A big man whose paunch was dressed in a white vest, over a shirt in the bosom of which a diamond sparkled, came toward me; his triple-chinned red face expanding into the professionally jovial smile of a confidence man.
“I’m Bardell,” he greeted me, stretching out a fat and shiny-nailed hand on which more diamonds glittered. “This is my joint. I’m glad to know you, sheriff! By God, we need you, and I hope you can spend a lot of your time here. These waddies”—and he chuckled, nodding at the pool players—“cut up rough on me sometimes, and I’m glad there’s going to be somebody around who can handle them.”
I let him pump my hand up and down.
“Let me make you known to the boys,” he went on, turning with one arm across my shoulders. “These are Circle H. A. R. riders”—waving some of his rings at the pool players—“except this Milk River hombre, who, being a peeler, kind of looks down on ordinary hands.”
The Milk River hombre was the slender youth who had sat beside the girl in the Cañon House dining-room. His companions were young—though not quite so young as he—sun-marked, wind-marked, pigeontoed in high-heeled boots. Buck Small was sandy and pop-eyed; Smith was sandy and short; Dunne was a rangy Irishman.
The men watching the game were mostly laborers from the Orilla Colony, or hands from some of the smaller ranches in the neighborhood. There were two exceptions: Chick Orr, short, thick-bodied, heavy-armed, with the shapeless nose, battered ears, gold front teeth and gnarled hands of a pugilist; and Gyp Rainey, a slack-chinned, ratty individual whose whole front spelled cocaine.
Conducted by Bardell, I went into the back room to meet the poker players. There were only four of them. The other six card tables, the keno outfit, and the dice table were idle.
One of the players was the big-eared drunk who had made the welcoming speech at the hotel. Slim Vogel was the name. He was a Circle H. A. R. hand, as was Red Wheelan, who sat beside him. Both of them were full of hooch. The third player was a quiet, middle-aged man named Keefe. Number four was Mark Nisbet, a pale, slim man. Gambler was written all over him, from his heavy-lidded brown eyes to the slender sureness of his white fingers.
Nisbet and Vogel didn’t seem to be getting along so good.
It was Nisbet’s deal, and the pot had already been opened. Vogel, who had twice as many chips as anybody else, threw away two cards.
“I want both of ’em off’n th’ top—this time!” and he didn’t say it nicely.
Nisbet dealt the cards, with nothing in his appearance to show he had heard the crack. Red Wheelan took three cards. Keefe was out. Nisbet drew one. Wheelan bet. Nisbet stayed. Vogel raised. Wheelan stayed. Nisbet raised. Vogel bumped it again. Wheelan dropped out. Nisbet raised once more.
“I’m bettin’ you took your draw off’n th’ top, too,” Vogel snarled across the table at Nisbet, and tilted the pot again.
Nisbet called. He had aces over kings. The cowpuncher had three nines.
Vogel laughed noisily as he raked in the chips.
“’F I could keep a sheriff behind you t’ watch you all th’ time, I’d do somethin’ for myself!”
Nisbet pretended to be busy straightening his chips. I sympathized with him. He had played his hand rotten—but how else can you play against a drunk?
“How d’you like our little town?” Red Wheelan asked me.
“I haven’t seen much of it yet,” I stalled. “The hotel, the lunch-counter—they’re all I’ve seen outside of here.”
Wheelan laughed.
“So you met the Jew? That’s Slim’s friend!”
Everybody except Nisbet laughed, including Slim Vogel.
“Slim tried to beat the Jew out of two bits’ worth of Java and sinkers once. He says he forgot to pay for ’em, but it’s more likely he sneaked out. Anyways, the next day, here comes the Jew, stirring dust into the ranch, a shotgun under his arm. He’d lugged that instrument of destruction fifteen miles across the desert, on foot, to collect his two bits. He collected, too! He took his little two bits away from Slim right there between the corral and the bunkhouse—at the cannon’s mouth, as you might say!”
Slim Vogel grinned ruefully and scratched one of his big ears.
“The old son-of-a-gun done came after me just like I was a damned thief! ’F he’d of been a man I’d of seen him in hell ’fore I’d of gave it to him. But what can y’ do with an old buzzard that ain’t even got no teeth to bite you with?”
His bleary eyes went back to the table, and the laughter went out of them. The laugh on his loose lips changed to a sneer.
“Let’s play,” he growled, glaring at Nisbet. “It’s a honest man’s deal this time!”
Bardell and I went back to the front of the building, where the cowboys were still knocking the balls around. I sat in one of the chairs against the wall, and let them talk around me. The conversation wasn’t exactly fluent. Anybody could tell there was a stranger present.
My first job was to get over that.
“Got any idea,” I asked nobody in particular, “where I could pick up a horse? One that can run pretty good, but that isn’t too tricky for a bum rider to sit.”
The Milk River hombre was playing the seven ball in a side pocket. He made the shot, and his pale eyes looked at the pocket into which the ball had gone for a couple of seconds before he straightened up. Lanky Dunne was looking fixedly at nothing, his mouth puckered a bit. Buck Small’s pop-eyes were intent on the tip of his cue.
“You might get one at Echlin’s stable,” Milk River said slowly, meeting my gaze with guileless blue eyes; “though it ain’t likely he’s got anything that’ll live long if you hurry it. I tell you what—Peery, out to the ranch, has got a buckskin that’d just fit you. He won’t want to let him go, but if you took some real money along and flapped it in his face, maybe you could deal. He does need money.”
“You’re not steering me into a horse I can’t handle, are you?” I asked.
The pale eyes went blank.
“I ain’t steering you into nothing whatsomever, Mister,” he said. “You asked for information. I give it to you. But I don’t mind telling you that anybody that can stay in a rocking chair can sit that buckskin.”
“That’s fine. I’ll go out tomorrow.”
Milk River put his cue down, frowning.
“Come to think of it, Peery’s going down to the lower camp tomorrow. I tell you—if you got nothing else to do, we’ll mosey out there right now. It’s Sunday, and we’ll be sure of catching him.”
“Good,” I said, and stood up.
“You boys going home?” Milk River asked his companions.
“Yeah,” Smith spoke casually. “We gotta roll out early in the mornin’, so I s’pose we’d ought to be shakin’ along out there. I’ll see if Slim an’ Red are ready.”
They weren’t. Vogel’s disagreeable voice came through the open door.
“I’m camped right here! I got this reptile on th’ run, an’ it’s only a matter o’ time ’fore he’ll have t’ take a chance on pullin’ ’em off’n th’ bottom t’ save his hide. An’ that’s exac’ly what I’m awaitin’ for! Th’ first time he gets fancy, I’m goin’ t’ open him up from his Adam’s apple plumb down to his ankles!”
Smith returned to us.
“Slim an’ Red are gonna play ’em a while. They’ll git a lift out when they git enough.”
Milk River, Smith, Dunne, Small and I went out of the Border Palace.
III
Three steps from the door, a stooped, white-mustached man in a collarless stiff-bosomed shirt swooped down on me, as if he had been lying in wait.
“My name’s Adderly,” he introduced himself, holding out one hand toward me while flicking the other at Adderly’s Emporium. “Got a minute or two to spare? I’d like to make you acquainted with some of the folks.”
The Circle H. A. R. men were walking sl
owly toward one of the machines in the street.
“Can you wait a couple of minutes?” I called after them.
Milk River looked back over his shoulder.
“Yes. We got to gas and water the flivver. Take yor time.”
Adderly led me toward his store, talking as he walked.
“Some of the better element is at my house—danged near all the better element. The folks who’ll back you up if you’ll put the fear of God in Corkscrew. We’re tired and sick of this perpetual hell-raising.”
We went through his store, across a yard, and into his house. There were a dozen or more people in his living-room.
The Reverend Dierks—a gangling, emaciated man with a tight mouth in a long, thin face—made a speech at me. He called me brother, he told me what a wicked place Corkscrew was, and he told me he and his friends were prepared to swear out warrants for the arrest of various men who had committed sixty-some crimes during the past two years.
He had a list of them, with names, dates, and hours, which he read to me. Everybody I had met that day—except those here—was on that list at least once, along with a lot of names I didn’t know. The crimes ranged from murder to intoxication and the use of profane language.
“If you’ll let me have that list, I’ll study it,” I promised.
He gave it to me, but he wasn’t to be put off with promises.
“To refrain even for an hour from punishing wickedness is to be a partner to that wickedness, brother. You have been inside that house of sin operated by Bardell. You have heard the Sabbath desecrated with the sound of pool-balls. You have smelled the foul odor of illegal rum on men’s breaths!
“Strike now, brother! Let it not be said that you condoned evil from your first day in Corkscrew! You have seen men whose garments did not conceal the deadly weapons under them! In that list is the black record of many months’ unatoned sinfulness. Strike now, brother, for the Lord and righteousness! Go into those hells and do your duty as an officer of the law and a Christian!”
This was a minister; I didn’t like to laugh.
I looked at the others. They were sitting—men and women—on the edges of their chairs. On their faces were the same expressions you see around a prize ring just before the gong rings.
Mrs. Echlin, the livery man’s wife, an angular-faced, angular-bodied woman, caught my gaze with her pebble-hard eyes.
“And that brazen scarlet woman who calls herself Señora Gaia—and the three hussies who pretend they’re her daughters! You ain’t much of a deputy sheriff if you leave ’em in that house of theirs one night longer—to poison the manhood of Orilla County!”
The others nodded vigorously. Echlin’s eyes had lit up at his wife’s words, and he licked his lips as he nodded.
Miss Janey, school teacher, false-toothed, sour-faced, put in her part:
“And even worse than those—those creatures, is that Clio Landes! Worse, because at least those—those hussies”—she looked down, managed a blush, looked out of the corners of her eyes at the minister—“those hussies are at least openly what they are. While she—who knows how bad she really is?”
“I don’t know about her,” Adderly began, but his wife shut him up.
“I do!” she snapped. She was a large, mustached woman whose corsets made knobs and points in her shiny black dress. “Miss Janey is perfectly right. That woman is worse than the rest!”
“Is this Clio Landes person on your list?” I asked, not remembering it.
“No, brother, she is not,” the Reverend Dierks said regretfully. “But only because she is more subtle than the others. Corkscrew would indeed be better without her—a woman of obviously low moral standards, with no visible means of support, associating with our worst element.”
“I’m glad to have met you folks,” I said as I folded the list and put it in my pocket. “And I’m glad to know you’ll back me up.”
I edged toward the door, hoping to get away without much more talk. Not a chance. The Reverend Dierks followed me up.
“You will strike now, brother? You will carry God’s war immediately into blind tiger and brothel and gambling hell?”
The others were on their feet now, closing in.
“I’ll have to look things over first,” I stalled.
“Brother, are you evading your duty? Are you procrastinating in the face of Satan? If you are the man I hope you are, you will march now, with the decent citizens of Corkscrew at your heels, to wipe from the face of our town the sin that blackens it!”
So that was it. I was to lead one of these vice-crusading mobs. I wondered how many of these crusaders would be standing behind me if one of the devil’s representatives took a shot at me. The minister maybe—his thin face was grimly pugnacious. But I couldn’t imagine what good he’d be in a row. The others would scatter at the first sign of trouble.
I stopped playing politics and said my say.
“I’m glad to have your support,” I said, “but there isn’t going to be any wholesale raiding—not for a while, anyway. Later, I’ll try to get around to the bootleggers and gamblers and similar small fry, though I’m not foolish enough to think I can put them all out of business. Just now, so long as they don’t cut up too rough, I don’t expect to bother them. I haven’t the time.
“This list you’ve given me—I’ll do what I think ought to be done after I’ve examined it, but I’m not going to worry a lot over a batch of petty misdemeanors that happened a year ago. I’m starting from scratch. What happens from now on is what interests me. See you later.”
And I left.
The cowboys’ car was standing in front of the store when I came out.
“I’ve been meeting the better element,” I explained as I found a place in it between Milk River and Buck Small.
Milk River’s brown face wrinkled around his eyes.
“Then you know what kind of riff-raff we are,” he said.
IV
Dunne driving, the car carried us out of Corkscrew at the street’s southern end, and then west along the sandy and rocky bottom of a shallow draw. The sand was deep and the rocks were numerous; we didn’t make very good time. An hour and a half of jolting, sweltering and smothering in this draw, and we climbed up out of it and crossed to a larger and greener draw, where the mesquite grew in small trees and bees zizzed among wild flowers.
Around a bend in this draw the Circle H. A. R. buildings sat. We got out of the automobile under a low shed, where another car already stood. A heavily muscled, heavily boned man came around a white-washed building toward us. His face was square and dark. His close-clipped mustache and deep-set small eyes were dark.
This, I learned, was Peery, who bossed the ranch for the owner, who lived in the East.
“He wants a nice, mild horse,” Milk River told Peery, “and we thought maybe you might sell him that Rollo horse of yours. That’s the nicest, mildest horse I ever heard tell of.”
Peery tilted his high-crowned sombrero back on his head and rocked on his heels.
“What was you figuring on paying for this here horse?”
“If it suits me,” I said, “I’m willing to pay what it takes to buy him.”
“That ain’t so bad,” he said. “S’pose one of you boys dab a rope on that buckskin and bring him around for the gent to look at.”
Smith and Dunne set out together, pretending they weren’t going eagerly.
“Where’s Red and Slim?” Peery asked.
“Stayin’ in a while,” Small told him. “Slim’s a million ahead in a poker game.”
Presently the two cowhands came back, riding, with the buckskin between them, already saddled and bridled. I noticed each of them had a rope on him. He was a loose-jointed pony of an unripe lemon color, with a sad, drooping, Roman-nosed head.
“There he is,” Peery said. “Try him out and we’ll talk d
inero. I warn you, I ain’t so damned anxious to get rid of him that I’ll let him go for nothing. But you try him first—trot him down the draw a little ways and back. He’s downright sweet.”
I chucked away my cigarette and went over to the buckskin. He cocked one mournful eye at me, twitched one ear, and went on looking sadly at the ground. Dunne and Smith took their lines off him, and I got into the saddle.
Rollo stood still under me until the other horses had left his side.
Then he showed me what he had.
He went straight up in the air—and hung there long enough to turn around before he came down. He stood on his front feet and then on his hind ones, and then he got off all of them again.
I didn’t like this, but it wasn’t a surprise. I had known I was a lamb being led to the slaughter. This was the third time it had happened to me. I might as well get it over with. A city man in range country is bound to find himself sitting on a disagreeable bone sooner or later. I’m a city man. I can sit any street car or taxicab in the world, and I can even ride a horse if he’ll coöperate. But when the horse doesn’t want to stay under me—the horse wins.
Rollo was going to win. I wasn’t foolish enough to waste strength fighting him.
So the next time he traded ends, I went away from him, holding myself limp, so the tumble wouldn’t ruin me.
Smith had caught the yellow pony, and was holding its head, when I took my knees off my forehead and stood up.
Peery, squatting on his heels, was frowning at me. Milk River was looking at Rollo with what was supposed to be a look of utter amazement.
“Now whatever did you do to Rollo to make him act thataway?” Peery asked me.
“Maybe he was only fooling,” I suggested. “I’ll try him again.”
Once more Rollo stood still and sad until I was securely up on him. Then he went into convulsions under me—convulsions that lasted until I piled on my neck and one shoulder in a clump of brush.
I stood up, rubbing my left shoulder, which had hit a rock. Smith was holding the buckskin. The faces of all five men were serious and solemn—too serious and solemn.