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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Scourge of Nevada and the Cure
Tom Sheehan
The baby boy was forgotten on the side of the trail by his drunken father in 1851, as they headed for the gold strikes in California. He was found a few hours later by a childless couple, and it was the wife who heard the cries first, saw the baby out on the trailside grass and yelled, “Eureka.” That’s how Eureka Doppler got his name, learned how to fight against those who poked fun at him, took that harsh and steady training to guns, and became, before he was 19 years old, “The Scourge of Nevada.” Some spinners of yarns said, “He’ll do in a dozen before he’s done.”
In his training to fight back at the ridicule about his name and his elderly parents, one an Indian squaw and one a mute gold prospector, the boy took to guns, any kind of a gun he could get his hands on, usually stealing them from drunks, cowpokes taking a wash in a creek, and finally, using a stolen rifle, knocking lone riders from the saddle, taking their possessions, burying the bodies, celebrating his good fortune.
His mother knew what he did and didn’t bother to stop him, enough had been done to her people, and the mute prospector looked not on his son’s sins as despondence but little yellow strike in his digs being the real culprit in life.
“Eureka,” his mother would say, “don’t you dare get caught at whatever you do, because they’ll hang you for it. There’s nothing I could say that would help you, for nobody would believe me anyway, and your father can’t say anything at all, so that leaves us even, the pair of us.”
So, in the raw land of the times, in the midst of robberies and rustling and murders of whole families, Eureka Doppler believed he was one of the many, and not one of the few, who preyed on others, who left both ranch homes and Indian teepees in ruins, the dead mutilated, scattered, and left for preying creatures of land and air.
Other old timers said of the Dopplers or their son, “Some folks don’t ever get a chance to change things up in their favor, like the Dopplers,” or “He was made in the making,” or “He already was what he was becoming.” Some were afraid to speak out about him directly, and never to his face, for suspicion ranked higher than truth with some folks.
Yet, in the parallels of life, in circumstances that play frolic or fate, right there in Salvage County, on the edge of the Rockies, where times were tough right out of the chute for all newborns, a squawking baby boy came to life in a small cabin in the hard hills. He was named on the instant as Barnaby Jones Solstice by his mother, once Mildred Jones, who saw in her son a savior for the disenchanted, the downtrodden, and the poor, and a newborn who would someday be chanted as “Solstice for Justice.” In her gnawing pain, she reveled in dreams of her son and his special undertaking. Her pain did not cease for weeks on end, nor did her dreams, until she knew she would be dead before this one fated day was over.
She told her husband about her dream. “Get a new wife, get a new mother, but point her at my dream.” She charged him fully, saying, “Don’t ever fail me in my dream, August.” He could not remember the last time she had called him by name.
She died minutes later in her husband’s arms, the cries of her new son beating at her.
In his search for a new wife, Jeffery Solstice found an Indian maiden, told her of his mission, his wife’s dream, and showed her the baby boy. She loved the baby’s smile, the immediate warmth in her arms, and believed in the dreams of the boy’s mother, for all her life she too had looked for justice. She donned the ready mantel that came with Barnaby Jones Solstice.
As Eureka Doppler made the gun his favorite toy, Barney Solstice found words, the written and the spoken, to be his joy of joys. He loved the special words that carried with them the lore and legends of all things that had come his way, and that he could expect to come his way in life. Of significant interest to him were the legends of his step-mother’s people, the gallant people of the Nations.
And each of the youngsters advanced in their choices of interest or leaning, the perfections coming with the devotions; Doppler a quick and deadly shooter before he was 14 years old, death of his victims kept as long as possible a secret from others, only his new mother aware of what burned in her son. And Solstice starred as an excellent student with his teachers, an Indian elder and a black preacher and a white teacher, each one visiting the Solstice home once a week for several years, imparting their best to the brightest student they’d ever tutored.
And thus it was that their paths were bound to cross, in 1868, each one into their 18th year in this life, the Great War over, and the land scattered with veterans from both sides, among them were some of the righteous searchers and some of the sad victims of terrible onslaughts of comrades where memory made them, without steady work, unmanageable. This condition made them mean and often deadly, with no more concern for life than had been shown them already. Such a situation began and begot actions from men with different goals.
Barney Solstice, a natural with the tools of a cowboy, meaning horse, rope and gun, was an able cow puncher, veteran of significant trail drives, trail scout, posse veteran now and then, and an anti-horse thief and anti-rustler and an anti-murderer all the way, knowing justice needed quickness lest it became a lost cause.
He volunteered to be the sheriff of his town, Turnby, Nevada, just into his 19th year, when one was needed in a hurry, the sheriff having died from a fall off a cliff while chasing an escaped prisoner. Solstice chased down the escapee in a day, reading signs as well as the criminal’s habits and suspected intuitions to apprehend him.
But the clash was inevitable between Doppler and Solstice who lived in the same stretch of mountains, 50 or so miles not being far enough apart to prevent the fated clash.
Doppler had held up a freighter’s wagon en route to Turnby, and believed he had killed the driver who lay apparently dead at the side of the road. A stage driver found the freighter still alive and brought him into town where the freighter identified the thief as Eureka Doppler.
“It’s him, sure as hell, Barney,” he said to the sheriff. “I saw him at Triangle Hill one time in the shootin’ contest they have every year. It was him, no question, and he stood over me like he was enjoyin’ every damned minute of it. I thought he’d shoot me again just for the hell of it. He got these eyes that look like bullet holes already in what he was aimin’ at.”
The newspaper editor of “The Turnby Western Star” drew a poster, from memory, of Doppler so deadly in appearance, so devoid of any sense of humanity at the same time, that a stranger would realize the artist had been involved with the fugitive in some hideous manner. That relationship was revealed at the bottom of the poster where it was written in a steady hand: “Wanted also for another killing, in Almstead on an earlier date, the sole witness ready to testify that Eureka Doppler is a sadistic killer.”
The editor was Edmund Sebastian Drury, III, once of Peoria, Illinois and Almstead, Nevada, a widower with one son, Drury IV, now 6 years old. The two lived in a home owned by the owner of the general store whose wife cared for the boy.
A freighter, coming into town, said to Solstice as they stood outside his office, “Barney, I saw a gent on horseback rip the poster off the telegraph pole right on the last bend of the road, tore it off and flung it in the air in pieces after he done read it, I’m sure. I can’t say who it was, but he was sure mad about somethin’ writ there.”
Barney Solstice, figuring right off who tore the poster in shreds, alerted his deputy by calling him out of the office and saying, “I’m riding out that way and checking on signs, so keep your eyes open here in town.” As he was about to leave the office, he added, “In particular, keep your eyes on, Ed Drury, the editor of the paper. He might be in the gun sights.”
The sheriff was aware of a man sitting on the edge of the boardwalk across the street, a man who obviously heard the conversation, all the parts of it, then walked to the rear of the building, mounted his horse and rode toward the other end of town. His exit from town was slow, steady, like a shadow might move along the ground, cast by the moon.
Solstice was keenly aware of the man’s supposed indifference to the conversation he had heard. He had recognized the garb of the man before he knew the man was one he had seen earlier in the day, therefore still a stranger to him.
Half an hour later the man was talking to Eureka Doppler at the side of the road coming from the north. “That’s just what he said, Eureka. He was goin’ out to check on the ground around the ripped poster hung on the telegraph pole near the Harley place. That’s south of town. Said he could read a lot of stuff from little signs, from just from plain old leavin’s.”
Doppler was glad to get the news and was also sure that he did not show any real concern about the sheriff; it would be the last thing he wanted to do, for he’d characterize such a reaction as fear of the sheriff and what he had accomplished in a short time. He’d never allow any signs of such feelings, but he realized at once that they did exist, almost on a plane with his own accomplishments on the other side of the badge.
Instead, Doppler said, “You did me good, Molar, so I’m not collectin’ from you on the bet you lost. Just keep away from me this week, and keep your eye on that damned sheriff. He ain’t so tough as me, but he’s smart as two sticks ‘stead of one. And don’t go near the newspaper place no way. Jest leave all that finaglin’ up to me. I’m goin’ to teach that ink stainer a what for for what he done paintin’ me like he did, my eyes like a mad coyote corralled at the backside of a canyon. Ain’t no one put me by yet, and they ain’t about to. And no ink man is goin’ to do it twice in a row.”
He checked his guns, saw they were loaded and slid them easily into their holsters. A look full of scorn loomed a stony entrance on his face and made Molar shiver and step back; he had seen Doppler go this route before, just like this one, the deep evil part getting ready for an encounter but all the odds totally in his favor … the editor wouldn’t have a chance against this man.
The knocking at the rear door of “The Turnby Western Star” was soft but insistent, and Edmund Sebastian Drury, III, editor, feature writer, major reporter, and the paper’s sole artist and sketcher, rose from his chair and pushed back the door bolt. When he swung open the door, he was face to face with the poster he had most recently sketched up, the evil eyes looking back at him with malevolence and promised injury, if not death.
Drury, unfazed, stepped back and said, “Come in, Doppler. I’ve been waiting on you and have already drawn up the poster for this week’s issue of the paper, showing you coming in through the back door like a sneak in the night.”
“Yah, so much for you and your pictures when I get through with you. You’ll go down like all them others I got a bead on, and I got a bead on you.”
Doppler waved his gun in the air, as Drury had ever been waved at, by departing friend or deadly foe, but the editor stood his ground, and pursued his argument, by saying, “No matter what you do to me on this day, Doppler, the law will have you dead to rights.”
His face lit up as he added, “Which just now, just this minute, I selected to be the lead in my new column, and the headline too most likely … ‘Dead to Rights.’ I think that will be fitting for you.”
He added no smile, no smirk, no sign of hatred in his voice, but knew it had hit home. A savage glee came upon him as he realized he had hit Doppler with what could be his final epithet flung with perhaps his final breath. There was a flash of enjoyment in it.
Doppler laughed his insidious and odds-controlled laugh as he aimed his gun right at the forehead of the editor and hated sketcher. For the first time in his horror-filled life, he became aware of the cold steel of a gun bore at the back of his neck. Sheriff Barney Solstice had silently stepped from behind the curtain separating his office from a late-night sleeping compartment, the space that Editor Edmund Sebastian Drury called The Deadline Suite.
“Don’t move, Doppler,” Sheriff Barney Solstice said as he jammed the gun tighter against the back of Doppler’s neck. “Now drop your gun real easy on the floor or everybody from here to there will know how you were fooled by an editor and you’ll never have a chance to prove otherwise.” He made that pronouncement without once referring to his reading the signs of Molar, Doppler’s sneaky confidant.
Doppler’s gun dropped on the floor with a final resonance.
Drury saw the ink already forming his new headline, Doppler looked for a way to re-establish his rule in life through some escape down the line, and Solstice could almost hear his mother saying some words of commitment on his part.
He couldn’t remember the exact words, but he knew the feeling.
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