Paper Sheriff (2 page)

“Your father will be proud of you, Jen,” Reese said.

“I'll see that Sebastian hears it in detail,” Judge Heatherly said and gave Jen a wan, tired smile.

“Proud of me losing for him?” Jen asked quietly. “He's proud of a winner, not of a loser.”

Reese pulled out one of the attorney's chairs beside Jen and slacked into it, looking over at Judge Heatherly. “I liked that benediction you aimed at the jury, Judge. You might have been speaking for me and for Jen.”

Judge Heatherly grimaced. “I caught on to those four fairly early in the week. They never said a word, of course, but you could read it in their faces.” He hesitated, musing for a few moments that were not interrupted. “There's a type of man who's born hating all women. As soon as he can walk, he resents their discipline and he escapes it as soon as he can. He's the kind that beats up women because that act proves to him that he's superior and they're inferior. He's the unsworn enemy of their sex—I say unsworn because he isn't conscious of despising them. That feeling is just part of him, like the act of breathing. He'll neither love nor respect a woman until the day he dies.”

Now he looked at Jen with fondness and with sympathy. “You can't keep this kind of man off a jury, Jen. He wouldn't admit to this prejudice even if you asked him, because he doesn't know he has it. When he gives all the right answers to the questions put to him by attorneys for both sides, he's accepted as a responsible juror and seated.” The Judge squared his hands in a gesture of helplessness and added, “Then what happened today is inevitable. Those four men weren't casting a ballot on the guilt or innocence of Orville Hoad. They were simply voting against a woman, all women.”

Now he put his palms on the table and pushed himself upright. “I'm tired and at the moment I'm disgusted with the human race. And I'm sorry for you both.” He picked up his hat and briefcase from the chair beside him. “Now I'll say goodbye.”

They bid him goodbye and watching him as he tramped slowly down the hall and turned into the corridor.

Jen and Reese regarded each other for a moment and then Reese said, “I can understand why he feels sorry for you, but why should he include me?”

“Maybe for the same reason I feel sorry for you, Reese,” Jen said quietly.

“And why do you?”

Jen shrugged slightly. “You're married into the Hoad family, Reese. I don't think they'll be forgiving.”

“No, they won't,” Reese said, just as quietly. “But as long as I know that, I can handle them.”

“Is Callie bitter about it?”

Reese smiled crookedly. “Up until today she thought I was only doing my routine job. I haven't talked with her since I was on the stand this morning.”

“Poor girl,” Jen said softly. “It can't be easy for her, can it?”

Reese said dryly, “I can tell you that later.”

Jen turned and picked up her black briefcase from the chair beside her. She said, without looking at Reese, “No, don't tell me later. I don't want to know.”

“You'll know,” Reese said. “You'll see it in me or in her and it won't change anything, will it?”

Jen stood up. “Nothing will,” she said quietly. “I have to go, Reese.”

Reese came to his feet and said, “Tell your father I'll be around tonight. Between the Judge and me we ought to convince him you're a passable lawyer.”

For the first time that day Jen smiled. She said goodbye and Reese watched her leave the court-room, her back proud and straight once more, thanks mainly, he thought, to Judge Heatherly's words.

Reese sat down again, grateful for the silence and solitude of the empty court-room. He wanted to assess the importance of this day's events, now that the trial was over. The testimony that had been given this morning had been explosive and had seemingly assured Orville Hoad's conviction for murder in the first degree. It came from a surprise witness whom Jen and Reese had hunted down, questioned and then hidden. Orville Hoad had been charged with the murder of Will Flowers on a May night two weeks ago. The two men, both presumably drunk, had quarrelled openly at a card game at the Best Bet saloon.

The quarrel, which took place in the early hours of the morning, was broken up by the other card players before the two men could come to blows or gun play. Will Flowers, a heavy drinking, dry-land farmer with a passion for gambling, never carried a gun. After the quarrel, the game broke up and Flowers headed for Hunters Feed Stable to get his horse. Orville Hoad followed him minutes later, heading for the same destination and on the same errand.

Orville Hoad's story was that Flowers waited for him in the stable back out of the light from the lantern hanging in the archway. Hoad maintained that Flowers took up a position at the entrance of a stall over whose partition some puncher had thrown his saddle. Over the horn of the saddle he had looped his shell belt and gun, a customary practice of cowhands who wanted to do some drinking but who wanted to stay out of a shooting spree. Hoad claimed that Flowers gave him a tongue-lashing in the half-lit stable, then turned to the shell belt and reached for the gun in its holster. Out of self-defense, Hoad pulled out his own gun and shot the half-turned Flowers before he was shot himself. There were no known witnesses and Hoad's story was plausible.

But Reese's persistent questioning of the day hostler at the stable had turned up the fact that a strange cow puncher that same evening had asked to sleep in the hayloft, was given permission, turned over his matches to the hostler and then had gone out into the town hunting for a saloon.

On a quiet and painstaking search, with only the hostler's description of the stranger to guide him, Reese had hit every town and ranch within a fifty-mile radius of Bale. He was looking for a recently hired hand. He turned up a dozen of them, but only one had fitted the description given by the hostler. Under Reese's questioning, this man finally admitted that he watched the shooting. Flowers, according to him, was searching the stalls for his horse when Orville Hoad came in and re-started their quarrel. He tried to goad Flowers into a fight, but Flowers had cooled off and wanted no more of their quarrel. When he turned away, Hoad shot him in the back. It was true the puncher had left his saddle, shell belt, and gun on the stall partition. Hoad had simply walked over to the stall, drawn out the gun, pitched it on the stable floor by Flowers' body and walked out. The stranger, afraid of what he had seen happen in a strange town, simply got his horse and rode out.

This morning Reese had taken the stand and stated simply that he had uncovered a witness to the murder. The stranger was put on the stand, gave his testimony, which was unshakable under the cross-examination, and afterwards Jen gave her summation.

Now, what was Callie Branham going to think of her husband, who had kept the secret of the murder witness from her, Reese wondered. She would think he had not trusted her and she would be right. Beyond that she would think he and Jen had secretly conspired to hang one of the Hoads and again she would be right.

Unconsciously he sighed and then rose, tramping back into the corridor, turning and going down it to his small office in the rear corner. As he stepped into the room he saw his deputy, Jim Daley, seated at the single roll top desk. At the sound of his entrance Jim Daley turned and the two men regarded each other silently. Daley was a stocky, middle-aged man, dressed in clean range clothes. Surmounting his broad, fight-scarred face was a thick mat of short-cut grey hair that burred out from a round skull. Now Daley said in a low-voiced, mocking drawl, “Bailiff, free the prisoner.”

Reese smiled crookedly at his deputy's recollection of Judge Heatherly's orders. Daley was bailiff of the court and he was not likely ever to forget those words. Reese slacked into a chair beside the desk and said tiredly, “I guess I married into a lucky family, Jim.”

“Any chance that family got to those four jurors, Reese?” Then he added, “Excuse the question, but is there?”

“It's possible, but I don't think so,” Reese said gloomily. “I think, and so does the Judge, that they didn't like the idea of a woman trying to get a man hanged. You can add this too. I think they might have been afraid that the Hoad clan would gun them down if they voted to hang Orville.”

Daley, watching him carefully, opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. But he could not keep the pity out of his eyes and Reese, seeing it, was unaccountably angry. Judge Heatherly felt sorry for him, Jen felt sorry for him and now Jim Daley felt sorry for him too. The anger died then and Reese rose. “Jim, the Hoads are celebrating tonight. They'll be liquored up and they may take a notion to come to town and crow. If they come in stay away from them, unless they get into some trouble you have to handle.”

Daley nodded and said quietly, “They're an easy bunch to hate, all right.”

“And not worth risking your life for,” Reese said dryly. “See you tomorrow, Jim.”

Reese went out the corridor's rear door and headed for the open shed where the horses of the county employees were stabled. He saddled his grey gelding, then rode down the alley which led onto Bale's main street.

Normally he liked the sight of the wide street of false front buildings at this hour of the early evening. Businessmen, their stores locked up for the day, would wave to him on their way home. Kids, running on last minute errands, would call to him. The Best Bet, a big box of a saloon with a hotel in its second storey, would be cheerfully noisy. The horses and riders coming into town for the evening or leaving town for the night would have stirred up the dust that seemed yellow in the rays of the slanted sun. This same sun seemed to bring out the color in the few drably painted buildings and in the weathered wood of the unpainted ones.

But as he rode down the street now the town seemed to hold no charm or friendliness. For the first time since he was sworn into office he wondered why he had let his friends prevail upon him to run for sheriff. They had promised him that after they elected him he would become a “paper sheriff”, a figurehead. He could hire himself a good deputy, they said, and go about his business of running his Slash Seven cattle outfit. What they were after, they told him; was a stockman sheriff, one of their own, not a miner's sheriff and not a soft sheriff who would take money and open up the town and attract a rough element by its easy reputation. But now, he thought morosely, he had been rewarded for his labors by this bitter farce of the Hoad trial.

His mood stayed with him for the two mile ride over rolling prairie grassland which brought him to his own fence and gate. The Slash Seven, the original Joe Bale ranch bought by his father, had the sprawling look of having been built by a man who wanted plenty of room. The big two-storey log house had single storey wings on the east and west sides and lay among giant cottonwoods so thickly foliaged that the flowers Callie planted had to fight for enough sun. It was a big house meant for a big family, Reese thought—a family it would never have. Reese rode past it and the cookshack-bunk-house to the pasture gate where he unsaddled and turned out his grey. There was smoke coming from the chimney stack of the kitchen wing, and that meant Callie was home. A kind of quiet dread touched him as he moved toward the open kitchen door and stepped inside.

Callie was at the big iron stove against the far wall and Reese noted she had changed out of her blue dress into a drab and unbecoming brown one over which she now wore an apron. At his entrance she turned to look at him but did not speak. Reese nodded and said mildly, “Smells good in here.”

He shucked out of his coat and hung it and his hat on a nail beside the door, then moved over to the sink. As he took down the wash basin and filled it from the sink pump, he said, “You didn't have to come home to get my supper, Callie. Why didn't you stay?”

“I wanted to,” Callie said shortly.

Reese glanced at her swiftly, searchingly, and he could tell that the color in her usually wan cheeks did not come from the heat of the stove but from the Hoads' moonshine. He untied his tie, rolled up his sleeves and was soaping his face when Callie said from close behind him, “I wanted to stay, but I came home. Remember that, will you?”

Reese rinsed his face, reached for a towel and then, drying himself, turned to Callie. “All right, but why?”

There was anger in Callie's face, he saw, and he could smell the rank odor of whisky on her breath.

“You'll find out,” she said enigmatically.

She went back to the stove and now Reese, after hanging up the towel, moved over to the cupboard, took down a bottle of whisky and a glass and poured himself a drink.

“Make me one too,” Callie said.

Wordlessly, Reese took down a second glass, poured a drink, then moved with both glasses over to the pump and splashed water into them. He could not yet fathom Callie's mood nor the meaning of her words, but he knew she was laying the groundwork for something special. Moving across the room he extended Callie's drink to her and then lifted his own. It had barely touched his lips when he saw Callie move swiftly. A fraction of a second later he caught the full force of Callie's drink in his face. Slowly he wiped his eyes with his sleeve and then very calmly threw the contents of his own drink in Callie's face.

Callie gasped with shock and Reese said quietly, “Smarts the eyes, doesn't it?” He turned now and went back to the counter, towelled himself, poured another drink, mixed water with it, then turned to watch Callie. She was wiping her face with a dishtowel and was at the same time crying.

“Pa would shoot you for that!” Callie said furiously.

“He'd probably shoot me for less than that,” Reese said contemptuously. “Now let's talk this out, Callie, not fight it out. What's wrong?”

“You ask that?” Callie said hotly. “After trying to hang my uncle, after keeping secrets from me along with that bitch of a woman, you ask me that?”