Wolf Creek (14 page)

“We didn’t have to catch him,” Sam said. “He
turned himself in. Kind or. By accident.”

“Huh?”

“A fella came over to the jail yesterday,”
G.W. explained. “He’d got cleaned out by Cash Gibson in the poker
game. He got real drunk, then went up to Gibson’s hotel room and
stabbed him. Couple days later here he comes, carrying a wanted
poster he had found of Cash Hooper, wanting to claim the
reward.”

“ ‘That is quite civic of you,’ I told him,”
Sam said. “‘But unfortunately that Cash was already killed a few
days ago.’ Fella says it was all a case of mistaken identity, we
have him locked up to explain it to the judge.”

“Then there was the hardluck young cowboy
who got his boots stolen,” G.W. said, “but Sam’s man Quint got them
back for him.”

“And there was that horse thief that pulled
on B.T. and got plugged in the gut for his trouble,” Sam said.

“Yes,” said Satterlee, “there was him.”

“And I thought we were going to have to
shoot a half-dozen more people at the end of the tournament,” Sam
said, “when it came down to just Ben Thompson and Samuel Jones, and
Jones won. A whole bunch of people claimed it was a fix, since
Jones is one of the house gamblers—but he paid his hundred bucks,
on the square, just like everybody else. They did require some
convincing, though.”

“It helped,” said G.W., “that Thompson drew
on the crowd and told them to back off, that Jones had beat him
fair and straight.”

“So,” Dab said. “Three killings—two of them
outside of town—a few drunks and rowdies knocked down and sent
packing, three sets of bank robbers out of which only one set
succeeded but didn’t get much, and a cowboy got his boots
stolen.”

“Ayep,” G.W. said. “That sounds like about
it.”

“Hm. Well, is that any worse than an average
week in Wolf Creek?”

“You make a good point, Mister Mayor,” Sam
said. “In fact, it was kind of on the light side.”

“You see what happens, Dab,” G.W. said,
“when you give us the money to hire more deputies?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dab said. “We
couldn’t afford that on a regular basis. Still, it did seem to help
in this situation. Now that we’ve seen how it works, we may just
have to make this an annual event.”

G.W. sighed. “You really do like to gamble,
don’t you.”

Dab smiled. “I like to win, gentlemen. I
like to
win
. Good evening to you.”

When Dab was gone, G.W. heaved another
sigh—this time, a very real one.

“Well that sounds cheerful as hell,” Sam
said. “What’s bothering you?”

“It’s that horse thief Ben Tolliver shot,
Huntington.”

“What about him?”

“Something doesn’t add up. The man had no
gun, no gun belt, yet Ben says he drew a hideout gun on him.”

“What are you saying? Do you think B.T. just
gunned him down unarmed?”

“No, I don’t think that. I think he gave the
man one of his own guns and forced him to draw, knowing he didn’t
have much of a chance, rather than bring him back in.”

“Huh. I’d never think of B.T. as lazy.”

“Not because he was lazy. You
know
how Ben is about his horses.”

“Everybody knows how Ben is about his
horses. It has made for many an entertaining joke around the old
campfire. Although I admit I do have nightmares sometimes about him
cavorting on the prairie with old Chollo, neither one wearing a
shirt.”

“This is no joke, Sam.”

“No, if anybody messes with his horses, it’s
not gonna end well for ‘em, that’s for sure.”

“You can’t just shoot someone down, just
because you can—no matter what they’ve done—and call it law.”

Sam’s face darkened. He thought back to that
moment, during the winter, at Andrew Rogers’s ranch, when he had
shot the man down like the dog he was.

“Is this about Ben Tolliver,” he said
softly, “or is it about me?”

Satterlee did not turn his head to look at
his friend. “Why? You got somethin’ you want to tell me?”

“What if I do?”

“Then don’t.”

“Simple as that?”

“Simple as that. You’re my friend, and so is
Ben. You’re both good lawmen. I don’t know what I ain’t there to
see. I’m sittin’ here studying about that dead horse thief—but
that’s all I’m doing. Studying on it. We got to be better than
them, that’s all I’m sayin’.”

“We’re alive and they’re not,” Sam said.
“That’s a step better, in my opinion.”

“Maybe,” G.W. replied. “Maybe not.”

“Basically, though, what you’re really
saying,” Sam said, “is that you’d prefer your friends keep their
cards close to their vest rather than lay ‘em out on the
table.”

“If they have a losing hand, and the stakes
are higher than they can afford to pay, yes, I guess I do.”

They sat there in silence as the last pink
of the sun faded away, leaving them in darkness.

“You ever figure out where Laban got to?”
Sam said at last.

“No idea. But I know he ain’t the sort to
just abandon his family without a word.”

“Strange.”

“I’ll tell you what’s strange, Sam. That
damn little barber, Hix. Stranger than usual, I mean. He’s gone
from asking about war stories here and there to pestering everybody
about it every day.”

“Morbid curiosity ain’t against the law last
I checked, G.W. Lucky for me, too.”

They sat awhile longer.

“Reckon we need another bottle,” Sam
said.

“Reckon we do.”

The End

ABOUT THE WOLF CREEK AUTHORS

JAMES J. GRIFFIN
I’ve had a great interest in the West and particularly Texas
Rangers from when I was a kid, so it was natural when I started
writing the Rangers would be the subject of my novels. Over the
years I’ve accumulated enough knowledge about the Rangers to be
considered an amateur historian of the organization. I also amassed
a large collection of Texas Ranger artifacts, which are now in the
permanent collections of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum
in Waco. I recently wrote a ten issue series of short stories for
High Noon Press. These are ebooks, titled A Ranger Named Rowdy, A
Texas Ranger Tim Bannon story. All are currently available,
and a Christmas “Ranger Named Rowdy” novella will
be released in both electronic and print versions in early
December.
My short story “The Toys” was a
finalist for

the 2012 Peacemaker Award for best short
story.

My other great passion in life is horses, especially Paints. I’ve
owned horses most of my life, and currently own an American Paint
Horse named Yankee. He is a Pet Partners certified therapy animal,
and we make visits to local hospitals and nursing homes. In
addition, Yank and I are members of the Connecticut Horse Council
Volunteer Horse Patrol. We act as auxiliary

park rangers, patrolling
state parks and forests.
I’m a native New Englander, and as much as I love the West I love
New England, particularly my adopted home state of New Hampshire,
even more. Currently, I divide my time between Branford,
Connecticut and Keene, New Hampshire.
To learn more about my books, and see some of Yankee’s tricks,
check out my website at
www.jamesjgriffin.net
.
Jim’s novel
A Ranger to Stand With
is a 2016 Peacemaker finalist.

J.E.S. HAYES
In a
past life, J.E.S. Hays was an outlaw. In this life she lives in
South Carolina in a little house full of books and photographs.
J.E.S. is the creator of the Devon Day and the Sweetwater Kid
tales, DOWN THE OWLHOOT TRAIL (a short story anthology) and OUTLAW
SECURITY (a novel currently on the publishing house circuit). She
is working on book two of the novel series at the moment. When not
off in her own little world, J.E.S. will be wandering around with a
camera in one fist. You can find J.E.S. on her website
at
www.jeshays.com
, or on
Facebook at JESHaysBooks for writing advice, or Twitter @jes_hays
for daily writing prompts.

VONN MCKEE
grew up in a river town in
northwest Louisiana, where stories hung in the air at church
picnics, back porch family singings, and country store counters.
She was first published in the fourth grade–a poem in the school
newspaper–and by her teens was a professional singer/songwriter.
She has lived in Nashville for many years and recently expanded
into literary writing. She loves destinationless driving, antiquing
and cooking for family and friends. She has been nominated for both
the Spur and Peacemaker Awards.

TROY D.
SMITH
hails from Sparta, Tennessee. His
first Western story appeared in
Louis
L’Amour Western Magazine
in 1995; in 2001
his novel
Bound for the
Promise-Land
won the Spur Award. He earned
his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois and teaches at Tennessee
Tech. As a professional historian his primary fields are American
Indians, slavery, and the South; as a historical novelist, his
interests lie in the human beings at the heart of his stories. “I
don’t write about things that happen to people, I write about
people that things happen to.” He was the second president of
Western Fictioneers, and has won both the Spur and Peacemaker
awards, being finalist a finalist for both on several
occasions.
www.troyduanesmith.com

CHARLIE
STEEL,
Tale-Weaver Extraordinaire, is a
novelist and internationally published author of short stories.
Steel credits the catalyst for his numerous books and hundreds of
short stories to be the result of being a voracious reader, along
with having worked at many varied and assorted occupations. Some of
his experiences include service in the Army, labor in the oil
fields, in construction, in a foundry, and as a salvage diver.
Early in his life he was recruited by the US Government and spent
five years behind the Iron Curtain. Steel’s work has been
recognized and reviewed by various publications and organizations
including Publisher’s Weekly, Western Fictioneers, and Western
Writers of America. Steel holds five degrees including a PhD. He
continues to read, research, and collect western literature. He is
the author of Desert Heat, Desert Cold, and Other Tales of the
West. Charlie Steel lives on an isolated ranch at the base of
Greenhorn Mountain, in Southern Colorado.
www.charliesteel.net

CHUCK TYRELL
I’ve read westerns all
my life. The first one I remember was Smokey, by Will James. I read
everything I could find, living far away from the west in Japan. In
1979, I wrote a western novel for a Louis L’Amour write-alike
contest. Didn’t win. Decided I could not write fiction. The
typewritten manuscript occupied a bottom desk drawer until 2000. I
dusted it off and edited it as I input it into a computer file.
Sent it off to a publisher, Robert Hale Ltd., in London. They
bought it providing I’d cut it down to 40,000 words. The novel is
now known as
Vulture Gold
, the first of the Havelock
novels.

Besides awards
in advertising and article writing, a short story won the 2010
Oaxaca International Literature Competition and my novel
The Snake Den
won the
2011 Global eBook Award for western fiction. Other than that, I
just write westerns and fantasy. My home is in Japan, where I live
with one wife and one dog and one father-in-law, visited quite
often by daughters and grandkids. I write most of my fiction by
longhand, usually at Starbucks. Other writing I do on the laptop.
My website is
www.chucktyrell.com
and
my blog is
www.chucktyrell-outlawjournal.blogspot.com
I have a number of short stories lying around in
various anthologies.