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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Vigil at Coffin Corners
By Tom Sheehan
His name was Clint Vaughan, closing on 20 years of age, working a small ranch outside of town that had been left to him by his parents, killed in an aborted robbery a good twelve years ago. An aunt had raised him on the ranch until she had died a year earlier. For those intervening dozen years, he had come into Coffin Corners every weekend and checked out every strange rider who entered the town. He thought he was discrete at these actions, but the word had long sifted around the town, and eventually found an avid listener in Sally Burroughs, who was a fairly new arrival in town. She was lively, lovely with golden tresses worn long and curly, inquisitive about people and “things” that were unsaid, and didn’t dodge much in the way of conversation, overheard or involved.
One time she had heard the shop keeper talking to a stage driver. “That Vaughan kid’s here every weekend. Rides in from his ranch, plunks himself down and just checks out every new rider comes into town, lookin’ for somethin’ or someone anyone can guess. Been doin’ it forever, it seems, and don’t miss a weekend less’n the weather says so, and that ain’t very often.”
The shop keeper nodded in an unspoken acceptance of whatever was driving the youngster, though he or any other citizen didn’t have to stretch too far when they thought about the boy’s parents and the manner of their deaths.
New in Coffin Corners, coming on 18 and looking every day for a pleasantly handsome face, a man for her lifetime, secret things absolutely shaking loose inside her for well over two years, Clint Vaughan was the first boy-man that had really interested Sally. She saw him, for the second time, across the one road running down the middle of the growing town, lounging at the entrance to the Coffin Corners General Store. A second time she looked, and then a third time, her interest slowly peaking. It might have been the way he wore his hat back on his head as if the Texas wind would play with it in a second and pull on his curly hair, or the way he respectfully nodded to older women who went in and out of the store, or his eyes and his attention shifted slowly and easily, but directly, to any strange rider tying up at one of the half dozen hitching rails on the street.
She did not realize the last observation was much more significant than she could imagine. Also, the stories she had heard about him were intriguing, full of so much sadness she wanted to hug him from the first time she saw him. That other time, when he sat near her in church, his blond hair neat and tied back, a pale green shirt showing the width of his shoulders, the slight tip of his head when listening closely to the minister delivering the point of his sermon. She knew, with certainty, she could dream in church as well as any place. It was her due, and she hoped handsome Clint Vaughan held out for the same kind of dreams.
So this time, with added interest and fervor, self-stoked, she pursued her lonely attention, from the best place of all. From inside the general store, through an open window, she managed a bit of personal window shopping, then found other viewing places. She noted how often he went back to his horse at the rail, slipped something to him from his hand, and patted the horse’s rump when going back to his favored lounging spot. The way he took care of his horse warmed her totally. He’d take the same gentle care with his woman, she just knew it. It was the cowboy way.
That he was handsome in a very rugged way pleased her. Though she assessed that he was not musically graceful, he did seem athletic in his manner; it was how he shifted his shoulders or stretched his legs or mounted his horse at the rail. Those actions, small as they were, also expressed his confidence. And it was also apparent that his regular weekend lounging about the town had a mutually appealing interest behind it; the force driving him found an easy tolerance in her. As with him, she was being raised by an aunt and uncle after her parents died in a horrible gunfight down Waco way, innocent bystanders at a foiled bank robbery. She saw some of her father in Clint Vaughan, in that he was usually “weekend clean,” as her mother was apt to say. ” And as her father further explained, “The week’s work rushed right out of his clothes, making them clean enough for Sunday, God and good whiskey.”
Her interest grew, and she quickly found things about him from friends and acquaintances, and by tipping her ear any time she was near two or more people at discussion. Love made declarations, as well as demands, and she was open to all of them.
Some of the insiders in town knew it would come to this someday … that Clint Vaughan, loner, orphaned by fire and gunfire, quick-draw perfectionist looking for one face to smash, one heart to puncture with an aim so perfect the heart would stop before it knew it, would face down the killer of his parents. It was discussed by many of them, thought about and, most likely in the passage of time, plain forgotten. Time just passed by, and all other attention ebbed and flowed away. But Clint Vaughan was there all the time, a boy at first, and then, before their eyes, a man. In time, the way familiarity works, he was taken as a piece of real estate as Coffin Corners grew. Sitting still for hours on end, on the porch of the general store, he was just a piece of the town’s structure.
The long and loyal watch went on nevertheless, old hat to everybody but Clint Vaughan in less than a few months of its beginning. Nobody knew what in particular he was looking for, what kind of a clue would alert him, or tip him off, that the killer or killers once again had come to Coffin Corners. He never told anybody what he was looking for, though many folks thought from the start that he ought to tell everybody within a hundred miles. Clint Vaughan did not believe that, so he kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. He scared nothing away from Coffin Corners.
Time, habit and circumstance, he considered, have strange ways of repeating themselves. Thus the boy grew into a man, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, a handsome young man, but one with an undeclared mission.
Which is where Sally Burroughs found him, a dozen years later, snapped into place in Coffin Corners, alert but almost unseen in the fabric of the bustling town. She was aware of what he was, in some manner, checking, measuring, seeking. The elusive identification of an unknown thing bothered her endlessly. Riders came and riders left … trail hands, hobo riders, drummers, adventurers, fugitives from one patch of ground seeking another patch of ground, men running from something or running to something in a wild and wooly world beyond the last great rivers of the continent, and, too, a fair share of desperadoes.
She also mused on the horrid details of the deaths of Clint Vaughan’s parents many years before as well as her own parents. With all her spirit she had become his lover from a distance. His parents had been shot by two men trying to rob them of a card stake won the night before in the Coffin Corners Saloon. The elder Clint Vaughan had hidden the money, a healthy chunk, in his barn and did not tell his wife or his son. When the shooting started the 7-year older Clint had ducked behind a water trough and had not been seen. But he saw his parents killed by two men on tall horses as they emptied their guns at them when the money was not produced after bitter threats. His father had gotten off a single shot that killed the horse of one bandit. In a hurry, the bandit took one of the Vaughan horses, already saddled and ready to ride.
All this information gelled and coagulated within her mind, and set her apart from the rest of Coffin Corners. She had fallen in love with Clint Vaughan practically from the first sight of him, and was not about to let a chance of happiness escape from her dreams. She vowed to stand by him forever. If he ever needed her for anything, she’d be there in a shot.
Her aunt said at the table one evening that she had heard the story of Clint’s parents and felt horribly sad about it, but suspected that some people from the moment of birth are born for trouble. “Certain people in this short life of ours are born to carry Hell on their backs. It comes with the territory. They never get far away from it. I suspect this Vaughan boy is ‘one of them.’ “
She had stressed that point a few times. “Mind yourself now, Sally.” But she knew she had spoken to deaf ears, seeing Sally had already begun to wash her blouses without prodding, hang them to dry in the sun, bring them to a hot iron for a weekend visit to town. It all said “boy” to her, the way it had been once before in her own life. She remembered the excitement, the expectation, the happening. It still touched her with a moment of tenderness she had not really known again. She hoped her niece would gain that beautiful tenderness that ought to abound in lives.
And in the succeeding week, from her favored watching place in the general store, Sally saw Clint suddenly come upright and stand at attention. A strange rider she had never seen before tied his horse to the rail in front of the saloon. The man was covered in trail dust, it appeared, the way one looks at the end of a day’s work. The back of his gray shirt was soaked from the sun’s rays, his face looked as if the prairie dogs had fed on it just outside town, and he climbed down off the saddle as though he was suffering from more than a day’s work. Stretching, trying to loosen his limbs, he was surprised to find a young man staring at him from no more than a dozen feet away, standing in a cocky but inquisitive manner. A pup, he thought, a yelper, too handsome for his own good, for the way he looked back at him.
“Help you, son?” he said, as he dusted off his pants with his hat. In his early forties, he had dark and somber eyes, a scar on one cheek might have been caused by a wild talon or claw, and a nose bent to one side by some bitter battle. He looked fearful.
The young man was staring hard at him and at his horse.
“You just buy this horse, mister?” Clint Vaughan said, introducing bare curiosity into his voice, as if he had seen the animal before, might have ridden him, a quite normal thing.
Across the street, at the window in his office at the jail, the sheriff had also come to strict attention. Clint Vaughan, to his memory, had never risen so abruptly to talk to a stranger in Coffin Corners. He strapped on his side arms and walked across the street, to hear Clint Vaughan ask another question.
“I only asked if you just bought this horse, mister, or have you had him a long time?” The horse was a strong-looking red stallion some men would give several months’ wages for and was fitted with a dark walnut-colored saddle.
Nervous, never having such questions tossed at him, especially by a pup of a boy, the stranger said, “Hell, no, I’ve had him for a long time and the saddle longer.” He patted the big red on the rump. “Comfort begins up there, son.” He swung his open hand across the saddle, its leather walnut-dark, sweat-borne, worn by use. His nerves though had begun suddenly working at a high point, for something else was under the current, making its way but not yet revealed. He’d best qualify what had been asked of him. “Bought horse here down in Maynard from Josh Burley and got this saddle down Taxco way almost more than a dozen years ago. Tell the truth, when I was in Yuma, for a spell, for something I didn’t do, my sister kept it for me. I won it in a riding contest. Yes sir, a good dozen years ago.” He had opened up some of his private life. That should dissuade anybody, should cut off further inquiries.
The sheriff, highly curious at the turn of events, slipped into the situation. “What you got here, Clint? Who’s your new friend? Don’t think I’ve seen him before, not here in Coffin Corners.”
Sally, at the window of the store, almost reading lips, sensing a long-awaited confrontation had arrived, felt the sudden fear of losing her chosen man. A wave of longing and tenderness flooded her, and then a sense of danger, a warning. It shot right through her body. Never had Clint Vaughan so quickly come to such abrupt attention, nor been so loved.
Pain and dread rose abruptly in her. Her heart pounded. Running to the door and starting across the dusty road, she heard Clint say, “Man says he won this saddle down Taxco way, in a riding contest, sheriff.” He rubbed his hand across the worn tooling of the saddle. “Says he won it a dozen years ago, and that’s about as long as my folks have been buried out there on the ranch, in a hole in the ground where the cliff drops off the mountain.”
“What’s that mean to me?” the stranger said, suddenly a lot more nervous, showing it in his stance, his hands looking out of place, the way things look when they’re not right where they belong … with him that’d be on the grips of his guns.
The sheriff also awakening, a sense of dawning and true awareness beginning to creep into his thinking, for a moment believing if the man was in the saddle he would have bolted, said, “Exactly what are you sayin’, Clint? You makin’ a charge here? You sayin’ somethin’ you outright haven’t said yet? You talkin’ about your folks way back there when they died and your dad got one shot off and killed the horse under the man who gut shot him and your ma, and that killer stole your pa’s horse?”
His eyes were all on Clint Vaughan now, looking for the answer before he’d hear it. He had watched this boy, over the twelve year period since he himself was just a new deputy, become a man, a man who was so practiced drawing his weapons that few men would be able to beat him to the draw. The gunsmith had told him about all the ammunition the boy has bought over the years for practice drawing and shooting, how he had the gunsmith work his weapons into perfect acceptance for his hands and his eyes, had seen him from afar draw and shoot the knots out of boards leaning on a fence rail. Without a drop of blood being shed, he had become an expert at quick-draws and hitting his mark.
Clint Vaughan said, “Look at that Cheyenne saddle, sheriff, at that tooling on it, and the initials there on the fender and the skirt and worked into the tooling. This saddle right here, that I now got my hand on for the first time in twelve years, was made special by Gallatin for my father. I could pick it out of a drover’s remuda taking grass anyplace on the plains. I’ve been looking for it for more than half my life. And now I’ve found it.” One hand was still softly touching the saddle and the other was perilously close to his weapons and the sheriff believed he couldn’t invent anything quicker than what was right there in front of him.
In mere moments the vagaries of life advanced onto the main street of Coffin Corners. The nervous stranger, now feeling that he was close to discovery, that his long-ago past finally catching up to him, was measuring his chances. He had to get away, but these two men, the youngster on the long watch and the experienced sheriff, might shoot him out of the saddle if he mounted and tried to run off. He could not take that chance, nor could he stand there and not expect to get hung for a murder that he had committed so long ago and had forgotten until this day.
If there was a chance in the next few seconds, he would take it, shoot the two of them and make a run for it. He watched their eyes, saw how the sheriff was completely aware of the younger man’s tendencies. In one more second, if the sheriff’s eyes went back to the younger man, he’d do it.
The sheriff looked back at Clint Vaughan, the stranger went for his gun, and Sally Burroughs screamed,
“Look out, Clint!” The pain and the fear ran right through her. She wanted to yell again, but nothing would come out of her throat, as if all sound was caught up in her chest. All life was in the balance. Was treachery afoot again? Was it here again, right in front of her? Her shoe caught on a skirt edge and she stumbled. The sheriff, hearing her, spun around to look at her. It was then, at that exact instant that the dozen years of practice stood up for good, as Clint Vaughan drew his weapon with alarming speed and shot the stranger whose filled gun hand was up and aiming. The stranger never got to pull the trigger as the single shot caught him directly in the forehead, which he never felt.
That other part of life began its long ride into happiness as Sally Burroughs fell into Clint Vaughan’s arms, caught the dreamed essence of him with the gun still in his hand, and the aging sheriff, yet immobile, knew that time had caught up with just about everything due in life.
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