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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Kid Bullet off the Trail
Tom Sheehan
Travis Henry, young sheriff of Winslow Hills, in the Wyoming Territory, was back from his honeymoon of sorts, and was on the job after a quiet period when he was away. He was 21, three times wounded in his short life, and considered lucky by most men who knew him, and gun-fast by everybody else in town.
Going back to work was easy, with a smile on his face.
It didn’t last long, that quiet period, with Bog Morchant in town and his gang of sour faces, poor dispositions and hands generally too quick to their guns. The lot of them was a mix of anger, greed, boisterous energy as long as things were tilted in their favor. It was easy to say that they could spoil any evening of any week, summer or winter, as long as they were together, bunched, interdependent, a precursor to unionism. It was their way, feeling it was their due, losers all the way trying to get something free they figured was owed them, fate at work for them.
The camaraderie had come into the ranks of a bunch of losers who had been banded by the energy, and evil, of one man. Morchant knew how he came at people and used it, fond of his mean edge and how he could slip it in against most anybody, like setting a branding iron on the lot of them who might get in his way.
A testament to the gang’s creation was offered up by one of its minions. Lucky Cadre was so misnamed that it never hit him. He was rotten-spoiled, a sore loser, sick mostly of what life served up for him, but knew he had found his haven within the gang, with Morchant as a leader. The man was steady in his way and little deterred him short of success, no matter what the cost amounted to.
Cadre said to a pard in their hideout cabin one night, “We was a bunch of loose lifes that Bog gathered under his wing, under his eye. I ain’t ever felt so good as when we run the way we want and take what we want. I swear to you, Turkey, that I used to dream about this, getting’ even, stickin’ my nose in their stinkin’ business and drawin’ off what I want. You got to say Bog got us this way. We were nothin’ alone, but now we’re somethin’. Now we’re our own army. Our own army, man.”
That made him think some more and he said, “Think he’ll ever make us corporals? We was here almost ahead of all the others.”
Earlier, Morchant had earmarked Winslow Hills as a soft target after he had visited several times, always at night, always at the saloon, listening to every conversation he could, picking up all the pieces of information floating about from the loose lips, the drunks, the smart-asses in their nice clothes and fancy hats sitting at crowded tables.
He hadn’t come across the sheriff in is visits, but had heard all about him and his good luck, how young he was, his new bride, his mouthy father.
“That Winslow Hills is a pot shot waitin’ for us to happen to it. We can have a barrel of fun there, boys,” Morchant said to his crew. “They got a kid sheriff, a babe right out of the wrapper if you want to know, and green as new corn. We ought to think about lockin’ him up in his own jail.”
He dwelled on that point for a long stare into possibilities. “Ain’t that one hell of an idea, boys, chuckin’ the sheriff in his own hoosegow? Set a stain on that town they can’t shake loose no matter how long they try and we can become part of their history, part of their legend. They’ll remember us forever.” He licked his lips, flashed the lascivious smile they all had come to expect and enjoy.
“It’ll be easy as lickin’ butter off a knife.” He made off he was doing just that, sliding his fingers down across his thrust-out tongue.
The whole crew of them laughed at the imagined sight; a jailer jailed, a town on its knees, the booze flowing, the women free and easy. Hiding the sheriff behind his own bars loomed as the idea of a master criminal mind at work. To a man they drooled over it, this knock-out punch for Winslow Hills; each of them admiring the boss’s imagination, wishing they had thought of it.
“Get thinkin’ what you boys want to get done,” Morchant summed up. “Don’t wait for it to happen. Get it straight now, set a target, get it done, and then you can make your way around town. Them ladies ain’t goin’ anyplace lest we say so. You boys remember that; they ain’t goin’ no place lest it’s with us.” He slapped the tabletop in their hideout in the hills and the whole cabin rocked with that slamming fist.
Though Travis Henry worked mostly alone on the job, having a part-time deputy, a former but tired sheriff, he did have a few allies and good friends in Winslow Hills. He had a few pals working in the saloon and a few others around town. It was part of his method of work, his way of the law.
One of those helpers was a porch percher, a boyhood pal with a bad leg, by the name of Chuck Herring, who sat most of the day looking out over the town from his porch at one end the main street. When he saw odd circumstances or strange happenings, he made sure that Henry heard about it through messengers that delivered the news like a loaded bee going back to the hive. So it was that Henry heard a strange gang had come into town, in separate entrances, and were merged somewhat later behind the livery where they probably were planning what they’d be doing based on information gathered so far about Winslow Hills.
After getting the word from Herring, the sheriff, from a vantage also behind a building near the livery, managed to view the meeting and guessed what was happening. He noted each man, what he wore, how he moved, how he carried his guns. Nothing of his observations was wasted, knowing he could spot each one of them any place in town. He departed the scene before they did.
The first thing he did was to change his shirt at the office, going in the back door, then going out the same way and heading to the saloon. He entered the saloon leisurely, wearing not his usual brown shirt but a light gray one, and his father’s old Stetson, long turned to a sad white. He carried his badge in his pocket, set his mind alert, his guns loose, his hands loose, but kept up his casual entry. In one quick scan of the room he spotted two of the gang drinking at opposite ends of the bar, neither one paying any attention to the other gang member.
At a table down near the middle of the room, Henry spotted two of the gang sitting at the same table, drinks sitting in front of them. Behind them, alone at another table, was the big man who had been doing all the talking behind the livery. Henry knew, from wanted posters from outside the territory, that the man was Bog Morchant, a man with a reputation for wildness and vindictiveness, and guilty of several crimes elsewhere … but not wanted here in Winslow Hills.
”Not as yet,” Henry said as he kept his eyes averted from eyes of gang members, though he wondered if any of them had recognized him yet. That’s when his eye settled on those of the bartender who had not said a word to him yet, having seen strange men in the room, and the sheriff not wearing his badge, or his regular shirt or his regular hat.
“The boy’s up to something,” the bartender said under his breath, setting a glass on the bar top.
Henry pursed his lips for silence, casually tipped his head at the strangers around the room, and tweaked his own ear.
The bartender, looked overhead when he heard a door close, saw Sally Keith standing on the second deck. He likewise nodded at the men in the center of the room and tweaked his ear. Sally Keith nodded back, off on a task she had done before.
In her red dress, a blazing red dress, her hair piled up in a big city fashion, shaking her bird cage in wanton glory, and her beautiful face caught up in a matching smile, she descended the stairs, moved slowly through the room and sat at the table where the two bandits sat, directly in front of Morchant’s table.
“Either one of you gents going to buy me a drink? I’m real thirsty for top shelf if you do, if you care to share some time with me. This place is usually dead as a snake under the hoof. You gents might make a little excitement for a change.” The two looked wide-eyed, as if a fire had sat at their table.
“Oh, we got that in mind, Ma’am,” one of them muttered through his teeth. “We’re gonna turn this place on its ear tonight. You betcha on that. We aim to lock the sheriff in his own jail and then raise all the kinds of hell you been lookin’ for. How’s that set with you, honey?”
“The name’s Sally, handsome, Sally Keith, and I just can’t believe you gents, just the two of you, are going to take on the law and put the law behind its own bars. That’s really putting on the spurs, now isn’t it?”
They both laughed, and one of them said, “Oh. We ain’t that dumb, Ma’am. We got more help right here in the saloon, and some more outside.”
Both Henry and the bartender saw Morchant, sitting behind them, trying to make them shut their mouths. Morchant finally coughed loud enough and gave them the shut-up sign.
One the men got up and said, “I’ll get us a jug of dynamite.”
Sally Keith, her hand touching on his sleeve, said, “Tell the man behind the bar I want boss whiskey, from under the bar, from his hiding place.”
The talker brought back a bottle from the bar and poured Sally a drink, a beer glass supposedly half full of boss whiskey.
She said, “You boys wait right here. I want to see what the other bottles look like down there under the bar. I want to make sure we got the best stuff. I’ll be right back.”
She walked off swinging her hips like matched tassels, drawing every eye in the saloon.
“Hey, Josh,” she said to the bartender, “Did we get boss stuff in that jug. It looks funny.” And in a near whisper said, “They’re going to lock up the sheriff in his own jail and raise hell all over town.”
The bartender, fully upright, said, “You got the best down there I got, Sally. The damned best of the lot. It’s the only stuff I drink myself.” His smile was as wide as his beard.
Sally walked back to the table. “It’s okay, boys. We got the best in the house, now pour me another and let’s get this night going. I’m thirsty, real thirsty and craving real excitement.”
She flounced herself into a strange pair of arms and began what she hoped was a short night with a nice thank you following, from somebody else.
Twenty minutes later, after Henry had slipped out of the bar, a young man in a gleaming white hat, a brown shirt and black pants, came into the saloon and stood just inside the door. He was also wearing the 5-pointed badge of a sheriff. In a casual manner, as though business was moving as usual, he sauntered slowly toward the bar, the bartender staring at him, nodding, saying, “Hi, Sheriff, what’ll you have this time?”
The ruckus started as soon as the sheriff felt the gun in his back and the hard voice coming from Morchant screaming at the top of his lungs, “Don’t nobody move or we kill the sheriff right here and now. There’s more than me.” He waved his gun and said, still as loud as ever, “Look around. There’s a whole bunch of us, in here and outside spread around the town.”
Several men were standing and waving their guns at those closest to them.
Morchant continued: “We aim to own this place, at least for the night. So you all go about your business, do what you always do, and don’t do any gun play or a shot in here will tell the rest of us around town to start shootin’ who’s ever closest to them. That’s a damned good promise I’m making.”
He stopped, looked around again as one cohort took the guns out of the sheriff’s holsters and stuck them inside his own belt.
Morchant added, “But we have a surprise for you gents while we lock the sheriff in his own jail. Don’t you think that’s great stuff, the sheriff locked in his own jail, and he laughed heartily and added, “one more nice surprise comin’ too. The bar’s open. The drinks is on me. All the way. All night.” His stare was at the bartender who only nodded back.
Three men, including Morchant, walked the unarmed sheriff out of the saloon, down the street and into the sheriff’s office with the jail cells in the back. Morchant grabbed the ring of keys off a wall hook, handed it to the sheriff and shoved him toward the cells.
“Open one of ‘em up, Sheriff. You’re gonna spend the whole damned night in there, along with anybody else who gets foolish or darin’ on their own.”
The cell was opened and Morchant was about to shove the sheriff into the cell, when he was knocked on the side of the head by Winslow Hills’ real sheriff, Travis Henry, wearing his own badge, the different brown shirt, his father’s faded Stetson, and brandishing his own weapons.
Morchant was on the floor of the jail from Henry’s smack on the head, Henry having come in behind them from the side door to the office.
Henry said to the other two gang members, “Not a word out of you two or you’re dead without a trial. Now pick him up and put him in the cell. You’ll stay in there with him. We’re going after your pals real pronto. It’s going to be a jig from here on.”
Around town in the next 10 minutes, with surprise, four men were caught in silence and at gunpoint and jailed in a separate cell.
The crowd in the saloon was drinking its way toward oblivion, Josh the bartender pouring freely under the watchful eyes, and guns, of two gang members standing at each end of the bar. Another man was at the saloon door, just inside. He moved to see who was coming in, felt the gun slam into his gut, and folded up.
Sheriff Henry, all 21 years of him, saw one man at the end of the bar go for his gun and slapped a bullet into his wrist that at another angle might have torn the man’s hand from his arm.
At the other end of the bar, his other partner measured what he had just seen and simply raised his arms in the air. He had already heard too many stories about the real sheriff of Winslow Hills, who this man must be. He was a sudden believer in all he heard.
Winslow Hills, for the next 15 years, except for a few sporadic incidents, was generally a quiet town as the sheriff and his young family founded their ranch, saw it bloom and blossom, all heading to the day in the short future when the sheriff would retire and begin ranching in earnest.
He still felt lucky as he set out on a new career, Morchant long forgotten as he spent those years in jail, and the wounded member of the gang, his gun hand gone forever, had become a lefty and a trusted member of Henry’s outfit.
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