Jack Parker Comes of Age Read online

  Once they got back to Mayfield, Tom Parker said to his son, ‘I got a little job for you, if you think you’re up to it.’

  ‘What is it, sir?’

  ‘Your friends from school all know what’s what, don’t they? About what happens at home, what their folk talk of at table and so on?’

  ‘I reckon, yes.’

  ‘Suppose you spend the rest of this day just talking to your friends and trying to gauge what the mood is? I know what men say to my face, but I’ve no notion at all what they say in their own homes.’

  ‘It sounds like spying,’ said Jack uneasily, ‘I don’t know that I like the sound of it.’

  His father did not speak for a minute and then said slowly, ‘I don’t know that I care for it either, boy. If I was asking you just for the sake of gossip and being curious, your objection would be a sound one – but I’m not. This is life and death. What’s a little subterfuge, compared with saving lives?’

  A philosopher might well have been inclined to debate this point with the sheriff of Mayfield, but Jack Parker was no logician, and neither was he much of a one for metaphysics. He did as his father had bid him, and went off to find out what he could about the views and opinion of the town’s citizens, as regarding the idea of armed invaders in and around Mayfield.

  Starting with Pete Hedstrom at the livery stable, Jack wandered around town that afternoon, catching up with his former schoolmates and listening to their views. More often than not, they framed their statements with direct reference to what they had heard from their parents, typically, beginning by saying, ‘My pa says. . . .’ or ‘It’s like Ma told me the other day. . . .’ Almost without exception, their parents appeared to favour the homesteaders over Timothy Carter and the other long-established ranchers. Talking this over with his father that evening, Jack could not see why this was.

  ‘See, son,’ his father said, after Jack had reported back on what he had managed to pick up about the mood of the town, ‘Those hands from the ranches spend money, but more often than not in the saloon. They cause a heap o’ trouble too, into the bargain. Getting drunk, insulting folk, bothering young women and suchlike. The homesteaders are families for the most part. They want to build something up. They might not be spending a whole lot, but they’re decent folk and they go towards making this a good town to live in. Times are changing, the old ways are gone. Folk here want to live the way people do in big cities, back east. They want trams and telephones, not drunken cowboys brawling in the streets.’

  ‘Will they join you then, I mean if it comes to fighting?’

  Tom Parker rubbed his chin and said meditatively, ‘That, as you might say, is the big question. They’d rather not. They want me to deal with all this by my own self. But I think if there’s a bunch of no-goods from outside fetching up here and causing bloodshed, then they might. They just might.’

  According to the best information available to Sheriff Parker, which he shared with his son, the train containing the fifty or more ‘regulators’ recruited in Texas was due to arrive in Cheyenne on the Tuesday. The wires between Texas and Wyoming had been fairly humming, and the sheriff knew all that he needed to for his purposes. A contact just across the state line in Colorado informed him that somebody had bought thirty horses and was arranging for them to be transported to Cheyenne, arriving at about the same time as the train from Texas. This tied in with word from Paris, that only about twenty horses were being carried in an extra car on the train. Presumably it was thought that acquiring mounts in Colorado would not be noticed as much as buying them in Wyoming would. The aim was, Sheriff Parker supposed, to assemble this body of armed men, ride into Benton County, kill a bunch of people and then leave the area as swiftly as could be, before there was time to organize any kind of opposition. He would have to move pretty sharpish himself, if he were to have any hope of averting what promised to be a large-scale shedding of blood.

  The day after he nearly clashed with Carter’s Texan range detective, Sheriff Parker found himself up against the man again. This is what happened. It may well have been true, as the sheriff contended, that the vast majority of the newcomers to Wyoming were as honest as anybody else, but inevitably, bad apples were to be found among them, as in any other large body of men and women. In short, there were real stock thieves scattered here and there, and such men were not wholly a figment of Timothy Carter’s imagination.

  Jack was, at his father’s instruction, polishing various bits and pieces in the office and trying to make it look a little smarter and better kept. Now that both deputies were back, his duties had become a little more menial and Jack wondered if this would change if his father really did agree to swear him in as a deputy on his birthday, which fell in a few days.

  It was the morning after the little run-in with Dave Booker and his friends, and from what Jack could make out, his father had wired Cheyenne to see if he could pick up any information on what was happening with the train from Texas. Apart from waiting for an answer to his enquiry, nothing else much was happening. Brandon Ross was writing up some report and Sheriff Parker was reading through notices that he had received, chiefly relating to men wanted for various offences. It seemed to Jack that he was the only one of the three actually doing anything which was at all like work that day. As he polished the brass knob of the street door, somebody attempted to open it from without. He stepped back to allow this person to enter the office.

  The clerk from the hardware store down the street had never before had cause to venture into the sheriff’s office and he looked about him uncertainly. Tom Parker said, ‘Mr Jackson, what might I be doing for you this morning?’

  Jackson, a fussy and old maidish man of fifty, said, ‘I’m not in general one to mix myself up with things as don’t concern me, but somebody come in the store not five minutes since and told me something you ought to know.’

  ‘What’s that, Mr Jackson?’ asked the sheriff, ‘You can speak freely here, you know.’

  ‘Fellow said he’d passed along the way and seen what looked to him like a party of lawmen. They had two men with them, hands tied like prisoners. The whole lot of ’em were heading for Mr Carter’s ranch.’

  No sooner had the little man got these words out than Sheriff Parker was on his feet and going over to the rack of firearms at the back of the office. He selected a scattergun and as he did so said sharply to his son and Brandon Ross, ‘Bestir yourselves, the pair of you. We need to move like lightning. Mr Jackson, I’m obliged to you for the information, sir.’

  The storekeeper left, seemingly alarmed at the sudden flurry of activity. ‘Scribble a note for Jerry,’ said the sheriff, to nobody in particular, ‘Tell him we’ve gone up to the Carter place.’ Jack did this hurriedly, before snatching up his rifle and racing out the door after his father and the deputy. The three of them fairly ran down Main Street to the livery stable and then waited impatiently while Pete Hedstrom tacked up three horses. The second this was done, Sheriff Parker vaulted into the saddle and urging the other two on, set off up the road at a canter, causing passers-by to remark uneasily that their sheriff seemed in the deuce of a hurry and that maybe something was up.

  As they speeded up to a gallop along the road leading north out of town, Jack was gripped by a terrible fear that they would soon be coming across another hanging body. He had seen more than enough of such things in the space of a few weeks to last him a lifetime, and he prayed that it would not be so, that they would be in time to save the lives of the men who had evidently been taken up to Timothy Carter’s ranch.

  Had Dave Booker and his Texan friends been content to take off the two rustlers and hang them in some out of the way place, then Sheriff Parker and his two assistants would most certainly have had no chance at all of preventing their being lynched. Booker, though, was a cruel man, with the sort of playful streak that you see in small boys who torment kittens or pull the wings off flies. He had a mind to see the men he had captured suffer some mental agonies before they kicked out t
heir lives on the end of a rope. Something put it into his mind to stage a mock trial before disposing of the two men. The verdict and sentence would never be in doubt to Booker and his boys, but the victims themselves might be given a false hope, which would make their ultimate fate all the more bitter.

  When the sheriff, flanked by his deputy and son, rode into the yard in front of Carter’s imposing house, it was to find two men sitting on horseback with their hands bound and men holding the bridles of the horses, to forestall any desperate attempt to gallop away and escape. Booker, who was also seated on horseback was facing the men and behind him were a half dozen other riders. The scene put Jack Parker in mind of children playing at courtrooms, with Booker as the judge and the men behind him adopting the part of a jury. His face, when he turned round and saw who the visitors were, was anything but welcoming.

  ‘Care to tell me what’s going on here?’ enquired Sheriff Parker affably. ‘I didn’t know any better and I might mistake this for a necktie party. I hope I’m wrong, mind.’

  ‘This is no business of yours,’ said Booker, ‘Whyn’t you just go back to town and leave us to this?’

  ‘Can’t be done,’ said the sheriff, still in a pleasant tone of voice, as though he genuinely regretted having to disrupt another man’s enjoyment, ‘Those men, who I understand have been taken in the act of theft, are arrested by me. They’re my prisoners. Sorry about that.’

  Booker smiled and said, ‘They worth risking your life for?’

  Brandon Ross was sure that his boss was about to back down, facing as they did odds of three to one against men who would probably not hesitate to shoot them down if it came to the point. But Jack recognized that tone in his father’s voice, and knew full well that somebody was in for a dreadful shock presently.

  Booker should have known better than to lower his guard, just because a man was speaking pleasantly and smiling apologetically. He was revelling in the sense of power which came from having a lawman speak so to him, and didn’t think it significant that this same sheriff was walking his horse forward while chatting to Booker like he might have been a long-lost brother. It was not until Tom Parker produced from nowhere a sawn-off scatter gun, cocking both barrels with audible clicks as he did so and aiming it straight into Dave Booker’s face, that the other man realized the peril he was in.

  The thing had happened so swiftly that neither Booker nor his companions had yet had a chance to respond, when the sheriff said quietly in a completely different voice, ‘You all should know that I’ve taken first pull on the trigger here. I so much as sneeze or fart and I’m like to blow your head clean off your shoulders, Booker. You counsel your men to stay still and not go for their weapons.’

  ‘Do like he says.’

  ‘Hell, he’s bluffing,’ said one member of the impromptu jury, ‘he ain’t a-goin’ to shoot.’

  ‘No,’ said Booker in a lazy and unhurried way, ‘He’s not bluffing. Just you boys do as he says.’

  ‘I’m going to come up close to you and take that gun from your holster,’ said Sheriff Parker, looking straight into Booker’s eyes. ‘Don’t think of resisting, for it’ll be the death of you. Maybe I’ll get killed in what happens next, but you’ll still be dead, whatever next chances.’ Having delivered himself of these words, he walked his horse forward very slowly, never once taking his eyes off Booker. Then, making sure to keep the shotgun pointing straight at the other, he reached across and plucked the pistol from Booker’s belt. ‘There now,’ he said, ‘That went well enough, didn’t it?’

  Aware as he was that Booker was a cold-hearted killer, Jack could not help but admire the man for his coolness under what must have been a very nerve-racking and trying experience. He wondered if he himself would be able to remain so calm and collected with a scattergun aimed right at his face in that way. From the way that Booker was taking it, he and Jack’s father might as well have been having a beer together. ‘Brandon, you make those two prisoners ready to travel. Don’t take your eyes from them and be ready to shoot them too, if they show any signs of wanting to escape. Take them over to the entrance to the yard. You too, Jack. I’ll follow on with Mr Booker here.’

  Taking no notice of the other men in the yard, Tom Parker said to Booker, ‘Here’s how we’ll play it. You’re coming back to town with me. Any sign of treachery, something in the way of an ambush by your friends say, and I promise you that you’ll be the first to die. Even if somebody shoots me from cover, I’m bound to twitch my finger as I die and despatch you in the process. That clear?’

  ‘That’s clear,’ said Booker, he raised his voice a little and addressed his men, telling them, ‘You fellows set where you are. Don’t follow on. I’ll be back soon enough.’

  Once the little procession was clear of Timothy Carter’s land and on the road to Mayfield, one of the rescued men said fulsomely, ‘Sheriff, you got no idea how grateful me and my partner are. I truly thought that I was about to die.’

  ‘Yes, we’re mighty thankful. Maybe you could tell your men to free our hands now. It ain’t easy to ride like this.’

  ‘You men live round these parts?’ asked Tom Parker casually, ‘I don’t recollect your faces.’

  ‘No, we’re from over in Johnson County.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  There was an awkward silence, which was broken only by Booker chuckling out loud. He said, ‘Ask ’em how we came across them, why don’t you?’

  The sheriff ignored Dave Booker and said, ‘Well? Cat got your tongues?’ to the two men. They said nothing.

  Sheriff Parker had so arranged things that Booker was riding at the head of the party, so that he could cover the man from behind with his scattergun. The two men whom he had snatched, as it were, from the jaws of death, rode a little behind him, with Brandon Ross and Jack Parker bringing up the rear. They rode on in silence for a while, until Booker said, ‘You really going to take me all the way to town?’

  ‘That I am,’ said Sheriff Parker, ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Cause I’m wondering if you’re fixing for to make me ride down Main Street like a prisoner, when all I done was catch some stock thieves, men as the real law never touches.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how it is, Booker,’ said the sheriff. ‘I don’t want men in the town to think that Carter and his boys are running Benton County, nor nothing like it. Seeing his chief man been led around at the point of a gun, I’d say that was mighty wholesome for them to observe. What they call an “object lesson”, I believe.’

  ‘You know I’m like to kill you, you do any such thing?’

  ‘We’ll see what we see.’

  In the event, Sheriff Parker did indeed lead Booker and his two prisoners down Main Street, which caused no small amount of interest among those walking along the sidewalk that day. When they got to the office, the sheriff dismounted and encouraged Booker to do likewise. Then he said, ‘I understand that you wish to lay an information against these men for stealing or attempting to steal some livestock. Have I got that right?’ When Booker simply shrugged, too furious to speak, the sheriff carried on, saying, ‘Unless those steers were your property, then I can’t take a statement from you. The owner will have to attend here. I’m guessing that’d be Timothy Carter?’

  ‘He’s in Cheyenne.’

  ‘Well, when he gets back, be sure to tell him to attend my office.’

  Booker was clearly irritated by this exchange, and when it was over, said, ‘How about handing me back my pistol?’

  ‘Mood you’re in?’ said Sheriff Parker, with a laugh. ‘You’re like to shoot me down on the spot! Get somebody to call for it tomorrow, when you’ve cooled down a bit.’

  After Booker had left, muttering curses, imprecations and threats of bloody revenge under his breath, one of the two men who had lately escaped summary hanging said, ‘Sheriff, you were magnificent. We can’t thank you enough.’

  Tom Parker turned and eyed the two men coldly. He said, ‘I got no more love for rustlers tha
n the next man. You two can spend the night in my cell and then if the owner of the steers doesn’t show up, I’ll release you on a bail bond. But I tell you now, I reckon you’d be well advised to leave Benton County while you’ve the use of your limbs. I’m not likely to rescue you a second time.’

  After Brandon Ross had locked the two men in the cramped little cell at the rear of the sheriff’s office and Jack had taken the horses to the livery stable, the sheriff and his son spoke seriously. Or rather Sheriff Parker spoke and his son listened. ‘You still want to try your hand at being a deputy? You’ve not repented of the notion, after seeing what you have in the last few days?’

  ‘No sir, I reckon not.’

  The older man sighed and said, ‘I pledged my word and I won’t break it, least of all to my own kin. Three days from now, on your birthday, you still want that I should do it, I’ll swear you in. At least ’til this business is settled. But I beg you to think the better of it.’

  Chapter 6

  Timothy Carter did not show up to make a statement about the theft of his cattle, and so the day after he had rescued them from being lynched, Sheriff Parker freed the two rustlers; repeating his earnest advice that they should leave Benton County as swiftly and quietly as they were able. After their narrow escape, he formed the impression that they were minded to heed his warnings. After ridding himself of his unwanted guests, the sheriff read a wire which had just been delivered to the office. It informed him that the train from Paris, with the ‘regulators’ aboard, had now left Paris and would be likely to arrive in Cheyenne that very night. Allowing for a day or so to get themselves organized and prepared, that might mean that the Texans would be hitting Benton County, if that were indeed their aim, on the day after tomorrow: Jack’s birthday.