Chapter 1 #2
“I have no doubt our festivities—parade, formal reception, and assembly—will outshine any show the governor puts on in Denver.” He paused and motioned back to where they’d come from. “I’ll put the viewing stand up right on the street in front of my office. Bunting and all.”
As they reached the next corner, an explosive detonated beyond the western end of town. Miners. Caleb didn’t think twice about it. At his ranch, he heard the blasts echoing along the ridges all the time.
Frissy, however, seizing on the chance to do his job, bulled past Caleb, leaving in his wake the smell of brandy and tobacco.
His employer waved him off. “Just some dynamiting at the mining works, Fredericks. Nothing to be alarmed about.”
They crossed the street, and three pillars of the community exchanged greetings with the judge. Caleb recognized one of them as the president of the Elkhorn Bank and another as the manager of the Wells Fargo Overland office. He didn’t know the third man.
“Gentlemen,” Patterson said, pausing for only a moment. “I’d like you to come to my office at four o’clock. I received a letter from the governor this morning.”
Horace D. Patterson was a man of importance, and everyone knew it.
He owned Elkhorn. And what he didn’t care to own, he still controlled.
Of medium height, he had a solid build and graying hair beneath his bowler that gave him an air of respectability.
He was clean-shaven, but sported long, thick side whiskers.
On the rare occasion that he stood still, he liked to slip one hand—Napoleon-like—inside the silver-gray waistcoat he wore beneath his charcoal suit.
Caleb had seen a sculpture of the old tyrant in the judge’s office.
Across Main Street, a crowd was spilling out of the open doors of one of the many saloons and gathering in the street.
From the center of the throng, three shots cracked in the air, accompanied by some wild whooping.
A miner was celebrating some good fortune.
He was staggering a little and waving a fistful of paper money in one hand and brandishing his smoking six-shooter in the other.
He fired two more in the air. The last one took a chunk of wood off the molding at the top of the saloon’s facade.
“Blast him!” Patterson exploded. “Is this the kind of behavior that our visitors need to be seeing next month?”
He made a quick gesture with his hand to Frissy, who turned and whistled shrilly to a man who slouched against the streetlamp at the corner.
The lone surviving deputy after the recent debacle with the town’s last sheriff.
Getting the message, the deputy spat out the twig hanging from his lips and trotted toward the disturbance.
“This is exactly why I’ve been harping in your ear, Marlowe. This town needs a firm hand to guide it toward civilization. Your hand.”
“You got a sheriff. Zeke will do just fine.”
At Caleb’s suggestion, the judge had given the badge to Zeke Vernon after the last sheriff and his rogue band came to a fitting end only ten days ago.
As a miner with a nearly pinched out claim, Zeke had already been working for Patterson when the need arose.
He was no quick draw artist, but he was a good man.
Solid as a rock and dependable as an old dog.
A curtain moved in one of the rooms above the saloon, catching Caleb’s eye.
As the window started to open, he instinctively unfastened the thongs over the hammers of his twin Colts.
A blond head emerged from the window. It was one of the women who worked the tables downstairs, looking to see what the shooting was about.
“Looks like you got everything under control, Judge.” Caleb nodded toward the disturbance. The deputy had pushed to the center of the crowd, and the exuberant miner promptly holstered his pistol and pointed toward the saloon.
“Zeke Vernon is a good man, but he lacks experience,” Patterson persisted. “He’ll need help. Consider it a temporary position, if you must.”
Watching the crowd break up and make its way back into the saloon, Caleb thought about being stuck in Elkhorn, jailing drunkards and breaking up street fights. He’d done this kind of job before, and he’d told himself, never again.
One positive thing was that he’d see Sheila more often. But did he want to?
“I got a ranch to run, Judge.” He tapped the elk skin vest he wore over his brown wool shirt. “I don’t need to wear no tin star to raise cattle.”
Patterson took hold of his arm and steered him along the sidewalk. He wasn’t a man to take no for an answer.
“It’s only six weeks until our most important visitors begin to arrive.
The number of people here in Elkhorn could double or even triple between now and then.
The hotels will be full, and the saloons will be packed with men of all kinds.
Without you to keep order, trouble could ruin our city’s reputation at a critical juncture in our… ”
The man continued to talk, but Caleb stopped listening.
He’d taken a deputy’s badge for the judge last month and done what was needed.
He’d left his ranch and gone up into the wilderness beyond Devil’s Claw.
He’d hunted down the outlaws who were holding up the Wells Fargo stagecoaches.
He had fulfilled his end of a bargain. He didn’t owe the judge a thing.
It was the other way around now, and that was the way he liked it.
Like river mist on summer morning, all sounds and thoughts of the discussion disappeared, burned off by the prickling sensation down the back of Caleb’s neck. He sensed trouble, and his instincts were rarely wrong.
On the far side of an alleyway ahead of them, a boy tapping a stick on a hitching post stopped short, his eyes widening as he caught sight of something or someone around the corner of the building, just out of Caleb’s line of vision.
A moment later, the gleaming muzzle of a pistol appeared. Then, the brown brim of a stovepipe hat and the eye of a gunman.
It was an ambush.