Free Cherokee by Giles Tippette Page B

see the sheriff and then I need to get home. We’re gathering cattle.”
    I went on out, turned right, and walked down the boardwalk to Lew Vara’s office. The sheriff was in, sitting behind his desk with his boots up on a corner, his arms folded, and a cigarillo in his mouth. I said, “Don’t you worry about them voters, Lou. They can see you’re on the job even if you ain’t got your spurs on.”
    â€œI’m thinkin’,” he said. “Job requires a certain amount of that.”
    I sat down in a wooden chair across from him. “Well, you’d want to take it careful on such a practice. Man could hurt hisself.”
    He brought his boots down to the floor with a thump. “What the hell you doing in town?”
    Lew and I went back a lot of years to a time when we were both about nineteen and had done our level best to kill each other in the worst fistfight I’d ever had. He’d left the country after that, and had almost gotten on the other side of the law. He’d gone up into the Oklahoma Territory, where I was headed, and fallen in with bad company. Of course, there wasn’t no shortage of that commodity up there then, or now as far as that went. But he’d come to his senses and come back home before he’d gone too far. As a favor for some well-appreciated help he’d given me and my family, we’d backed him for sheriff some seven or eight years back, and had had no cause to ever be sorry.
    But just looking at him you’d be more likely to take him for a bandit than a sheriff. You looked at him from one direction he looked like a Mexican. From another side he looked like an Indian. And in some ways, he didn’t look like either. He was about two inches shorter than I was, but about the same weight. Most of that weight was packed in his upper body, his shoulders and his arms and his big hands and neck. Lou was not anybody to take lightly. He wasn’t particularly good with a handgun, but then he didn’t have to be. He had a presence about him that could usually stop trouble before it got started.
    I said, “Oh, getting some business set up I’ve got to tend to.”
    â€œI help?”
    â€œYeah,” I said. “Friday afternoon I’ll be coming out of the bank with twenty-five thousand dollars in gold hidden in two nail kegs. Be me and Ray Hays. We’ll leave town riding north. I’m trying to keep this as quiet as I can, but I wish you’d back-trail me for about three or four miles. Make sure nobody in town has got wind of it and is looking to make a payday. Hang back about a mile, mile and a half.”
    â€œYou don’t want me to go further?”
    That was Lou. Tell him you’re riding out of town with $25,000 in gold in two nail kegs, and he don’t even raise an eyebrow, much less ask any questions.
    I said, “Naw, we’re going a pretty good ways. I don’t think the voters could spare you as long as I’ll be gone.”
    He raised his arms and stretched. “I’m sorry to hear that. I won’t have anybody to drink with. At least anybody that pays their share.”
    I got out a cigarillo and lit it. “You still remember the geography around Oklahoma, don’t you?”
    â€œPalm of my hand. That where you’re headed?”
    â€œYeah. Anadarko. Any idea where that is?”
    He leaned his elbows on the desk. “Smack dab in the middle of the Indian Nation. My people, Cherokee.”
    I said, “I wish you’d get it straight. One day you ain’t got no Indian blood, next day you do.”
    â€œHell, I’ve always thought you had more Injun in you than I do. I swear there’s a war chief somewhere in your background.”
    â€œNever mind about that,” I said. “How far you figure it is up there?”
    He gave me a look. “You don’t mean by horseback?”
    I nodded. I didn’t know what there was to