at the rail. In less than an hour, early in the evening two men came out of Scagg’s, mounted their horses and left together, heading north. He was about to end his watch when he saw a lone rider come up out of a wadi after the two riders had passed it by. This lone rider had company, a good-sized dog that loped along beside the horse, a big, solid black stallion. The dog, like all dogs could smell most odors on a fair breeze. He knew it was Dirty Dan Digby with his dog.
He’d have to use the dog, Digby’s first line of protection, to get to him. He thought that even as Digby entered Scagg’s Place and brought the dog in with him.
With a plan fermenting in his mind, Ormsby rode back a few miles, set a snare and in less than an hour had the carcass of a rabbit in his wire snare. He opened the carcass, gutted it, and wrapped it in an old shirt and then stuffed it in a saddlebag. He hoped he could get things done the way he planned, but trouble was always a presence in the pursuit of an avowed criminal.
Returning to his look-out spot amid the outcroppings, he stashed his horse out of sight, took the wrapped carcass into a cave amid the rocky terrain, and then looked again at Scagg’s Place. In half an hour or so he saw Digby come out of the cabin and take his horse to the small corral beside the cabin, strip the saddle, and water the horse behind the small fence. When he entered the cabin again, he patted the head of his dog and left him sitting outside.
A few hours into the darkness of night, the light went out in the cabin and Ormsby knew Digby was staying the night, his dog on guard.
He waited in the darkness, hearing nothing but prairie sounds, for an hour more. Then he opened up the shirt and took out the rabbit smelly as all hell, tied it on a stick and began waving it in the air. It did not take very long when he heard the dog walking in among the rocks, his claws clicking out his whereabouts, at which time he backed deeper into the cave whose sides he had earlier rubbed with the carcass. The scent was powerful and he hoped it would hide some of his own smell, or at least dilute some of it.
The dog, he knew, was coming into the cave, sniffing, paws making soft sounds, and then he knew it was at the carcass, the hungry and ravenous sounds telling him so. He fired one shot and killed the dog, and hoped the sound would not travel clearly all the way to the cabin and the sleepers there.
Again, with lots of time on his hands, he waited. In another hour, all silent at and within the cabin, no lights on, he was 50 feet from the cabin. He went closer, his steps slow and soft and as silent as he could make them. He was 30 feet away from the door and there was still nothing but silence. He bent over to merge his dark silhouette with the darkness of the hard earth under his feet.
When he was 20 feet from the door, he heard a slight, whispering sound and knew it was the leather hinges on Scagg’s door now with weight on them as someone slipped open the door.
The kid sheriff, the student of the old sheriff, stayed low, made no sound and heard a gruff voice say, “Here, Tick. Here, boy.”
It was a sure voice. It was not Scagg’s voice. It was Digby’s voice, and him suddenly conscious that something in the night was not right.
Ormsby heard the click of a pistol as its hammer was set.
He remained still, silent, low to the ground.
The doubtful and wondering voice of Digby came again. “Here, Tick. Here, boy.”
There was a step taken onto the doorstep.
Ormsby flipped a single stone he had palmed in one hand to a spot about 10 feet off to his left.
When Digby’s gun flashed and the bullet slammed off the pebbly ground, the kid sheriff fired directly to the left of the gun flash.
He fired a second shot.
There was no return fire.
But he heard a gasp, and then the sound of a body as it fell back against the door, and then hit the wooden floor.
Scagg, in his usual manner, offered no interference in the pursuit of the law, as he would offer none in the commission of a crime committed at his doorstep.
In an hour the body of the wanted killer of many men, several women and children, the robber of a dozen or more banks, was trussed across the saddle of his horse and on the way back to Dover Pass.
A few days later the bounty was paid to the sheriff, who turned in his badge, appointed his deputy as new sheriff of Dover Pass, and was on his way to find Casey Kelly in Independence or wherever she might be.
He’d not rest until he found her.
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