Max Collins - The Legend of Caleb York

Anyway, he could catch a few winks at his office and then, bright and early, go and deal with a certain town problem — that gunfighter, who he’d come to believe was almost surely Wes Banion. Time to show Trinidad that strangers couldn’t just ride into town and start shooting down deputies...

Gauge had figured to stretch out on a jail cell cot, but found Rhomer had beat him to it, sleeping it off in their nicest accommodations. His number two man looked disheveled and battered, his left ear bandaged, the white of it stained red.

The sheriff kicked the cot until the red-bearded deputy woke with a start, propping up on his elbows, dark blue, bloodshot eyes popping.

Gauge frowned at him. “What the hell happened to you? Horse throw you?”

Rhomer swallowed thickly, held one side of his head, then sat up, rattling the chains that held the cot to the wall. “Hell... really tore one on over at the Victory. Is it morning?”

“It’s the A.M., but it ain’t morning. Your ear’s bleedin’.”

“One of Lola’s girls got rough and I got rough and...” He grinned stupidly. Touched his bandaged ear, grimaced. “Kind of got bit.”

“Well, I hope you gave her as good as you got. Is our shootist still in town?”

Rhomer nodded. “I think he’s over at the hotel. But that ain’t the half of it.”

Gauge sat next to him. “What is?”

The deputy swallowed, apparently not relishing the taste, and gathered his thoughts, such as they were.

“When I went over to the doc’s,” he began, “to get this flapper patched up? Doc and Banion... I mean, I figure it’s Banion...”

“So do I. Go on.”

“Anyway, Doc and Banion come down the steps carryin’ somethin’ — somethin’ all wrapped up in a sheet. Now, I figure right off it’s a body...”

Wincing, Gauge thought, I really do need to find a brighter second-in-command.

“... and then I was sure it was a body, when I saw this hand flop down, and the doc kind of picks it up and tucks it back under. The doc, he was wearin’ work gloves, what’s a doc wearin’ work gloves for?”

“I don’t know. Go on.”

“Anyhow, the doc and Banion cart this body out back and walk past the houses to where it’s nothin’ but country, and just disappear off into the dark. Did I say that there was this shovel laid out on top of the body, on the sheet?”

“No. You didn’t.”

Rhomer nodded shrewdly, eyes narrowed. “I figure that was a body that they was goin’ out to bury in the boonies.”

“Seems at least a possibility.”

“Anyways, I sat on the stairs in the alley there, by the bank, waitin’ for the doc to get back. When he finally does, Banion ain’t with him. Or the body, neither, of course. All he has is that shovel.”

“Did you ask him what he’d been up to?”

“Well, yeah, in a way, but mostly I was hurtin’ and wantin’ him to tend to my ear. I lost a piece of it, and he done some stitchin’. So we was just jawin’, while he was sewin’, and I ask him where he’d been and such. I josh him—‘You off diggin’ for gold, Doc?’ He laughs a bit and says, no, he just had this-here dead dog to bury.”

“Bury a dog. Middle of the night. You just let that slide, did you, Vint?”

“I was lucky gettin’ the doc to patch me up, middle of the night, is how I took it.”

What body would the doc and the stranger feel the need to bury, right now, right this instant, under cover of night?

Troubled, the sheriff rose. “Catch yourself some more sleep, Vint. We may have a busy day tomorrow. Likely an early start.”

Gauge decided to go over to the hotel to get a decent bed — maybe a few hours would help him think straighter, to cipher through this conundrum of bodies buried in the wee hours But as he passed his desk, he noticed something: an envelope with Sheriff Gauge written neatly there. He went around to sit and saw that it was a telegraph office envelope.

He tore it open and read:

To Sheriff Harry Gauge, Trinidad, N.M. Wesley C. Banion killed by deputies this city two months prior. R. Bishop, Marshal, Ellis, Colorado

“When did this come?” he demanded of the deputy in the jail cell.

Rhomer, already half-asleep again, sat up like a man out of a bad dream. “Don’t rightly know, Harry. Saw it on the desk when I come in. Door was open. Somebody dropped it off, I guess.”

The telegraph clerk Parsons. Gauge had told him to deliver anything that came in, whenever it came in...

“And Banion’s over at the hotel?” Gauge asked.

“Far as I know,” Rhomer said, touching his sore ear, then flopping back down on the cot, hurting side up, and turning to put his back to his boss.

A few minutes later, Gauge found Lola, in a dressing gown, standing at the check-in desk. She turned to him with surprise, maybe even alarm, showing in her features. The same could be said of the scrawny, near-hairless clerk, eyes wide and blinking behind spectacles that pinched his nose.

Lola, rather breathlessly, said, “ Harry!... I was just coming to find you.”

“What are you doin’ up?”

Her smile seemed nervous to him, as she said, “Oh, some damn kid threw a rock through my window. Now there’s a mess up there, and I was inquiring after another room for tonight.”

The chinless clerk was nodding and smiling in a sickly fashion, backing her up.

Gauge frowned. This didn’t sound right. But he had bigger things on his mind.

“Let me see that register,” he said to the clerk, gesturing impatiently at the tall, narrow volume.

The clerk swallowed, making his bow tie bobble, and said, “Just so you know, I was going to send somebody over to your office first thing in the morning, Sheriff.”

“Give it here.”

The clerk turned the register around and pushed it across. “I mean, it’s plain that this stranger was playing me for a fool. Just the same, I thought you should see this... Like I said, I was going to bring it over first thing...”

Gauge was looking at the name that the stranger had signed into the book.

Caleb York.

Lola, at his side, was looking, too. “It’s a joke. Has to be. Caleb York is long dead. A year or more. Wes Banion shot him.”

“Two years ago,” Gauge said.

She looked at him with wide eyes in a pretty face still wearing evening paint. “Then... he is Banion.”

“No. Just some fool.” His gaze bore into the clerk. “Is he here?”

“No!” The quavery man pointed to the upstairs. “He took a room” — and then to the entry doors — “but he went back out some time ago.”

Gauge nodded, shut the register hard, shoved it back at the clerk, and turned to head out. Lola’s hand at his arm stopped him.

“Harry... what now?”

“Now I’m gonna rouse Rhomer out of his dainty slumber and have him round up every man I got in this town. Then I’m gonna send them out lookin’ for this would-be Caleb York, and have them—”

“ Kill him?”

What did she care?

“No. Have them bring him to me.” He stopped just before he went out to add, “I’m going to kill him myself.”

Dawn was just a yellow-orange threat, like a distant fire hovering over distant buttes, as Willa brought more coffee to her father, their breakfast over, the dining table otherwise cleared. Both were in red plaid flannel shirts and denims, a blind man and his daughter, well-matched and ready for a working day.

Her blond hair ribboned back in a ponytail, Willa filled her own cup, then joined Papa at one end of the big table. There was so much to talk about... yet neither seemed able to find a word.

When a wall of stones is about to fall on you, she thought, which rock do you discuss?