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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Last Gun in Wentworth
Tom Sheehan
It was late in the day and a stranger appeared at the bar of the Tall Rider Saloon in Wentworth, Texas, had a shot of whiskey, a beer chaser, checked his gun by looking at its load and assuring the barrel rolled smoothly, and then put the weapon back in its holster.
He had commanded attention.
Walking out of the saloon quickly, he mounted his horse and rode out of town.
Townsfolk talked about him for a week - a gunman.
At noon on a following bright August Saturday more than a week later, he came into the saloon again. He stood just inside the door and said, “Tell Kinsella that Boyd Dowler’s looking for him and he’ll be here next Saturday, same time. I’m riding with him.”
The apparent gunman left The Tall Rider Saloon, as quickly as he had entered.
Word got to Jack Kinsella as fast as a horse could travel out to a small ranch a few miles out of town.
Kinsella, late in the afternoon, met with Sheriff Jim Clanton, at the sheriff’s office.
“This was your place, Jack,” Clanton said, “for a long time. It feels funny when you walk in the door, like you never really left. I swear I haven’t seen you in a more than a month.”
“I had my fill, Jim, and Dowler had a big hand in it. Made me figure things all over again. That’s why I quit, that and knowing you’d get the job. Working for Max at his place is nice change. I catch my breath once in a while.”
“It was a tough time getting Dowler into a cell,” Clanton said, “handling him for the trial, and then getting him to prison. He’s probably been burning in there all these seven years. I’ll admit I got plenty worried last week or so when his friend popped up like he did. Nobody ever saw that dude before.”
Kinsella said, “Must be one of his pals from the territorial prison, a cellmate, another robber. The only good thing about it so far is neither one’s killed anyone lately that we know of, unless they broke out in a big way, but we would have heard of that by now. It sounds like it’s gotten under his collar locked up all the while, and changed some. I think he did all his time.”
“Looks like he’s going to call you down, Jack. What’ll we do?” Clanton, sometimes wearing spectacle, but mostly for reading, and which threw off a few potential opponents, was a might studious looking, with a golden mop of curly hair for which as a boy he was often referred to as Cottontail. In spite of the studious look, he was athletic, a good rider at breaking in mounts on some of his early jobs, a ceaseless worker when driving cattle on long trips to the railhead.
“I thought some on that riding in here. Only thing we can do up front is post a “No Guns Allowed” sign on both entrances to town, and enforce it. If he draws down on me, I’m dead, that’s easy to see. I haven’t drawn a gun in these seven years, ‘cept for celebrating something or other one or two times.”
“I’ll do it right now, Jack. You go back to the ranch. I’ll get a couple of signs from the newspaper print room and post them today. Let’s hope it does the trick. Maybe we’ll have some luck in this situation.”
Kinsella put out his hand and said, “You do that, Jim, and I’ll go back to work. I’ll be here before noon on Saturday.” He had a serious look on his face when he left the sheriff’s office, saying over his shoulder, “Yes, we could use some luck.”
Clanton, looking after Kinsella as he mounted his horse and rode out of town, felt a funny chill moving through his body.
Memories of Jack Kinsella in past duties came back in a rush, a whole passel of them. But the one he recalled strongest, coming with colors and smells and sounds, making it almost alive for a second time, was as a young deputy greeting Kinsella after two weeks out of town and asking him where he had been for so long. The answer was one he had not expected.
“In Hell,” Kinsella had replied, and never spoke of it again. Never alluded to it. Never wore once more the initial look of his face as he replied, as though a knife was coming sharper than ever, or a bullet was on its way. He had expected, and faced, something deadly.
The image of that moment kept coming back over the years and Clanton realized he’d never know where the sheriff had gone, but figured he’d been in the worst of a horrible situation. With enough of his own years on the job, different situations and odd and troubling characters met, his thinking probed for an answer. It was possible the Dowler incidents, though not earth-shaking at first sight, might be deeper than he realized. It made him wonder all the more about the connection between the two men. If it wasn’t legal stuff, this or that side of the law, it could be an old feud or contested property … or it could be a woman. Kinsella had been a widower for a long time; there could have been a third party in the scheme of things unresolved, at least to his successor on the job.
Other stories came back to him out of the past, stories told to him by his father and grandfather as they sat in front of the old iron stove in winter, or on the porch on a summer evening, or setting on the back end of a wagon after a day’s work and not yet ready to go back to the house and the women, mother and two daughters, an elderly aunt story stuff for the men, for the adventurous. And Sheriff Jack Kinsella made his way into many of those stories, and some of them pretty rough and graphic for the young listener, but so was the life coming at him in the growing west. It was best to bring the young aware of the future and all it might bring.
That Kinsella was a hero to young Clanton was no mystery. He’d been braced by killers, faced down hot shot gunmen, stopped bank robberies when it seemed all the other people standing around were dazzled or dumbfounded or terrified of errant guns in the hands of errant men.
Clanton readily admitted to himself that there were large holes in some of the stories, possibly due to his young boy’s diverted attention when a story was told, like a hawk grabbing for notice as that motionless wonder sat on top of a thermal like he was sitting in a chair, or downstream of a late campfire a fish broke a placid piece of water with a sudden energy, or in a corner of a remote canyon a wolf or a coyote, almost musical, called for company, set his territorial mark, yowled over a victory, celebrated a prey brought to ground.
Yet all his adolescent and early adult years, pieces of Kinsella’s history tried reasserting themselves in his memory, like a few words from his father at a moment of clarity “That man (Kinsella) stood there in front of those hombres and dared the three of them to go for their guns, telling the ringleader he was the first man dead on the spot ‘Before you can count to 10, Drumlick, you’re a dead man.’”
The trouble with his early memories were the disordered mix, a trail lost of a story and then only finding itself in another story, which proved too cumbersome or odd to belong together. Someday he’d write a book about “That Man Kinsella,” yes, that’s what he’d call it. That man who was now a ranch hand on another man’s ranch, who was the object of at least two men seeking to kill him for some past deed. All of life seemed unbalanced out of order, never even-steven no matter how one might look at it.
Saturday was bringing those two men to town, Dowler and his saddle pard, the spokesman to date and Kinsella too, the retired sheriff who should be allowed to put his boots up on a footrest and drink of his choice without any interruptions or challengers; a good life at a good end, or the promise of a good end - comforts, wants, desires, all on the platter for the taking just roll over, lift a hand, make your pick.
Clanton went to the print shop, requested two signs be made, came back in an hour and posted them at each end of town, on the roads coming into town from east and west, beside the first house at the edge of town. The signs, in heavy black lettering said, NEW WEAPONS LAW: NO SIDEARMS ALLOWED IN WENTWORTH UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. LEAVE YOUR GUNS OUT HERE AT THIS HOUSE. PER ORDER OF THE SHERIFF.
He figured a rifle was usually carried in its sheath on a man’s saddle, and that might ease the strain. Few people walked about town carrying a rifle. Clanton was right about that assumption … but was totally wrong about the Kinsella-Dowler connection, which he saw almost too late in the game.
There was grumbling during the week, some rather boisterous comments coming from young hoodlums, from a saddle tramp who ended up in jail for two days and who was starved into righteousness by the sheriff, but a few townsfolk applauded the stand the sheriff had taken. The comments, of course, ran the gamut of variety.
Across the saloon when the sheriff entered the same day of the posting, from one man to a pal across the room: “Hey, Sid, whatcha doin’ totin’ an empty holster for? That’s like standin’ in line at the general store and there ain’t anythin’ you’re gonna buy ‘cause you ain’t got any money, real useless if you want to know what I think of things like that. Real useless, like you know what on a bull.”
“Hey, Jim,” yelled the general store clerk across the dusty road, “You did a good thing with the signs. I saw both of them. It’s about time we took a stand on criminals. I’m all for it, what you’ve done. Good luck with it.”
A lady passing by Clanton’s office early in the same evening: “Sheriff, I do believe the town is a bit quieter today, more peaceful. I commend you, young man. I commend you for a good turn.”
A tall, thin, dark suited man, who shared the same pew in church, nodded, smiled, and said, “It’s your bounden duty to finish what you’ve started, Sheriff, and it’s only fair for all of us. We’ve been too long under the thumb of hooligans and hoodlums and distraught gunmen for whatever reason they bear. I trust you’ll carry this out to all our satisfaction.”
The tall man did not shake Clanton’s hand, or pat him on the back, or wink at him with commendation or even look at the pistol at his side. Clanton carried the lone gun in Wentworth, out of all those who wore a sidearm from the moment they woke up until they lay down to sleep, though that last part was often not the real case.
But he was armed, he was ready, he was the sheriff. It would be nice, he thought, if people thought he was in the mold of Jack Kinsella.
Saturday, as it follows every Friday on the calendar no matter where you are, came, the dawn bright as blue gold, a slight breeze that early risers expected would bring something new, a surprise, a message on the air, the stage coming earlier than ever for a change, perhaps strangers riding into town as if they owned it.
Like Boyd Dowler and his mouthpiece with the smooth working sidearm.
Perhaps there could be a resolution of problems finding the way home.
Clanton figured, above all days, he had to be ready for this one. Out over the mountains he saw slices of silver leaping up from rock faces, dawn showing off. A huge winged buzzard lingered way out over the grass, as if waiting for wolves or coyotes to leave partly eaten prey, or to make sure a still form in the grass was not going to move. Death, he realized, hung in odd measures in odd places when it wanted to be known. For that matter, messages hung on the edges of all entities, on the mountains, at the edges of clouds, on the horizon the way it can flatten to nothing and make you squeeze your eyes for some kind of recognition, the way surprise or conjecture mix themselves in with the real world that sits on a far line of sight, there but unknown even after staring at it for long parts of the day.
Days like this one bothered him in a strange way, the signs there but difficult to read. He stood at the very center of the road through town and looked both ways, east first and then west, and saw no riders. But there was no doubt there’d be coming at noon; most likely armed in spite of the signs. It was a way of life for them.
At 10 o’clock of the morning he entered the small café beside the hotel and had a light breakfast, tried to joke with the waitress and the cook, but neither of them would take part in the lightness, aware of the ominous day that might lie ahead … in a few hours. He left abruptly, saying, ‘Just another day on the job, folks.” He didn’t believe he had said those words.
The door of the saloon swung out at precisely noon, and Jack Kinsella, to Clanton’s surprise, stepped into the single road in Wentworth. Two revolvers sat in his gun belt.
A commotion came to him as he studied Kinsella, a noise down the road from both ends, and Dowler and his pal rode slowly down the road, their side arms easily seen.
Clanton, knowing then that he could not disarm Kinsella, strode to the middle of the road, put up his hand and yelled out, “Didn’t you read the signs out there? No guns in town. I’m ordering you to drop your weapons.”
Dowler, coming in from the east, and now nearly but 30 feet away from the sheriff, wore a crude looking bowler tipped on his head. He said to Clanton, “What about your friend there? He’s wearing his irons. What about him? He owes me big time. He killed my mother years ago. Shot her dead, and I’ve been waiting to get him”
Kinsella stepped off the small boardwalk and said, “You’re a liar, Dowler, you shot “my” mother. I was there right after you.”
“Still lying about it, ain’t you? Once a liar, always a liar. Shot her dead in the street.”
“You shot her, Dowler. I know it was an accident, but it could have been prevented. I didn’t fire my gun that day. And my father was already dead a lot of years.”
Dowler, still in the saddle, nervous looking, but a threat nevertheless, said, “And my father died that day, right beside my mother. Both of them dead in the street. I figure you shot him too.”
In the middle of Wentworth, at the stroke of noon with the sun ablaze overhead, not a single other person in sight, Sheriff Jim Clanton felt the odd sensations, and the odd stories, resurfacing. From out of nowhere, it seemed, they crowded him, and one story started to come back the more he thought about it, tried to fit the parts together.
“Was that down in Brewster,” Clanton said, “in May of ’67, right after the war? Is that what you gents are talking about?”
“Hell, yes,” Sheriff,” Dowler said. “My mother and father dead at the same time.”
“And my mother,” Kinsella said, now in the street, still wearing his weapons, and Dowler starting to dismount.
Clanton leaped into the midst of everything, the stories coming back, the mysteries, the long-known pain he was aware of. “Are you gents half brothers? Did you have the same mother?”
He waved his arms in the air, threw his guns down on the ground. “I know who did it. I know who shot a husband and wife down in Brewster one day a long time ago, after the war, like I said, in ’67 or thereabouts.”
“How do you know about that, Jim?” Kinsella said. “I never told you anything about that.”
“My father told me. It was his brother George Clanton who killed them folks. It was accidental and I guess he’s still running ‘cause I haven’t seen him since that time. Never once. But he shot them. He was running from a sheriff.”
“That was me,” Kinsella said. “I was tipped off on a killer that was in Brewster. Didn’t know who he was, but had a description from a woman I met when her stage was broke down outside town. I was coming off a posse run. I never fired my gun that day. He got away while I was helping my mother. She bled awful.”
“My mother,” yelled Dowler. “My mother too. They told me it was you.”
“Who told you?” Kinsella said.
Dowler said, “A big guy wearing a bowler, the kind I wear, and carried the longest sidearm ever seen, a special make of weapon. I was hiding behind the livery that day. Thought you did it.”
Kinsella, aware of a new twist in an old story, said, “That’s what the lady in the stagecoach said. Those same words. She said he talked to one of the ladies in her place, and that gent said it all to her. I thought it was you.”
“You guys hated each other for years? For nothing? For something my own uncle did, the big guy in a funny bowler, who never liked big Stetsons. My father didn’t tell me for a long while. He was shamed of his brother. Really ashamed.”
He paused, and then said, “My father would have loved to have gotten his brother back, before things got bad. Look at you guys. You got a chance now. Brothers. Think about it. Brothers.”
It was just after high noon in Wentworth, an old mystery over, unfired weapons sitting in the dust of the town road.
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