Bad Guys and Buckshot

by Jim Wilson

Jack Taylor spotted them the minute he left his shop and started down towards the Post Office. Years ago, Captain Wright had told him to always keep your head up and see what is going on around you. The Captain had said, that deer off down there just spooked from that oak thicket. Was it a coyote? A lion? Or was it some bandito who was about to draw a bead on you? It had been years since Taylor had ridden with the good captain but some old lessons just stuck with you.

In this case it was two men parked at the sidewalk in a brand new Ford automobile. They seemed to be dressed nicely in suits and snap-brimmed hats. But they were definitely strangers and seemed to have their attention drawn to the right, towards the courthouse. By the looks of the cigarette butts on the ground near the driver’s door, they had been there for a while.

When he came out of the Post Office, the strangers and their car were gone. Taylor went back to the task at hand. That task being to re-assemble a Remington Model 8 after he had replaced the firing pin and given it a good cleaning. John Browning might been a great gun inventor but Taylor sure wished that his designs might have been a bit simpler to take apart and put back together. For all of that, the Model 8 was a good, reliable rifle that was getting popular with a lot of Rangers and other Texas lawmen. This particular one, however, in .30 Remington, belonged to Bud Jenkins who ranched out west of town a ways.

A little after 1 o’clock, Jack decided to head up the street to Maggie’s Cafe for a bite of lunch. He liked to wait until the noon crowd had thinned out a bit so he could eat in peace. Mrs. Davidson, he never called her Maggie, served as good a lunch as a single fellow could find anywhere.

As he opened the cafe door, the two strangers were coming out. They nodded as he held the door and they walked past him. Tough looking guys in expensive suits, he thought.

Being the only one in the cafe, he asked, “Mrs. Davidson, what do you make of those two fellows that just left here?”

“Mr. Taylor,” she said, “I don’t know. They sure didn’t seem very friendly, but they left a nice tip.”

“Did you, by chance, happen to overhear any of their conversation?”

“Only that one of them said something about being paid good money and the other one said that they would get their work done tonight and blow this hick town. I assumed they were probably dealing in oil leases, or something like that.”

Later, when Taylor stepped out of the cafe and stopped to roll a cigarette, he noticed that the strangers and their car were gone. However, it looked like it was parked on up the street in front of the Baker hotel. And the fellow sitting in the chair on the hotel’s porch sure looked like one of the pair.

Back in his shop, Jack finished installing a Lyman receiver sight on a Model 94 Winchester and thought about the two strangers. For whatever reason, they didn’t strike him as being lease hounds. Men hustling oil leases were generally friendlier than these two seemed to be and lease hounds didn’t while away the daylight hours just sitting in their car, either. The fact that they might be at the Baker hotel made him even more suspicious.

This had been a quiet little ranch town until national Prohibition had been declared. And then right on the heels of that, oil had been discovered in the county. Things had gotten a little western in the past couple of years. Cowboys and oilfield hands liked to party and gamble. It was no secret that bootlegging had been on the increase and, at one time, there were poker and dice games going on in various places around town. Fights, cuttings, and shootings had become too common. And the Baker hotel had been the center of most of the action.

The previous sheriff just hadn’t seen anything wrong with all the action. He tried to point out to people that all of this action was sure good for the county’s economy. The good people of the county weren’t having any of that and suggested that the sheriff wasn’t doing his job to enforce the law. The final blow came when a rumor circulated that the sheriff had a financial interest in the whiskey sales and gambling, along with Jim Neal, the owner of the Baker hotel. In the next election the sheriff got beat.

G.B. Eastridge, the new sheriff, had come down from Oklahoma several years before. He had bought controlling interest in the local newspaper and eventually brought in a son to run it for him. Next, he had started an insurance agency and put another son in charge of that. Eastridge seemed to sincerely like people and had immediately gotten involved in the various projects that promoted the town and county. Taylor liked him and was one of those who encouraged him to run for office.

Immediately after he took office, Eastridge contacted the Texas Rangers and asked for help in cleaning up the gambling and bootlegging. Frank Mills, Charlie Miller, and a couple of other Rangers had come to town to back up Eastridge and his two deputies. They hit stills out in the county, busted up dice games, and jailed the thugs or ran them out of the county. And they did it with only one shooting and that was when some fool gambler pulled a gun on Charlie Miller and died in the process.

Jack Taylor had still been in the Rangers when Charlie joined the outfit. The two had hit it off from the very beginning. Taylor had taught Charlie how to do the Ranger job and Miller had taught Taylor a lot about getting a gun into action fast and accurately.

After the Rangers left, Sheriff Eastridge had hit the Baker hotel at least two more times. On the last raid, so rumor went, he and his deputies had walked in on two poker games and one dice game going full blast. It was said that they had seized a couple of thousand dollars off the tables and arrested 20 men. And, while the gamblers had been released after paying a fine, the district attorney had filed felony charges against Jim Neal, the hotel owner. Jack Taylor thought maybe he ought to tell the sheriff about these two new strangers.

Though he didn’t talk about it much, Eastridge had been an army officer during the late war. According to his sons, he had been in the thick of the trench war fighting and had been wounded several times. His sons also said that their father was one of the best shots with any kind of a gun that he picked up. All of which was quite strange because Sheriff G.B. Eastridge did not wear a gun of any kind while enforcing the law in the county.

When Jack had brought the subject up to the sheriff, Eastridge had said, “Now, Jack, you have to realize that this is 1932. It’s not the wild west anymore and we enforce the law in a civilized manner. Heck, I’ll bet that there are 20 or 30 other sheriffs right here in Texas who don’t habitually carry a gun. It’s just not dignified and folks, nowadays, expect their sheriff to be dignified.”

“But, G.B., you could get into a mess where you are the exception to the rule and, in that case, a pistol might be a handy thing to have. Besides, on the raids and arrests you are putting an extra burden on your deputies. They have to look out for your safety as well as their own. And, G.B., at the end of the day, you are responsible for your own safety.”

Jack Taylor was thinking about all of that as he walked across the street to the sheriff’s office in the courthouse. The office clerk, Mrs. Arnold, was there by herself. She said that Deputy Davis had gone to Fort Worth to pick up a prisoner. Deputy Mayfield was serving civil papers out in the west part of the county. And Sheriff Eastridge had gone down south, to the Gallagher Ranch, on some matter that he hadn’t discussed with her. Due to the distance involved, Mrs. Arnold didn’t expect the sheriff back in town until well after dark.

Taylor spent the rest of the afternoon in his gun shop. He sold some ammunition to a cowboy who was in town, stocking up on supplies. And he showed a new Winchester bolt-action rifle to a couple of oil executives who were doing a little early planning before deer season opened up next month. All the while, he thought about the two strangers and wondered if he might be overreacting.

Were those guys hired killers? Were they watching the courthouse, looking for the sheriff who didn’t carry a gun? Was retired Ranger Jack Taylor fixing to make a fool of himself? In the end, he decided that G.B. Eastridge was his friend as well as his sheriff and he was going to err on the side of caution.

Going to his private gun cabinet, Jack considered taking out his Model 94 or his 95 carbine. Instead, since this would be night work, he took out the Winchester Model 97 riot gun that he had used for night work in the Rangers. He stuffed it full of 00 buckshot and put more shotgun shells in his coat pocket.

Jack always prided himself in wearing a 3-piece suit while working. And one of the reasons that he did was because the suit vest did a good job of covering up the Smith & Wesson .44 Special that was stuffed in his waistband in front of his right hip. An outfit over in Fort Worth had special ordered the guns a few years back. They had had some bird do a horrible job of engraving some of the guns and they bought pearl and ivory stocks out of Mexico to further fancy up the guns. Jack couldn’t stand the engraving so he had bought a plain gun with a 4-inch barrel. But then he had gone back and bought a set of the ivory stocks with the steer head carved in the right panel with little ruby eyes. A little fancy didn’t hurt anything.

Just as dusk was turning to dark, Taylor draped his overcoat over his shoulders to conceal the shotgun that he carried, locked up, and headed for the courthouse. Assuming that the strangers would still be on the hotel porch, he turned to his right and went down the street a ways. Crossing the street, he went between the hardware store and a dress shop and then turned back up towards the courthouse. Coming up behind it, he circled around to the north and found a spot where he was near the door to the sheriff’s office but not visible from the hotel. Being well concealed, he rolled a smoke and sat down to wait.

A little over an hour later, he saw the sheriff’s car coming up the street and turning in at the curb. Getting up, Jack tried to look natural and relaxed as he walked to meet Sheriff Eastridge.

“G.B., I need to tell you about two strangers who are...”

  Before he could explain, a car came roaring up and screeched to a halt. Three men, guns in hand, jumped out.

“G.B., get down!”, Jack yelled.

As the sheriff dove to the ground, Taylor shrugged the overcoat off and thumbed back the hammer on his shotgun as he brought the gun to his shoulder. The man closest to them had a .45 auto in his hand and jack gave him load of buckshot in the chest, about level with this shirt pockets. Racking the slide, he swung on the man coming around the front of the car who, not seeing the sheriff on the ground, was already firing shots at Jack. Taylor gave him a dose of 00 in the face.

In the meantime, the sheriff had grabbed the bone handled .45 that the first crook had dropped. Lying prone, he rolled slightly onto his side, and using both hands fired five shots at the third killer. It was later found that he had connected with four of the five shots making a nice, tight pattern on the man’s chest.

When they had caught their breath and checked themselves for wounds, which there weren’t any, Jack and the sheriff checked their attackers. As he had suspected, Jack saw that two of the men were the strangers that he had seen that morning. The surprise came when they rolled the third man over, the one the sheriff had shot. It was Jim Neal, the hotel owner.

The courthouse gunfight was the talk of the town for several days afterwards. Several other lesser crooks and ne’er-do-wells decided to move on to greener pastures. And Jack bragged on Sheriff Eastridge, preferring to stay in the background and let the sheriff enjoy the publicity.

About a week later, Taylor looked up from a Colt that he was working on to see the sheriff come in the door of his shop. Always friends, they were now even closer as men who have shared a common adventure will often be.

Throwing down a badge and ID card on the counter, the sheriff said, “Jack, I can’t ignore that concealed Smith & Wesson you carry any longer. That’s against the law, you know. So, instead of arresting you, I decided to make you a Special Deputy. Try not to get any more wild west than you absolutely have to.”

Then, pulling back his coat to reveal the killer’s bone-handled .45 auto in a shoulder holster under his arm, Sheriff Eastridge said, “And I need some more ammunition for this Colt. A man’s responsible for his own safety, you know.”