Authors: Charles Hackenberry
"C'mon," he said, walking up my table, his eyes full of some annoyance or other. "Let's go ask John Tate about these cartridges."
"Sit down and have a beer, and let me finish this one and we'll go do 'er," I told him. It was still nice and quiet in Clooney's.
"No, it's too early for me," he said. "C'mon. Let that stuff alone. Let's go." He started for the door taking strides like he wanted to get somewhere.
I couldn't see the sense of letting a nice, cool half drunk beer go to waste, but I picked up just the same and followed him outside, where he was lighting a smoke.
We walked down toward Tate's store but neither of us said anything. It was a fine spring day, though. Sun had a little heat to it already, and you could tell the cold weather didn't have a chance no more.
Nice town, Two Scalp-mostly a one streeter, but you can't help but notice that there's houses going up pretty regular. They had started another one over in the east end, and you could hear them banging away at it from all over town. Mabel's whorehouse was the oldest building in Two Scalp, I guess, but it certainly wasn't the handsomest. The bank would carry off that prize, for it was made of stone and higher than any other thing in town, except the water tank. Pictures of lion's faces and leaves carved into it, all around the top. The bank, I mean, not the damn water tank. Course, most places were like Jones' Barber Shop, pretty rough and small, showing all the saw-cuts, but at least the barber shop didn't try to look like more than it was with a squared-off false front like a lot of the businesses did.
"What's on your mind, anyway?" I asked Clete after we'd walked for a while. "You worried about Nell or are them new pants too tight for ya?"
"No," he said after a minute. "I was just trying to figure out how to tell you you've been drinking too damn much without making you mad." He kept walking while he said this to me, sounding like he was just commenting on the weather. "Of course, it's your business, but it seems every time I need you I've got to go to Clooney's."
Well, I stopped right there and just waited for him to tum around, which he did after a few steps.
"Now just a minute," I said. "You're the sheriff here and I do what you tell me, but I don't remember bein' asked to sign no damn temperance card when you offered me the deputy job. Besides, there's nothing for me to stay sober for, anyhow. Biggest problem in this town, outside of a few drunks firing off their pistols, is the dust settlin' on people's furniture."
"Shit, Willie, I'm not against a man taking some whiskey, but not at the rate you're going. When was the last time you went all day without a drink? Or two or three?"
"Why, I don't know
when
that was and I don't care to try and recollect it, either."
Clete just stood there with a flat expression on his face expecting me to confess the error of my ways, I suppose, but I wasn't about to do that. "You want this badge, that what you want?" I ask.
Well, he screwed his face up and glanced at the sky and finally walked back to me. "No, I don't want the damn badge," he said, letting a little mad show through his voice. "But you're wrong about there being nothing for you to do." He lowered his tone some then. "I don't like whatever's goin' on out at Nell's. I talked to Jesse McLeod again last night and he came damn close to being killed." He took those funny-looking cloth-backed things out of his coat pocket and held them under my nose. "Whoever threw one of these at old Jesse meant to kill him. He lay in ambush and shot from more than half a mile off, you realize that? Now that doesn't sound like the work of anyone we know here in Two Scalp, does it?"
He waited a minute for me to answer. "No, it don't."
"You're damn right it don't," he said before the words was hardly out of my mouth. "Look, I'm going to need your help here, Willie. I rode around out where you did at Nell's and
I
didn't see a damn thing. But you didn't have anything to drink that day except a swig from Talfer's pint. You were probably more sober than you've been in two months."
He took a minute and hitched up his pants, likely waiting for me to cut myself a nice big wedge of humble pie, but I didn't.
"It's your business, true," Clete said, looking at me a little sideways. "But if you're gonna keep trying to pickle your brain in alcohol, I'm gonna
have
to get a new deputy, and I'd rather have you backing me up, when you're sober, that is, than anybody else I can think ofâeven though you can't shoot worth a dog's asshole."
Again he waited for me to declare myself a reformed man, but I'd already decided against that. A man's drinking is his own affair and nobody else's.
"Well, come on," he said, "Unless you intend to stand there all day like a damn statue. Doesn't seem right, two men standing in the street squabbling like schoolkids. I'm going to talk to Tate." He turned and walked off down the street, but I wasn't sure I was going. If he looked back, I didn't see him.
After a time I started down that way too. Truth is, I couldn't think of nothing else to do. Clete was already inside by the time I got there, but he was waiting for Tate to finish up with a customer, a lady who was buying some lamp wicks and yard goods, and I don't know what else.
John Tate sold dry goods and hardware, but mainly he sold guns. Everyone around bought guns and ammunition from John Tate, because if there was anything worth knowing about firearms, he knew 'er. Had all kinds of catalogs and announcements from the companies that made them, too. I watched him helping the lady out the door with her packages, and I never would have guessed that someone as gentle and polite as him would spend all his free minutes studying on the tools that men use to shoot one another.
After he said goodbye to the woman, Tate turned to Clete and me. "Can I help you gentlemen?"
"I hope you can, John," Clete answered. "Would you mind closing your shop for a few minutes? I'd rather not have everyone in Two Scalp gossiping about what I have to ask you. I'll ask you to keep this to yourself, too."
Tate's eyebrows sprung up. The spectacles on his nose slid down a notch or two, but he pushed them back up quick, locked his door, and then went behind the counter. "Of course, Sheriff, of course. What can I do for you?"
Clete dug the two shells out of his coat pocket. "Ever see anything like this?" He laid them on the counter real careful. Wellsir, Tate picked one up and turned it around in his hands, eyeing it as careful as most men do a good-looking woman.
"Yes, indeed, I know what this is. Haven't seen one in a while but I know it. Let me check my lists, just to be sure." He went into the back part of his store and Clete and I followed him. The place smelled of gun oil and turpentine, and I didn't see a cobweb anywhere. There were more revolvers and rifles back there than I ever seen in one place before, blued ones and browned ones and silver ones, enough to outfit all the Rangers and then some. After a minute he located the book he was after and flipped the pages quick. "Yes, indeed! Just as I thought, Sheriff. This is for the old breech-loading Sharps-fifty-two caliber!"
He smiled at Clete and me like he had just found a double eagle in the mud of the street.
Clete looked at me and I shrugged. Hell, I don't know nothing about firearms. "What can you tell me about the Sharps, Mr. Tate?" Cleteask.
"Well, I don't think I can get you one, if that's what you mean, not a new one anyway," John Tate answered, looking pretty sorry about it. "I'm almost sure they don't make them anymore, but you can still buy the cartridges."
"No, I don't want one," Shannon said. "Just tell me whatever you can about it."
"Oh, I see," Tate said, kind of lit up again. "This has to do with the law, doesn't it?"
"Yes, it does," Clete told him, trying to be patient, I could tell, even though he didn't feel like it. "And if you could just-"
"Yes, sir, I understand." He checked his book again. "Single shot breech-loader. That's linen there," he said, pointing a stubby finger at the cloth part. "Separately primed, of course-regular percussion caps. Let me see, I think this was the piece issued to Berdan's Sharpshooters."
I could see the hurry-up slide right off Clete's face. "This piece would have a pretty good range, then, wouldn't it?"
"Oh my yes! A thousand yards or more! That's why Berdan's men got them. Of course, you had to have a sharp eye to hit something that far away. They came with good open sights, but I've seen some of them fitted out with telescopes for sights, peep sights too, now that I think of it. Pretty heavy ball, and apparently pretty good rifting, too. And of course it took quite a bit of powder to-" Tate took to examining the shells again and frowning, and for a minute it seemed like he just forgot we were there. "Why, this is peculiar ⦠" He took out what I guessed was a little measuring tool with arms and sized up the lead I had sunk my thumbnail into before. "Well, it's the right size, certainly, but this isn't the standard projectile. I'm sure of that. Looks queer ⦠"
"What do you make of it?" Clete asked after a time.
"I don't rightly know, Sheriff. Somebody has modified this cartridge. I've never seen that before. The rings are all right, I believe, but this shape is off. If you could spare this one, I could take it apart and tell you more."
"Go ahead," Clete told him.
Tate took the thing over to his work bench and I watched him cut it open. "Thousand yards is more than half a mile, if they haven't changed the numbers since I was in school," I said to Clete.
"Lot longer range than my Henry," Clete allowed.
"My God!" Tate whispered, "will you look at this?!"
Well, we'd have like to, but we couldn't see a damn thing from where we stood. In a minute he brought it back.
"Why, this is an explosive bullet, gentlemen!" Tate said, waiting for us to be as confounded as he was. When we wasn't, he decided he'd have to give us our lessons. "They called them musket shells during the War, but nobody ever made them for the Sharps, as far as I know. Judging from the look of this, somebody turned these out for himself. See the remains of the file marks here?"
Clete picked the lead up off the counter and looked it over good. "What's this?" he ask.
"That's the fuse," Tate told him. "Set for just a little over a second, judging by the length of it. The explosion in the barrel lights it and then the fuse ignites the fulminate. Same principle as the exploding cannon shell." He fussed with the lead a minute and then laid out a chunk of stuff smaller than the end of your little finger. "This is what explodes it. If it's in your body by then, well, you're a dead man. If it's still in the air, it sends sharp little pieces of lead in all directions. Never saw one for the Sharps, though."
Clete tipped back his Montana and then rubbed his jaw. "Anyone around here gunsmith enough to fashion these for himself, except you, of course?"
"No, sir," Tate answered right away. "And I wouldn't do it either. You could easily blow a hand off with this stuff," he said, picking up the little core of fulminate. "And if you didn't form the lead properly, it could blow up in your rifle. No, I'd not try anything like that. Why, it's not even safe to carry these around in a standard cartridge box. I remember stories of some exploding under cannon fire. The man that happened to would never tell the tale, you can be sure."
Clete thanked the short, stubby storekeeper for his help and asked him again not to mention this to nobody else. Tate promised twice he wouldn't. Clete unlocked the door and we went back up the street the way we'd come down. "Willie, I don't like this, not one damn bit. Especially since I don't have a single guess as to who these things belong to and why he would want to use one on Jesse McLeod. Why, that old rancher has never harmed anyone. Nell says he never got around to making an enemy in all the time he's lived here, and he was one of the first ones in. Beats the hell out of me."
We got to Clooney's and I stopped. "You have anything you want me to do?" I ask him.
"No, I don't even know what I'm going to do." He looked at me hard but he didn't say nothing further.
"Well, I'm going in here and continue where I was," I told him. "You want a drink, I'm buying."
"No, I'm going over to the office and read the posters. May be something there. Keep a lookout over your shoulder," he said, and started across the street. Course, I knowed nothing about what was going to happen later when I spotted Corrie Sue by herself at the bar in Clooney's and walked over in my best strutting walk and told her how damn pretty she looked in that pink dress.
A few days later, I remembered him saying that to me, warning me to be careful about myself. The remembering brought tears to my eyes, I confess, for I believed then that they were the last words I'd ever hear him say.
The man in the high-peaked hat looked down on the town through his glass, a leather
and
brass model he
had
pried from the fingers of a dead Yankee officer on Horseshoe Ridge after Chickamauga. He
had
spotted his prey twice already today but could not get the shot he wanted. He would wait. He
was
good at waiting.
I
could
blame it all on Corrie Sue, I suppose. But I can't do that. Fact is, she was everthing a man could of wanted that afternoon. Sweet and willing and just like a lady sometimes. No, I could not blame what happened on Corrie Sue, for it wasn't her fault I drank like! did.
She took me upstairs after a few whiskeys, and we brung a bottle with us, of course. Maybe we had two, I'm not sure. I don't remember as much as I'd like to about that afternoon. We come downstairs after a couple of hours to find something to eat, I think, but Corrie Sue's younger sister Jenny was there, and we had a drink with her. Jenny was going on about me being a deputy and how she always favored lawmen. It come out she was only seventeen and I didn't feel right about a girl so young drinking whiskey, but her sister could of said something, I didn't see it was my place. Matter of fact, Corrie Sue got so quiet I thought for a minute she was mad at me, but I didn't see how that could be, friendly as we was just a little while before. She had a pretty smile, had Jenny. True, her jaw hung out toward the front, and she was awful broad in the sitter, but a young girl's smiles and a young girl's attentions takes twenty years off a man's age. Yes sir, I was standing there at the bar with this pair of pretty ladies and feeling like a big bug when two shots was fired in the street. At least that's what I thought at the time.