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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Angle of a Star
Tom Sheehan
The town drunk, Ernie Howard, earning his single drinks on single errands, stumbled into Puma City’s Horned Bat Saloon and yelled at bartender Max Stonewalk, “I got another telegraph here for Sheriff Ringwald, Max, and he ain’t at the jail. You gotta pay me.” Howard dropped the telegraph message on the counter and a shot of whiskey was put into his hands. He dipped once, gulped the whole shot, nodded, and ran out of the saloon.
The sheriff, in a corner table with a friendly lady, sauntered to the bar, picked up the message, read it once and also rushed out of the saloon. Nobody in the saloon or the town saw him again for three days, but they all heard about the message read aloud by the head of the town council: “Dolph Schlitzer just released. On his way to see you in Puma City. To get even. Wish I could help. Bill Teadley, Carson City Sheriff.”
Someone in the bar said, “What’ya think the sheriff’s doin’?” His head was tilted as if the answer was in place already, which did not seem to be a positive one.
It didn’t take long to arrive, as another member of the council strode in and said, “What’s goin’ on? I just saw Spud Ringwald bolt from his office, mount his horse and rush north out of town. He had three rifles with him across his saddle. A double bandoleer, too.”
He looked around at the saloon crowd and said, “He goin’ far? For long?” His head shook in more wonder and said, “He comin’ back?” He tried to force a smile, but it wouldn’t appear.
Implications had been explicitly stated; and talk began in the same vein, but heated in varying degrees.
Then, like a landslide had begun, the talk came from all over.
“Course he’s not. He’s bailin’ out.” The voice was from a crowded corner, the speaker hidden.
“He ain’t,” retorted a voice from the other end of the saloon, crowded as usual.
“He is,” said the voice from the first corner.
“You never liked him for no reason anyway.”
‘Why’s he runnin’ now and Dolph Schlitzer on his way here for payback?”
“Maybe he’s gone out there to meet him on the way,” another voice gestured, shrugging his shoulders in half derision.
“Yah, in between the rocks somewhere on the trail, and three loaded rifles like he can’t miss when Schlitzer ain’t even lookin’. Always thought he wore that tin badge leanin' on the thin edge.”
“You say that to him when he comes back?”
“If he comes back, why not?”
“He’ll like as punch you in the mouth, Herb. I wouldn’t blame him none either.”
Stonewalk, pouring three more beers for bar customers, said, loud enough to be understood that the whole lot of them ought to square up, “Why don’t you tongue waggers keep drinkin;’ and stop talkin’ like you know everythin’ there is to know about two men none of you would stand up to, and that includes me.”
The silence came abruptly. They all remembered the time Stonewalk had shut the saloon down at the point of a gun, for a very personal reason.
*
Out past Puma City, in a rugged section of the lower part of Mount Hadley, rocky sections standing like permanent guards over the trail from downriver and from Carson City, Sheriff Spud Ringwald, barely a year on the job, nothing spectacular done on his part, but shirking nothing that came up, which was little for a year, sat himself in a corner after putting his horse under good cover of a tree-fall. His rifles were loaded and his pistols were loaded. He munched on a dry biscuit, swigged from his canteen, and openly lit a cigarette.
None of his nerves came exposed. He breathed calmly; he had known Dolph Schlitzer more than half his life, since their first encounter as drovers on their first drive. Schlitzer at that time had exposed something of what he would become as an older man. Doing little to hide it, Schlitzer carried a deep scar across his forehead, as if he’d been target of an unsuccessful scalping. But he evaded any and all talk about the scar as though he’d never own up to its being right there under his hat brim.
Ringwald, recalling other attributes of the released prisoner, walked to his horse after a few hours and gave him a drink, patted him, and checked the area.
It would be the place for Schlitzer to make a stand. He’d bet his life on it; and realized he might lose, but it was the only way: Dolph Schlitzer never gave an even chance to a vagrant, a lost soul, a thirsty horse other than his own, a wounded Indian found on the trail, any man who might get an edge on him in this life. It was cut and dried his lifestyle; he was a man unlike few others Ringwald had met; he didn’t want to meet any more of them.
With the scar and the attitude he bore, Schlitzer was hardly favored by any local acquaintances, and liked by fewer, if there were any. His stay in the Carson City prison was the result of shooting at a wagon driver he swore was trying to steal his friend’s wagon. It was word against word until the judge heard a story from the wagon man who had two witnesses stating that Schlitzer had threatened him the next time he saw him … which happened to be the day of the shooting. And Ringwald had been one of the witnesses.
The other witness left town in a hurry, subject of an obvious threat, as was believed by most folks of the town.
Now, from Ringwald’s perspective, the sunlight was sitting low in the foothills of Mount Hadley, the shadows grabbing extra long space in their casting, the bottom sections of the rocky area already giving way to deep shade and thicker darkness. It was easy to see that cover, for a bushwhacker, was everywhere; Schlitzer country without a doubt.
Ringwald, in turn, tuned in.
For bare moments there was silence in the rocky world. Ringwald’s horse in a hidden place was quiet, and then wolves and coyotes out and about began to howl as if they had sudden odds with the world around them. The canyons and rocky surfaces carried their echoes for miles onto other rocky surfaces, their howls leaping and likely heard out on the wide prairie. Other night creatures attended such callings, those of sworn enemies.
Ringwald’s inner alarm system was keyed up, working through the new sounds and the rare bits of silence. He stared at one black space above him. “Likely a crevice, just the kind of place he’ll use,” the sheriff thought aloud, looking at the spot again, rechecking what was known.
Then, according to his plan, he slipped down into a slight depth, which allowed him to change his location by more than 20 feet. Inhaling, taking a deep breath, he brought his hat up on a stick and moved it slightly, the white hat showing in the shaded area. While he did this, he peered over the edge of a rock, hatless, eyes staring at the dark crevice.
He saw the fire spit from the muzzle of a rifle before he heard it, the ensuing bullet slamming off the dead-on top of the rock where he’d shown his hat on purpose, and going into a wild ricochet. His return shot slammed back into the crevice area.
Ringwald heard nothing but a pair of wolves someplace beyond. He waited 10 minutes, to test himself and Schlitzer, stood up eerily slow, and saw nothing but darkness gathering into all the odd places of a mountain and spreading down to the lower levels, as though night came in slow chunks and swam about him. The stars dominated the sky and one of them appeared to lean on him. A night bird, from far off, seemed to be talking to him alone.
He woke in the brightness of a new dawn, heard nothing of Schlitzer, saw nothing of him, and dared to move in place. Nothing developed. Nothing moved in the dawn’s brightness. No sound came down to him from that higher location. The wolves were quiet, like a morning retreat. With difficulty, because he felt a new pain he had not experienced earlier, he felt warmth on his shirt. He walked stiffly and upright into the dawn to where he found a connecting ledge and began climbing it. The crevice he had imagined was right where he thought it was; and so was Dolph Schlitzer, wounded badly. His blood had run thickly into a huge clot at his stomach, his shirt red with it. But he was breathing, labored, but breathing.
Ringwald wrapped him as best he could with his own shirt, and with an almost insurmountable difficulty began dragging him down the sloping ledge. He heard Schlitzer moan, heard himself moan, and knew the pain that caused it. He had never known this other end of lead.
It took the sheriff over 10 minutes to find Schlitzer’s horse behind a stand of sheared-off cliff face, standing right on its edge where it had fallen. With the same amount of difficulty he got him on his own horse, and the pair started off for Puma City on what was to be a tough ride for both men and their horses.
In Puma City, at the height of noon and the straight-up sun, as sober Ernie Howard sat out front of the telegraph office, he saw dust rising on the road into town at the final curve. Two horses were coming from that direction, with one rider upright and one looking as if trussed across the saddle of his horse.
In a bound, his legs more agile than ever it seemed, he was pounding at the bar in the Horned Bat Saloon. “Max,” he yelled, “you gotta pay me for this, for what I just saw.”
His excitement didn’t bother Stonewalk, but one patron placed a coin on the bar and said, “Give the geezer one on me, Max. It might just be worth it.”
He turned to Howard and said, “But tell me first, Ernie.” His finger remained on the coin.
“The sheriff’s comin’ and he’s got a body acrost a saddle. Looks dead to me.”
Stonewalk put the shot on the counter and the whole of The Horned Bat Saloon rushed to see the sight, all jamming up at the doorway and one man saying, “I told you he’d pick him off. That’s why he ran out so fast the other day. That’s our sheriff, I swear to goodness. Knew it all along.”
There was no reply but tables kept bumping and chairs overturning in the exit of the crowd.
The two horses came to a stop in the front of the saloon, half the town standing there at attention.
One voice, somewhat disguised, from the heart of the crowd, said, “You get him with one shot, Sheriff, just the way you planned?”
There was a whole mouthful of rancor packed into that question.
No retort came this time from the crowd, forcing a silent reaction from the total community. Only dust moved on the town road, a pair of pigeons alighting on the livery rooftop.
Sheriff Spud Ringwald dropped the reins of the horse he was leading. The horse jumped and the body across the saddle plummeted into the dust of the road.
There was a groan from the fallen body as it hit the gravel.
“He’s alive!” yelled someone at the fringe of the crowd. “Look at all that blood, and he’s wrapped up in the sheriff’s shirt. That’s the same one I sold to the sheriff just last year.”
At that statement, Sheriff Spud Ringwald fell from the saddle in the midst of his quiet town, the blood from a shoulder wound gathering thickly on his torso.
His blood, as happens at death, stopped flowing seconds after he hit the ground.
Silence is often the great rebuke or the great salutation and may come with deep volume atop all kinds of pain or surprise.
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