Free Dead Warrior by John Myers Myers Page A

was not the only one who blinked at this method of handling the situation. “You can’t do that, Ed,” one of the others declared. “A man’s always deputized for a whole manhunt, and you ain’t got the right to fire any of us till we get back home. What’s more, I don’t know as Sid didn’t do the right thing, and maybe we ought to back him up.”
    Alexander Hamilton slipped outside. Terry removed his right arm from the table. I was wishing I had practiced drawing a revolver when Ed finally spoke.
    “I’m resigning’,” he said. Unpinning the star from his shirt with his left hand, he shoved the badge of office into his pocket. Next he looked at his four associates, one after the other. “Do you get that, all of you? I’ve quit; I ain’t goin’ back. Now does any one of you boys want to tell me which sheriff you all are deputies of?”
    It was a victory for logic, if not necessarily for law and order. “I guess we can’t be deputies if that’s the way you’re going to act,” one of the former peace officers muttered, “but I think we ought to get full mileage from the county.”
    “Sure you ought, and I’ll say so in my letter of resignation.” The sheriff then waved cheerfully to us. “A new citizen’s buyin’, so you Texas old-timers ought to get in on it. That was a nice piece of ridin’, Terry.”
    Pointing out that if they hadn’t been following McQuinn they would never have been surrounded by Indians in the first place, Sid continued to sulk. Unscathed themselves, the remaining ex-posse members could afford to be more philosophical. A second drink sufficed to establish an era of good feeling. Terry was just spilling money on the bar for another round when I heard the voice of the landlord.
    “Say, Pat.”
    It took a minute for me to remember that I was Patrick Henry. “What’s on your mind, Alex?”
    “Well, now that it don’t matter to you where my saloon is, I was wonderin’ if you’d mind movin’ it back out of Texas again. Not all of my customers get along with the law as well as you and Ben Franklin, and I’ll lose their trade if I’m on the wrong side of the border.”
    Ed Whittlesey, to give the quondam sheriff his full name,rolled his eyes and rested them sadly on McQuinn. “I wish I’d been raised by the Blackfeet, but shucks, I never had no early advantages. How do you make saloons jump like checkers anyways?”
    My horses had been grazing beyond the cottonwoods around Hamilton’s water hole. As Ed, Terry and myself went to get them, the former caught sight of the coach, which had been left in the shade of the trees in order to keep the driver’s seat cool.
    “It looked from the tracks as if you must’ve hitched a ride on a stage, but I couldn’t believe it,” he remarked. “What’re you goin’ to do for a bronc, Terry?”
    “I think Alex can supply me with one, or can scrape up a customer with a horse to spare.” McQuinn gave a peculiar whistle, and one of the wheel horses stood fast, instead of shying away, as it usually did when I tried to catch it. “At least I don’t think that fat squaw of his makes lariats just to skip rope with.”
    The landlord did indeed prove equal to the occasion. It wasn’t quite dark when a man showed up leading a saddled mustang. By then I had a pleasant cargo of liquor aboard and was in the mood to go on indefinitely, but Terry insisted on pulling out.
    “We’ve done fine here so far,” he replied to my remonstrance, “but the best way to end up with a slit throat is to try to make a night of it in a place like this.”
    So it was a few miles down the trace that we had our nightcap. It was also our stirrup cup, as they planned to ride south and east to Fort Griffin at dawn, while I intended to push south toward Tascosa.
    Whittlesey was readying his blanket roll for travel the next day when Terry took me aside. “We’ll be meeting again in some camp or other,” he told me.
    “Sure,” I said, not believing it