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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Hourly Bastion, Bastard Hero
Tom Sheehan
He was “that boy” in town, born in a room above the Bull’s Head Saloon, living there most of his early life, subjected to scornful castigation, taunts, and frequent beatings at the hands of bullies. He spent limitless hours of young exploration in the alleys of Westcott, Arizona, sometimes hounded by peers who maligned him with the harshest nicknames, all speaking directly to his birthright, “that bastard boy born upstairs at the saloon.”
His name, given because of the barrage of questions from the upstairs ladies about when the expected birth was due, came from the house madam’s usual reply, “Hourly,” and so his mother, Sally Bastion, one of the loveliest of the ladies, called him “Hourly” from that hour on. Without realizing it, the name came back upon the boy, and his mother, as a brand, a stigma from the start. A few saloon wags even made up songs about the mother and her son, their tawdry refrains phrased with the cruelest indignities.
But, in truth, the vocal stigma toughened up both of them, her for her frightful role in life, the boy for the life that was trying to pin him down to a singular role in the long run.
Hourly Bastion, it could be seen early on, wasn’t going to stand for it.
As a result of the many indignities tossed at him, he found solace in odd places about the small community on the river. In those hours he “lost” himself and “aged” himself in the strange games of human interplay caught up in his mind. Hourly saw people, all kinds of people, at their best and at their worst. It made him sit up and look closely at some of those he saw in both normal and extraordinary actions around town, knowing it was just like being in an outdoor schoolhouse. He found escape in the created adventures, and from them gained experience he’d not otherwise achieve. Hourly, it was evident to any keen observer, was maturing without realizing it.
The horses got him first, the parade of them into and out of town, him hiding behind some small barricade so he could see them all, their spirit, their muscled frames. He loved them with a ferocity that seemed born with him, dreaming of them, seeing their eyes wild and bright, manes flying in the wind, their huge chests like prairie barges, miracles on the run, and when they ran in bunches, fast, then faster, like longhorns in a stampede, he loved them more, the grays and pintos and sun-gifted palominos and quarter horses as talented as athletes. Incessantly he dreamed of a huge remuda under his care, a huge herd of cattle out on the vast prairie, and him on his favorite horse singing a soft song to the herd and the remuda, a song that he had not yet heard, and never knew the words coming out of his mouth.
It was a significant joy for him, a trade-off with pleasure for the daily pains that otherwise came at him.
Horses, of all things western towns featured, came with their assorted colors and patterns, especially the ones called paints and pintos; he loved their variety and color schemes, the lively camouflage of them at a distance. From an early age, barely out and about by himself, he watched the parade of riders coming into and leaving the livery run by an old man with a crooked leg and a deep voice. The crooked leg frightened him and the scary deep voice as if coming from a dark cave, but the feeling were altered by the way the man treated horses; he knew that was special, and thus so stood the man with the bent leg and the scary voice. It was, he learned in piece parts, a lesson taking place, and to which he must pay attention … at all times. These lessons lead to warm fuzzy feelings, which meant lunch, a late sandwich when he was ravished by hunger, or a hug from his mother or one of the ladies who smelled like the prairie flowers that ran right up to the fence beside the Wescott cemetery on the edge of town.
Those who did not know his background would say he was a handsome boy, his hair keenly gold as corn tassel, eyes as deep blue as one of those prairie flower, and bore an intensity for a youngster that made people take a second look at him, oftentimes setting him apart from others his age. They’d exclaim mightily and with an exultant joy, those who did not know of his background, when he said his name was Hourly. The name drew “hallos” and “howdy-dos” and “whatta ya knows” from them and now and then a “Whoop-dee-doo.” A few new-comers to town tried quick attempts at jokes about “What’s your second hand up to?” or “How many minutes you got to spare, Kid?” After a few of them, gaily delivered, he understood them to be curious kindnesses, and made room for them.
His mother, and the ladies upstairs who doted on him, had helped him to read at an early age, and that let him spend time at books and small tasks he found on his own. One of the tasks was making a list of all the horse breeds he saw in the town with all the information on each one that he could get by studying horses, by asking questions, and he was eventually able to tell one from another in an instant. He insisted that his mother and the ladies help him make his list, and the list grew; quarter horses and mustangs and appaloosas and paints and pintos and Arabians and Morgans. He’d ask anyone a question about horses to fill his book.
Certain touches of the wind became readable and colors and scents of animals began to form a litany in his mind. The scent of animals developed name tags for him, as did their colors or paired colors with a basic white, as with the paint horses, where white mixed with a variety of bay, black, brown, roan, buckskin, champagne, chestnut, cremello, dun, gray, grullo, palomino, perlino, red dun, roan, smoky cream, or sorrel.
He stockpiled all he learned, and his collection of note pads, grocer’s wrappings, throw-away paper were tucked away on a roof beam in the saloon’s upper structure.
When the horse book was full, he started on guns, hand guns and rifles, small bore to blunderbuss, and made up a list that also became a book. Hourly became so adept at certain tasks, and with grasping all kinds of know-how, that some of the cowpokes became irritated and muttered, loud enough to be heard by ladies on the balcony, “That little bastard gets more favors than we do and we keep the damned place running, don’t we?”
Stories circulated that a few of the ladies, angered by cowpokes’ attitudes, imposed their own demands on the noisiest of them.
While on his livery lookout the boy saw how riders mounted a horse, and dismounted, took care of their horse and gear, made way to the saloon where his mother spent all her days and nights. A few of the repeat riders became favorite sights and he could spot them at the far edge of town as they rode in from wherever, his eyes quickly finding known elements of identification: color schemes of clothes, a wide hat with a special band on it or a brim flipped at a cocky angle, how the sun bounced off a steel spur or a magnificent belt buckle or now and then off a lawman’s badge, a proud adornment he began to dream about.
He noticed how men rode in the saddle, how they sat, what kind of saddle they favored, how they found rhythm from the hooves of their huge gray or black or red horse or a pinto, as he moved each horse into its appropriate breed and class of horses that came or rode off.
All the garnered knowledge of familiar figures found its way into his memory structure, and he sought additional characteristics that separated each man from the next man he saw. Soon, he could spot the differences at first glance.
At noon when he came back to the saloon from hunger’s stir, climbing by a side entrance to his own room, little more than a closet space, either his mother or one of the ladies would provide lunch for him, each one of them having somewhat adopted him as her own in her own way. “Hourly’s one of ours and we’ll do whatever to take care of him.”
Some of that, unknown to Hourly or his mother, was carried to another level where customers were advised how special Hourly was to each lady on the second floor and it would be best for all customers to have the same considerations for “that little boy you see around here, Hourly, our boy Hourly.”
His mother kept saying she didn’t know who his father was, but each of them had a serious suspicion of who he was because of the boy’s looks and the looks of one likely looking customer. The name was always a whisper among the ladies, and never once mentioned in Hourly’s presence.
But Hourly, as dictated by his genes, had some backbone in him, and some smarts, and thusly from the age of 14 was a willing volunteer to go on posse hunts with the sheriff, Will Tonger, the first man in Westcott to really look upon him with something other than distaste. This favor was not one asked or suggested to him by one of the ladies, but from something he ascertained in the boy as a scraping child, an exerted will, and Hourly making his way around town and on into adolescence, a survivor all the way in spite of his beginning.
The pair of them went through several dangerous situations on a few posse hunts, and the bond grew stronger with each incident. The boy’s natural instincts and wisdom were consistently exposed to the sheriff, and he felt comfortable with him as a riding pard. Someday, he was positive, there’d be a turn-around for Hourly Bastion, the way things happen with people he found notable, worthy, beyond their start in life. He’d seen ordinary mountain men assume greatness on the land, coming off as near-godheads in the crudest but survivable way, knowing the land as only the native tribesmen did, living off it, succoring it, giving back to it. They were heroes.
The sheriff addressed it openly one day when he said, “Hourly, some day when you go out on one of these challenging rides, you’ll come back different than when you left. And things back here will be different for you too. Don’t ever let it get away from you, that chance at change. Like they say, It’s in the books, the books about heroes. I’ve got my hands on a few of them hero books from drummers and hustlers and you can read them any time you want. My door’s never locked.”
On his 18th birthday Hourly Bastion was hired as a full-time deputy by Sheriff Tonger. “Do it up the way you think about it, Hourly, and I know you do that with your own special tools. Do it good and honest and as quick as you can. You bring a lot to the job, so you should be able to walk away with something from it.”
Two days later, as fate might have set its spring, the bank was robbed by two masked men who moved as smooth as a good clock at each of the small details in the big heist.
No volunteers would go with the sheriff on the posse because three people had been killed already as the robbers made their way out of town in a running gunfight mounted by alarmed citizens. The three dead townsmen changed the town, but Hourly Bastion was ready to ride in minutes.
They left, the two of them, tracking the robbers of the bank, the leader having said to the bank manager, “We’re not taking it all. Only what we need right now. You’ll have enough left to run the bank. Perhaps someone will come along to put a big deposit in the bank and really make it grow.”
A few days later, while Sheriff Tonger and Hourly Bastion were still on the chase, a cattleman, at the end of a profitable drive, put up a 10 thousand dollar reward for the capture of the two robbers, and made a hefty deposit in the bank. His name was Mort Gloster, and he owned a sizable ranch a dozen miles up the river from Westcott.
At about that time, in a canyon up river, Tonger and Bastion cornered the two robbers, and forced them to drop their guns in a deadly crossfire. The two, both known by their captors as ranch hands at the Gloster Ranch, proclaimed their innocence in a flurry of talk. But Hourly Bastion had seen one of the men in operation before and remembered some things about him.
He asked Tonger if he could question him. “’Course you can, Hourly. Take your time. We’ll get them back to town and then have a quick trial.”
Bastion said to the robber, “All of a sudden, Clarker, you left a difficult trail to follow to one like a kid trying to hide from his mom. Too simple and easy, wasn’t it? Ain’t it? What else you guys got going?”
He knew the card table expression on Clarker’s face, a giveaway to some other ruse or ploy already well into play.
‘Nothing, I swear it,” he said, but his looks did not agree to what he was saying.
It had been warning enough and just as Bastion saw a reflection from above and yelled out a warning,
two gunshots went off, one atop the other, like they were fired from rungs in a ladder. They echoed down from above and Sheriff Tonger and one of the robbers fell dead from their saddles. Bastion scrambled for cover, still holding the reins of the other robber’s horse, the robber’s hands trussed to the pommel, him going nowhere.
Both men had been shot in the back.
Deputy Hourly Bastion brought two dead men and the prisoner back to town, two bodies across the saddles of their horses, the prisoner trussed up for jailing. He was hailed as a hero in the town that had castigated him and taunted him for years, and at times still did the same to his mother … but no longer where Hourly Bastion could hear it.
Bastion heard the sheriff’s words about coming back to town different than when he went out … but it couldn’t have been about the sheriff’s death … he wouldn’t have meant that. It still eluded Bastion.
There was hell to pay around Wescott for the whole day, and the judge in the next town was sent for. The judge had one trial going and would in Westcott in a few days.
It looked to be a quick trial on the bank robbery and a new posse, under Hourly Bastion, would go back out to find the bushwhacker who killed the sheriff and the prisoner.
The next morning, however, a quick meeting of the town council was called by the mayor, where Mort Gloster made some devastating accusations against Hourly Bastion. “I got a couple of my line riders who saw the deputy, who probably wants the sheriff’s job and figures this is the only way to get it, shoot both men in the back as they sat their horses in Big Horn Canyon. Shot them right out of the saddle he did without so much as a howdy-do. That’s your sheriff, gents, going today to the cemetery. Now I don’t know how long you gents are going to take that kind of stuff from the likes of him, and you know what I mean by that, but I’ll say right here and now me and my boys won’t stand for no tricks from him any longer.”
The mayor said to Bastion, “Hourly, you don’t need to give me your gun and your badge, not now. We can wait till things develop once Judge Carlton Shavers gets here. We’ll see then. Just consider taking a rest from the job unless something happens before the court sits on this serious matter.”
“So you’ll let me keep my badge and guns in case something happens, huh? Well, Mayor, I don’t think that will work out in my favor, so you take them now or I carry on like always.”
“Oh, all right, Hourly. I was just trying to be fair about this.”
“There ain’t nothing fair about any of it except the sheriff gets a decent burial, and I’m going to see that it happens.”
In the morning they rang the bell in the church and the trial soon got underway, the saloon stuffed with the curious, the faithful, the thirsty. The mayor said, “Please rise now for Judge Carlton Shavers who will sit here in judgment of the case against Deputy Hourly Bastion.”
Shavers, an ordinary looking man, with a beard, a Stetson sitting squarely on his head, a pair of Colts displayed on his belt, sat at a table in the saloon. He cast a stern eye about him and said, “That’s the end of all drinking while court is in session. No more beer. No whiskey, not so much as a glass of water or a glass of sarsaparilla gets passed to a customer.” He added, “The law of the land,” as he looked at the long row of men standing at the bar, the driest looking lot in the saloon.
He harrumphed a few times, took a drink of water that had a faded orange color to it, and banged the table with his fist. “I have read the charges against the deputy you call Hourly. Who is the defendant’s lawyer?” He looked around the room for someone to stand up, be announced.
It was Hourly Bastion who stood up and said, “I am the defendant’s lawyer.”
The judge said, “You ain’t no real lawyer.”
Hourly Bastion, in his best imitative voice, said, “And you ain’t no real judge.” There followed a slow laughter, most men aware of what Bastion meant.
“ When they were going to try Cody Twitchell for murder back in Pega Verdi, Judge,” Bastion continued, “you were the barkeep and the only one who had no interest in the trail and that’s how you were chosen to be judge and you’ve plain kept at it ever since. I ain’t saying you haven’t done some good at it, but these accusations could make me real uncomfortable if I don’t take some real precautions that a real lawyer would try. So I suspect that we agree on all that, don’t we, Your Honor?”
“Oh, alright, Hourly, you can carry on by the minute if you will,” and he squeezed out a smile that went to the farthest corner of the room, and took another sip of the off-color water. “Who do you want up here to get sworn in as a witness?”
On the landing above the temporary court, from her room down the hall, Sally Bastion watched her son Hourly, and admired the way he was going about this whole mess. More than once she looked down upon the man who most looked like her son and whom she knew to be his father, neither one of them ever guessing about the relationship. At the same time she saw another son, one she had given up, sitting at a table with his adoptive farther while his real father, also with no knowledge of their kinship, sat at the very next table watching all that was going on, and none of them knowing what was most important to them.
The ironies could have crushed her, except for the gifts she got when she decided to keep Hourly in spite of all the talk that surrounded them, and much of it because of the son she had given up.
Hourly Bastion looked at his two accusers, Jonas Salt and George Spanger, and noticed the grimace moving on the face of Jonas Salt.
“Jonas Salt, come up here, please,” he said, his hand out to one of the two witnesses, a cowpoke on the Gloster ranch, a weekend drinker with few equals, a cowpoke who more than once Bastion had seen beat his horse with a whip. He picked Salt, having seen him for a few years at his best and at his worst.
Salt sat in a chair beside the judge, and Hourly Bastion said, “You were out on line work and that’s when you saw me shoot Sheriff Tonger right in the back from close up and didn’t do anything about it. Is that your story?”
“That’s just what I said when the mayor asked me.”
“And you didn’t do anything at all but run and hide?”
“We was too far away to do anything.”
“You just said you saw me from close up.”
“I didn’t say that, you did.”
“But you agreed, didn’t you?”
“That was part of the trick work my boss said you was goin’ to use.”
“You work for Mort Gloster, don’t you?”
“Yup, all the way.” His smile reached around the room.
Hourly Bastion, self-defending lawyer, said, “If I was to tell you that there is a witness that says you were not out there on line work the other day, but someplace else, what would you say to that?”
“I’d say he was a dad-blamed liar all the way.”
“Well, his name is Epaminondas Anganistickoulus.” Bastion laughed loudly, gauged the reaction in the courtroom, and said, “I swear by all that’s holy that his name is Epaminondas Anganistickoulus. You know the man? He came here from one of those Greek Islands we hear about every once in a while. ” With a pard’s move, he placed his hand on Salt’s shoulder. “How’s that sit with you now, Jonas?”
Judge Carlton Shavers twisted his head sideways, and tossed off the most curious look at this information.
“Well, Hourly, that’s a real easy one for me,” Jonas Salt said. “I never knew the man, I never saw the man, I never spoke to the man, so he can’t say where I was anytime at all, or what I was doing, or where I been any of these days. And that’s the honest truth.” He glowed in the face as he looked around the room again, a bit of crow in his talk, a nod to the table where Gloster sat.
“So, Jonas, that’s the whole truth just like everything you said so far is the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you in the face of the good Lord. So true without a doubt about the next witness and where you were when I was supposed to have shot my best friend in the whole world, Sheriff Tonger?”
“Sure as I’m sitting here.” The look on his face came up for the third time.
“Truth is a strange thing at times, Jonas, and comes from right where it is when you need it the most. Now, I admit I didn’t make that part up, Jonas, but Sheriff Tonger said it one day and I plain just remember it.”
Jonas Salt smiled his understanding and Hourly Bastion whirled about near the judge’s table and said, “Will Epaminondas Anganistickoulus please stand up.”
The whole courtroom, from Judge Carlton Shavers and the witness Jonas Salt and the accused Hourly Bastion looked around the room and waited for the man named Epaminondas Anganistickoulus to stand up.
Behind the bar, not working since the judge’s dictate about no drinking, the bartender known as Sticky raised his hand and said, “Here I am.”
Jonas Salt almost fell out of the witness chair, and stared at his boss, Mort Gloster, who pushed his thumb up under his chin as if to say, “Stick with it, Jonas, or you’re on your own in all of this.”
Jonas Salt yelled out, “He never told me that was his name. We always called him Sticky. Sticky’s his name. His one and only name.”
Hourly Bastion said, “You think his mother called him Sticky ‘cause he came all glued up?” Even the judge laughed at that.
Upstairs, on the landing, somewhat out of sight, Hourly’s mother smiled at her son’s question and Jonas Salt managed a weak smile, fearing some strange thing about to work against him. Sally Bastion also knew a nervous twinge pass through her body. Perhaps something was about to break loose.
Sticky, the usually quiet bartender of the Bull’s Head Saloon, sometimes but most infrequently known as Epaminondas Anganistickoulus, walked from behind the bar and took the chair beside the judge as Salt went back to his boss’s table. Mort Gloster did not acknowledge him.
“Sticky,” Bastion said, “you heard everything Jonas Salt just told this court, didn’t you?”
“Every word.”
“Did he tell it the way it really was, Sticky?”
“No, he didn’t, Hourly. He was right at the bar, him and Georgie Spanger, that other fellow he’s sitting with at Mort Gloster’s table. He’ll be another witness for you if he tells the truth about him being there or not being there at the canyon. They couldn’t be anyplace else but drinking up a storm right here in this room when they said they were up there in the canyon watching you shoot down your best friend, the sheriff.”
“Is that the full and only truth, Sticky?”
“It sure is, Hourly, and they are the damnedest liars I ever heard in court.” He turned to the judge and said hello in his birth language, “Yειά σου, Carly. Nice to see you again. It’s been a spell, hasn’t it?”
“Sure is, Sticky, obviously understanding Sticky’s hello. “I ain’t seen you in a hound’s age. You been well, I take it.” He slammed his fist down on the table and said, “Charges dismissed against Hourly Bastion.”
And he turned back to his old pal and said, “Get back to work, Sticky. I got a real thirst goin’ in place.”
Mort Gloster made a move for the door, and Hourly Bastion, with a sudden change to his voice, said, “Hold on there, Mister Gloster. You got some explaining to do, you and your lying friends and who else was in your employ. I want all your ranch hands in here to stand up now and tell us where they were when Sheriff Tonger was killed by some bushwhacker or bushwhackers and I want the truth ‘cause I have more witnesses ready to swear the god-awful truth about all of this and you all know, every last man in here, that I got no quit on this one, not when it comes to my first and best friend ever, Sheriff Will Tonger.”
It was his turn to slam the table top and he did so right in front of the judge, who stood up and said, “This here court is back in session and the bar is still closed. “ He shrugged his shoulders at old friend Epaminondas Anganistickoulus.
Mort Gloster, wealthy rancher, prominent citizen, made another desperate move for the door, and Sheriff Hourly Bastion, quick as a slick gunman, drew his weapon and leveled it at the unveiled manipulator bearing the heaviest suspicions, being a possible murderer of the town’s most recent sheriff, looking as if he was about to flee true justice at the hands of the bastard sheriff.
Fate does have its way with some of its heroes. Hourly Bastion, supposedly fatherless, born into a tragic life, despised and continually set upon by his peers, knowing the ironies swiftly piling up from one more sweeping statement, stood at last at the head of the line among his peers, his unknown father identified, his birth covered by sudden attrition as his mother, Sally Bastion, seeing him take aim at Gloster as if he was about to shoot him, leaped from a corner of the balcony, and yelled, “Don’t shoot him, Hourly. He’s your father.”
Hourly Bastion had come home, all the way home as a hero, as foretold by his dearest friend, Will Tonger, hoped for by his mother, and definitely foreseen by the ladies upstairs at the saloon.
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