Free Waco's Badge by J. T. Edson

holster from which it had come.
    â€œLooks like leaving the Army hasn’t stopped you finding trouble, major,” Peter Glendon remarked, joining the man who had been his commanding officer on the street.
    â€œIt found me,” Mosehan corrected. “Only I’ll be damned if I know why. Do you recollect anybody called ‘Joe Benedict’ while we were serving together, Pete?”
    â€œI can’t bring any such to mind,” Glendon confessed, after thinking for a few seconds, oblivious of the crowd who were gathering.
    â€œThat jasper said I had his brother hanged,” Mosehan explained, indicating the body with a jerk of his thumb. “But none of the three were called ‘Joe Benedict’.”
    â€œNo,” the stocky man agreed. “The two you arrested for raping and killing that Navajo girl were Buckton and Weighill and that snow-bird 2 who murdered the old prospector on the Yellowstone afore we tracked him down was called Joel Benskill. But we never had no doings with a feller called Benedict.”
    â€œAnd, unless he was using another name, I haven’t come across one since I took over at the Hashknife,” Mosehan declared. “Comes to a point, I haven’t hadanybody hanged since those three either and every one of them was guilty.”
    â€œThere’s no god-damned doubt about that,” Glendon confirmed, then gave a derisive sniff and continued, “Here come the local John Laws, on time as usual.”
    Glancing in the same direction as his former sergeant, Mosehan studied the two local enforcers of law and order who were pushing with scant courtesy through the onlookers. Both appeared to be in their early twenties and, being a shrewd judge of character, he was not impressed by what he saw even without the indication of disapproval displayed by Glendon.
    Slightly the taller of the two, Jackson Martin clearly regarded himself as the leader. His surly features were set in a frown augmented by the moustache he cultivated to make him appear older. Longish black hair shown from beneath his round topped black hat. He wore a black cutaway coat, floral patterned vest, white shirt and black string tie. Striped trousers were tucked into the legs of his riding boots. Looking so glossy it might have been patent leather, his gunbelt carried two rosewood handled Colt Civilian Peacemakers in its fast draw holsters. A sawed off shotgun rested upon his bent right arm and the badge of a deputy sheriff glinted under the left lapel of the jacket.
    No better looking, with a similar hirsute appendage on his top lip, Alfred “Leftie Alf” Dubs was brown haired and two years younger. His attire wasmuch the same as that worn by Martin, but of cheaper material, and his Colts had plain walnut grips. Unlike his companion, he displayed his badge of office in plain view and was carrying his sawed off shotgun with his near hand grasping the wrist of its butt.
    â€œWhat’s happened here?” Martin demanded, halting and eyeing the two men arrogantly, his accent Mid-Western and suggesting a good education.
    â€œThat man tried to kill me,” Mosehan replied quietly, nodding to the body. “And I stopped him.”
    â€œIt looks that way,” Martin admitted and something of his arrogance left in the presence of a man he sensed could not be browbeaten by virtue of his civic authority. “Who is he?”
    â€œI don’t know,” the major declared. “That’s the damnedest thing about it. He claimed I’d had his brother hanged, but the name he gave doesn’t come to mind.”
    â€œYou hanged so many men you can’t remember them all?” challenged Dubs, in a voice suggesting he came from the same region as his companion, albeit his origins were lower on the social scale.
    â€œI said I’d had hanged, not that I’d hanged them,” Mosehan corrected coldly. “There’s a difference. Anyways, whoever he was,