Free The Ballad of Dingus Magee by David Markson

‘Course they was. And then we drawed on each other, like always happens when a stalwart sheriff meets up with a notorious desperado—but I beat you easy. Had the drop on you afore you could scratch two gnats off’n a whore’s behind. So then you tried to skedaddle, being cowardly at heart like most immoral criminals. I could of kilt you, but I dint see no reason to do that, seeing as how I get the same reward money either way. So I jest calmly shot you on a tangent, like, in a location where you couldn’t run too fast, is all.”
    Dingus howled at him, charging to the front of the cell. “Why, you—you—is that what you’re saying done happened?”
    “Reckon so, especially seeing as how I jest wrote it that way.”
    “Why, you coyote-brained, pussle-gutted, limp-tooled old polecat!” Dingus was sputtering. “Now blast it all, Hoke, I were shot in the ass long afore you ever snuck on into Miss Pfeffer’s, and you know that for a gen- u -ine true fact!”
    Hoke pursed his lips, eyeing him. “Now Dingus,” he said. “You think a famous law officer like C. L. Hoke Birdsill has got time to fret over details?”

4

    “… the best job that was ever offered to me
    was to become a landlord in a brothel.
    In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu
    for an artist to work in.”
    William Faulkner
    So Hoke was content again, almost euphorically so. Because it had been a long and dismal six months, more full of frustration and bitterness than he wanted to remember.
    Nor was Hoke thinking merely of that disastrous pretended jailbreak which had cost him both his reward money and his sinecure at Belle’s, since that had only been a beginning. After that there had still been the duplicity of the vest for him to endure, if not to say almost becoming a murderer over—not only tonight with Turkey Doolan but twice before. Even now, as he smirked over his ultimate victory, the memory of those earlier misdirected shootings still brought a taste of gall to Hoke’s mouth.
    Both episodes had occurred very soon after Dingus tricked him. Hoke had taken instinctively to hanging around Belle’s again, in the hope that he might redeem at least part of the calamity by getting his original job back, but Belle would not hear of it. As a matter of fact she had finally added insult to injury by ordering him to keep away from the bordello altogether unless he had money to spend.
    So he was actually moping disconsolately outside the house one night—wistfully eyeing Belle’s own prohibited upper rear doorway, in fact—when the first of the new indignities befell him. Two riders appeared along a rarely used trail, and before Hoke quite knew what he was doing he had emptied his Smith and Wesson at one of them. The second rider spurred off, but Hoke could not have cared less—until he discovered that the man he’d hit, the man in the red-and-yellow hinged Mexican-wool vest, was an inconsequential saddle tramp named Honig. The tramp had suffered a mild gash in the hip. What Hoke himself suffered at the realization of this new treachery was hardly endurable.
    So he began to spend time behind the bordello deliberately after that, well-hidden in a grove of cottonwoods and no longer even caring that he was further alienating Belle by being there. In fact he virtually camped in the trees for eight days, or more precisely nights, until Dingus cantered up along the same trail once again. This time it developed that he had presented the vest to a down-at-the-heels prospector named Arden. Hoke had set out three revolvers on a dry pine stump, and his third shot from the second gun nicked the prospector in the shoulder, going away.
    So by then the outrage was more than unappeasable: Hoke was almost mad. Belle actually threatened to shoot him on sight if she caught him within a hundred yards of her premises now—as did one of her better customers likewise, an elderly, normally undemonstrative barber who had suffered a mild stroke in the arms of a