|
Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Worst Bandit in the West
By Tom Sheehan
There was hell to pay out west. Clogner was an abomination. A curse. Evil itself. The ultimate danger on the loose. He’d shoot a dog if it made too much noise. Or a horse. And a good horse wouldn’t make any difference at all. The bankers wanted to shut down their banks, but they couldn’t. Posses didn’t want to get into the chase for him, but they had to. And sheriffs hoped that Ditch Clogner, the worst bandit in the west, the deadliest, the meanest, the craziest, would never come into their towns.
But, of course, they realized the path he was laying might squelch their hopes.
In these situations, some men sit and wait for the inevitable to come along. Some men wait, but they don’t sit. That’s the way it was in Mattsville where Sheriff Micah Topaz, bare years on the job, bare years beyond his 21st birthday, sat with every person coming into town carrying a scrap of information about Ditch Clogner. He pumped them all dry, every last ounce, in the general store, the blacksmith shop, the saloon, the barbershop, any place where he came upon them, saying for openers, “You just ride in, stranger?”
“Two horses? How do you know? You see them? Someone tell you? Say again what he said, to the blacksmith in front of the Clarkville Bank, about honest work for an honest dollar. How do you know he was alone? If you saw him alone, what kind of guns did he carry? What do they say he does with all the money he’s robbed? He spend it any place? Bury it? Bought a ranch someplace? His horses were always out of sight, around the corner of a bank, like here in Mattsville, with an alley down the side? You sure of that? Who told you that? The man in the general store? Was he at work or at the bank? Where was the sheriff all the time Clogner was in the bank? Breakfast at ten-thirty, at the hotel? With company? The lady who owns the saloon!”
“He kilt an old buck milking his cow, then shot the cow.”
“They said down Tarpas way he shot the stage driver and shotgun ‘cause they was nobody in the coach carryin’ stuff for him to steal.”
“Nobody told me what he looked like, so I don’t know, but he’s bad, so bad he makes you sick to think about him no matter what he looks like.”
“Sooner or later,” Ditch Clogner supposedly had boasted on numerous occasions, “I’ll be in every town in the west, one way or another. You can smoke on that.” People said he often made that boast on the way out of a bank, “’and I like bank hospitality,’ he usually added,” they added.
The word on Clogner came on horseback, by carriage and coach, by train passengers and train crews; by herders, driving beef to rail heads, finally coming into trail towns to clear the dust away, wet their throats and their talk, gab away like a sewing circle in full session; and by degrees the talk became more than what it was, if that was at all possible. The despicable reputation and unfolding of character went across the state of Texas and the entire west like a prairie fire in the wind. The man was beyond saving to the most believing of souls.
Initially the word on Clogner had spread out from his first robbery at the Clove Hitch Bank in Oklahoma; the name set in place; a character and his make-up solidified at the outset; evil afoot in the land. With a satchel full of money and making way his exit, he said to one customer, an elderly looking gent with spectacles, “What do you do in the town?”
“I’m the doctor.”
“The only one?”
“Yes.”
Clogner shot him in the stomach, straight on. “Fix it,” he said, laughing his way out of the bank. He fled town with two horses he had tethered beside the bank.
Another stranger coming into Mattsville said that Clogner, at his next robbery, in the bank at Alno Verdi, shot a pregnant mother. “Tell ‘em Ditch was here,” he yelled as he left the bank. “They’ll know all over the territory.” At the door on the way out, he smiled at an old lady and said, “It’s a good thing, ma’am, this is not the next time.” His eerie laugh hung in place for months in the bank, the way a nightmare is known. “I saw the whole thing,” the stranger said time and time again.
The next time out of the barn and into a bank, he shot an old lady just as he was leaving the Melon Hill Bank. “I was thinking of this ever since the bank at Alno Verdi. A promise to myself.” He laughed again.
Micah Topaz was fully aware of a few things. One was that Ditch Clogner would be paying a visit to the Mattsville Bank in a matter of months. The second fact, accepted as true, was that only Micah Topaz would be able to stop him; it was in the cards, he believed, since the day he was born, since the moment he knew he was born to be a sheriff.
“He’s coming,” he said to his young wife Hannah late that evening, “sure as shootin’, and I have to be ready.”
“Micah,” she said, “if he’s heard of you, if he was me, he’d stay away from Mattsville and Micah Topaz, ‘the star’ of the west.”
Topaz smiled at that logic and nodded his assessment of a few things he was aware of. Hannah smiled back her understanding and hung her apron on a nail. The smile would not let go.
“I swear he knows better, Micah. If he’s as bad as they say, he has to be as smart as they say, which is being dumb as a bunny if you really think about it.”
Micah Topaz smiled again. “I’ll have a plan in place before dawn.” Hannah’s smile still didn’t go away.
Hosiah Cambershaw, the banker of Mattsville, motioned Topaz into his office just after opening on the following morning. Like many bankers of the era, Cambershaw was a hard businessman who had learned his way in the financial world back east. Early on he saw two promising things about the growing west: the availability of real, high adventure, which he truly yearned for though he could not physically achieve it, and the innumerable opportunities that existed for fresh blood in the new raw towns springing up as the west moved on. On first sight he was a big man who looked as soft as an old saddle. He was hardly out of shape because he had never really been in shape, yet he had a spine that Micah Topaz had admired from their first encounter.
“Micah, can I get you a coffee?” Cambershaw said.” Rest your bones a bit, young man. How’s Hannah this morning? As beautiful as ever I trust. She may be your best investment ever, Micah.” He brushed past Micah and raised two fingers to someone beyond. In minutes two cups of steaming coffee were in hand.
“Thanks, Joe, it smells like range coffee. Rugged as rocks, rugged as fence posts. And Hannah sends her best.”
“Ah, yes,” Cambershaw said, “best from the best via the best to the best. We have this place licked, Micah. It’s in our hands.” His hand motioned to the gilt letters on the wide windows bearing a sign of the times. He gripped the edges of his desk and felt the earthy and solid wood it was made of. His hands, in concert with his body, were huge. But once, in the dark, he had tried to move the desk himself, and could not do it. It made him smile. He believed in rocks, in fence posts, in branding irons, in hard form, in stubbornness, and in good numbers. He knew his hands, and his body, were in second place in this gauging. He knew where and what he was.
Then, perceptive, intent, he leaned forward on his desk as his mind shifted gears. He could feel the heat of the sun touching the backs of his hands and saw it shimmering in small waves on his desk and on the glass of the window. He was feeling proud of the gilt letters on the wide window that said Mattsville Bank.
At the same time he was deeply concerned about the ugly words loosed on the west by Ditch Clogner, and looked up to express a moment’s relief when Micah Topaz entered his small office. He remembered how hard he had fought to get the badge on Topaz’s chest. Some folks said the boy was too young, but Cambershaw had persisted. It was one of his solid business decisions, but he also harbored the fear that he might have sent the young man to an eventual and premature death.
He, too, knew Ditch Clogner was coming to Mattsville, though his kind of reception was completely different than the one that floated continually in the sheriff’s mind.
Micah Topaz brought the banker back to his own words. “Yes, it is in our hands, Joe. I have no doubts that he’s coming and we have to be ready. He is not going to turn this town into another target for terror. We have to stop him here.”
The sun, at its early angle, threw a bit of golden sheen on the young, healthy, newly scrubbed sheriff of Mattsville and Josiah Cambershaw reflected again that as a banker he was capable of good decisions in more than one direction.
The sun shone on Topaz’s badge, the promise and vow almost glowed in his eyes, and his voice came with an unsurprising firmness. “I have a plan, Joe, that you have to give an okay to.”
They launched into a solid half hour of discussion. Both men finished off cool coffee, shook hands, and the young sheriff departed the bank.
Cambershaw called in one of his clerks.
After the bank closed for the day, there was a flurry of activity, slender laths or lengths of wood were brought in a side door, hammering came that sounded like nails being driven home. In the morning the first customer, after business was conducted, received a free cup of coffee, retrieved by a clerk from behind a new latticework divider that had been erected against the side wall. The aroma of fresh coffee seeped out of the bank as if the hotel kitchen had sprung its doors open. And the word spread around town about a free cup of coffee at the bank for each piece of business transacted. Some people even paused in front of the bank to inhale the aroma of the blend and gab a while. It was a change in daily activity, like a rest stop.
Three days later business was still brisk, even if not a lot of money was being moved, yet the advertising was creative and accepted in good faith.
Just before noon, a young man, hired by Cambershaw, came into the bank and told the chief teller that a horseman had hitched two horses in the side alley and had ambled off to the general store, where he was buying a few sundries. “He looks mean, Mr. Cambershaw, mean and dirty, like he’s been riding out there for days. Got a full catch of whiskers now, like he ain’t shaved in a month. He’s in a brown vest and a red shirt and black pants. He’s wearing two guns on his belt. They look like Colts of a kind.
The teller retrieved a cup of coffee from behind the latticework divider, which now had a small hanging sign that said, “Make a deal, get a free coffee.”
When the man in a bearded growth, brown vest, red shirt and black pants came into the bank, the teller froze in place. The man was raw and mean looking. He had heard all about Ditch Clogner and fear ran through his frame. When the stranger pointed his gun at him, the young teller said, “Anything you want is yours, Mr. Clogner. Anything you want.”
Sheriff Micah Topaz stepped from behind the new divider. “Drop your gun, Clogner. I got you in my sights.”
The man spun around, his gun menacing at his hip. Topaz shot him in the chest. The man went to his knees with full surprise in his eyes, looked at Topaz and said, “That ain’t my name, sheriff. I’m Albert Brickley from Meridian. You must know my father; he’s the sheriff over there.” He fell over dead, his gun clattering on the floor. The coffee sign fell off the divider and also hit the floor.
“I wonder, Micah,” Cambershaw said later, “how many times that’s happened, or how many times a mimic is going to string the legend along.” He was also wondering how long the coffee would last.
“Or,” said the young sheriff, “if there really is a Ditch Clogner. I hope we’re not the ones to find out.”
|
|
|
|
|
Send this story to a friend
|
|
|
|
|
