C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-ONE
I was blue. I'd hardly ever been blue before, and the feeling was so strange it didn't seem to belong to me. The world was changing. This thing called civilization was sneaking in, day by day, and along with it all sorts of people and laws telling me I couldn't do this and couldn't do that, and I'd better learn to live with it.
None of the small crew at Sally's boardinghouse could cheer me up. Sally smiled and told me I needed to move to the Far East. Rusty told me I'd be fine if I got my badge back and could start arresting people for spitting on sidewalks. Count Cernix said that if Puma County switched to a parliamentary monarchy, things would go better.
But that didn't help me one bit. Up until recently I had been free as the wind and could do whatever I damned well felt like doing. Now there were naysayers on every corner, people who'd got out of grade school and done some high school, too. There were meetings and committees and bunches of people intending to do good. All this hit me right in the gut. Rusty said he felt it, too, but he wanted to hold out as long as he could. But that didn't sit well with me. I still thought it was all woman inspired. The world was just fine until all these women starting messing around with it, and now what was left? I couldn't even belly up to a bar and buy a drink.
I couldn't figure out who was right or wrong, and all I knew was that a melancholia had crept into me, and I spent my days in a dour mood, avoiding company. Maybe there were other frontiers I could escape to, now that this one was sliding into a quiet, settled life. But the country was running out of frontiers.
I mourned, because it was like watching a funeral of something I loved. The wild freedom was dying. One morning I headed for Turk's Livery Barn and eyed Critter.
“Guess we'll get the hell out of town,” I said.
I must have sounded pretty blue, because Critter just nodded, sighed, and nickered. Critter was behaving in ways unheard of. He didn't try to kick me or jam me into the stall wall or bite my arm, and he didn't even load up his lungs with air to make it harder for me to draw the cinch tight. That nag just allowed it all to happen, as if Critter were becoming civilized himself, instead of behaving like the rank bronc he really was. It sure puzzled me. I thought I'd sell Critter if he kept going downhill and buy myself a rank horse.
“You owe me for a week's board,” Turk said.
“I'll pay it when I'm elected.”
“From what I hear, you'll never get a county salary again.”
“Well, take it from all the money I saved you by not pinching you for public spitting.”
Turk wheezed and spat. “World's coming to an end,” he said. “If a man can't spit, there's no reason to live.”
“That's how I feel.”
“I need some Chinamen and an opium parlor,” Turk said. “There ain't anything else interesting about Doubtful.”
“Nearest one's in Laramie,” I said. “The university professors keep her going.”
I mounted, and Critter didn't even hump or buck. He just stood there and dropped apples, and then we rode out of town. I didn't know or care where I was going; I just wanted to go where there was less settlement. I was suffocating in Doubtful. Maybe I belonged in a bunkhouse instead of in a town like Doubtful that was growing quieter and more orderly every day. Maybe all I needed was some cowboys around me to start feeling fine again.
I rode north, vaguely thinking I'd go toward some familiar buttes, where a long spur gave me a panoramic view I cherished of wild, unsettled country. Just get out and look at the open world. Look at the Rockies to the west and the Medicine Bows across the plain. Maybe that would put my thoughts on the right track. When there was too much civilization around, mountains were the cure, and open country the healing.
A few years ago there were no roads at all through this rough prairie country, but soon there were trails, mostly wrought by ranch people going somewhere, and now there were regular turnpikes, sometimes impassable but mostly clean and hard. This May day there were mud-holes, but that didn't slow Critter down. He was tired of civilization, too. Maybe he was looking for a bodacious mare, I thought. It was the time of year when males started hunting for females.
A sharp wind gusted now and then, driving grit into my face, but that's how Wyoming was. I got several miles out of Doubtful, but it didn't do me any good. Instead of feeling freed from civilization, it was like being on the end of a fishing line, where all the laws of Puma County could reel me back in. But I continued anyway, mostly because Critter was having such a fine time.
It got to be noon, but there was nothing to eat. I hadn't packed a lunch. I'd just wanted to get out of town and stay out. So I decided to ride and starve and face into the west wind, and feel the sun starting to burn my wintered flesh. And that was fine. I was sick of boardwalks and mercantiles and banks and women with parasols.
Up ahead were riders, lots of them, in a settled trot and coming my way. So I reined in Critter and waited. There sure were a mess of them, maybe twenty, and they were heading toward town. Sure enough, it turned out to be pretty near the whole roster of the Admiral Ranch, and Big Nose George Botts was in the lead. I knew half of these fellers, and they were a hairy and wild bunch when they felt like it.
“Well, if it ain't the sheriff,” said Big Nose.
“Sheriff's Lem Clegg now, Big Nose.”
“Yeah, I heard. Him and his deputies, they've got to learn to ride a horse. They can't be the law and run around in a wagon.”
“Well, the whole place is civilized now. Who needs a horse, Big Nose?”
The foreman of the Admiral Ranch frowned, pulled a bag of tobacco from his pocket, rolled a cigarette, and lit it.
“Hear you got pussy-whipped,” he said.
“It sure wasn't a pretty sight, Big Nose.”
“You're not much of an excuse for a county superintendent.”
“You took the thought outa my head.”
“But we're going to put you in anyway,” Big Nose said. “You're better than nothing. We've had enough of this crappola and we're going to stop it. You may be a swayback old nag full of fistulas and farts, but we're riding you to the finish line.”
“That's real friendly of you.”
“You know what this is? A voter party. We're going in to get ourselves registered to vote. And so is every man on every ranch. And you'll get our vote, even if you don't deserve it. I'll tell you something else. There's two men for every woman in this county, and we'll see to it that every loose male from the south end of Puma to the north, and maybe beyond a little, gets run into Doubtful to vote, and if he don't vote the right way, he's going to disappear from Puma County and float down the river.” He turned to his crew. “Tell this poor excuse for a candidate it's the gospel truth.”
“It sure is, Cotton,” said Smiley Thistlethwaite, a notorious womanizer and reformed outlaw.
“Yeah, Pickens, we'll make our X for you, even if you're a piece of dog turd,” said Alvin Miller, who was packing two pearl-handled Peacemakers and had a scattergun hanging in a scabbard.
“The way we see it, Pickens, is that we're going to put you in office, along with your worthless deputy and that strange idiot from across the seas, and then you'll owe us a few things, like repealing a few laws.”
“Like the dry laws?”
“That and a lot more, Pickens. You're going to get your ass in office, and you're going to repeal the whole thing, and you're going to send engraved invitations to every saloon man that got drove out to set up shop and enjoy life and expect a good trade again. You got that?”
“I got it, Big Nose.”
“And if you welsh on us, Pickens, we'll string you up so high you'll have time to recite three prayers before your neck snaps.”
“I got it, Big Nose.”
“All right, then. We're going in to register. And so's everyone else. We've been talking back and forth on the spreads, and we're sending every man in the county in to get fixed up to vote. I tell you, Pickens, it's been an ordeal since January. We can hardly keep drovers on the range. Half the outfits can't hire enough men because word's out about Puma County. If this keeps up, half the ranchers are going to quit. The first thing any new hire asks is whether there's a saloon somewhere. But the sheep outfits aren't so bad off. They tell me they're doing fine, as long as there's some ewes around. But we ain't saying that publicly, are we, boys?”
He spurred his horse and the whole bunch rode past, looking pleased with themselves. Life sure was interesting.
I touched my heels to Critter, and the horse swung into an easy jog, heading straight to the buttes. I'd been on this journey a few times. So, maybe the three of us Peckerheads would win after all. At first I thought that was mighty fine, but it kind of worried me. If I actually got into office, and actually tried to repeal all them laws, what would happen? It might be real bad in town.
I rode another mile to the turnoff and headed west along a familiar trail that would take me straight to the buttes. There were three buttes, and one was easily accessible along a dirt trail that had been used for ages by animals and also by humans seeking to see what lay ahead. The buttes figured in some of the local lore. They were useful to war parties intent on ambush, useful to ranchers looking for lost cattle, useful to the occasional sightseer, like me, who wanted only to see the free world. Some spring storms were brewing fast as I headed west, and from the buttes I could watch the squalls march across the vast open land, towering clouds with blue-black bellies slanting rain into the empty land. Once I had sat on Critter halfway up the butte when a storm engulfed Doubtful while sun shone everywhere else.
When I came to the barbed-wire fence I could scarcely imagine what it was doing there. Three strands of wire ran arrow-straight north and south, the wires stapled to juniper posts, which was the only irregular thing about the fence. But there was no pine forest nearby, and the sometimes twisted juniper had been put to good use.
But there was no gate. The wires lay across the trail I had used as long as I had been in Puma County. Me and Critter were on the Admiral Ranch; I wasn't sure what lay beyond it, but it probably belonged to Thaddeus Throckmorton, who had been collecting sections of land and was now apparently enclosing them. And blocking an ancient trail. I thought wildly of cutting the wire and continuing onward, but I reined Critter around and started back, my planned sojourn out in the wilds suddenly transformed.
Fencing was rare, but it was coming along, and some day the open range would be under wire. But it sure did annoy me. The world was changing out in the country as well as in the towns, and this wasn't much different. I'd been stopped by a fence, my will thwarted. In town the new laws were thwarting a lot of cowboys who wanted a drink. I didn't know what to make of it, but it wasn't my world anymore, and the worst thing was, I knew it would never return to the old days of the unsettled world. I had ridden all this way to escape melancholy, and now my desolation was all the worse.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-TWO
That three-strand fence running straight down a section line out on the plains shocked me worse than anything that had ever happened to me. I rode Critter home, hardly aware of where I was going. It felt like being sentenced to jail the rest of my life.
I pulled into Turk's Livery Barn late in the day, unsaddled and brushed Critter, and fed him a bit of hay while Turk glowered.
“I hope you know you're running up a big tab,” Turk said.
“Yeah, well, maybe you can take Critter off my hands. There's no place to ride anymore.”
“No place to ride, is there? No place to go on a horse? No wonder the supervisors got rid of you, Pickens.”
“It's all over,” I said. “Everything died.”
“What you need is a good woman, Pickens.”
“That's like going to jail,” I said.
“You have my condolences, Pickens.”
I ignored him, closed the stall gate, stared at Critter a while. A mean horse and no fences was better than a fenced world and a little wife. I wanted to head for the sheriff office, but it wasn't mine anymore. I finally headed for Leonard Silver's Hardware Emporium and found what I was looking for. A back room was stacked with rolls of barbed wire, floor to ceiling. There was more wire in there than I had seen in a lifetime.
“You looking for wire, Pickens?”
“Didn't know there was any in Puma County.”
“We got lots of it, any type. You want two strand, three strand? You want two-barb, that's cheapest, or four? You want staples? We got several sizes. Some fellows want real long staples to hang the wire on, whiles other gents want to cut corners a bit.”
“You been selling a lot?”
“It's been walking out the door all spring, Pickens. Thaddeus Throckmorton's got most of his ranch fenced, and he's not alone. I figure I'm selling a mile of fence a day from here. Two, three years, all the ranches will be fenced in. Oh, there'll still be some open range, some big roundups, but it's gonna disappear pretty quick now.
“By the time you're middle-aged, Pickens, it'll all be fenced. They won't hardly need any cowboys anymore. Just one or two to haul feed or drive the cattle into the pens. Once they fence, they can grow crops without having stray stock trample it down and eat it up. And then the next big thing, irrigation. Pretty quick, you'll see a lot of big outfits putting in dams across creeks, or building pump houses and running water through irrigation ditches to the pastures or grain fields they want to water. It's the future, Cotton.”
“I got born too late,” I said.
“Oh, there's more coming. Once things get fenced up proper, there'll be lots of breeding up. The old common cattle, they'll gradually get sold off to the butchers. There'll be good-blooded bulls brought in, to breed up the herds, put more meat on each animal. That takes fencing, you see. Can't have runty bulls crowding in and leaving their mark on a herd. And they'll start breeding up the cows, too, so they're more fertile and grow quicker. Not so many barren cows anymore. And that takes fencing so ranchers can control who mounts what.
“Can't have some low-class, dumb, half-educated bull around, messing with nice, refined, sweet-natured cows. You get the picture, Cotton? You looking for some wire? Gonna fence some pasture for Critter? Now if I was you, I'd fence in Critter, six feet of barbed wire, just to keep neighbors from getting upset with you. Who'd want a mare bred by that outlaw?”
“No, just curious,” I said, fleeing the gloomy rear room where rolls of barbed metal awaited buyers.
That left me even worse off. No wonder me and Critter lived in a sort of truce. We were brothers.
I headed back to Sally's boardinghouse and found Rusty and Count Cernix and Sally sipping cold coffee.
“You're back earlier than you thought,” Rusty said.
“Ran into a fence.”
“Why didn't you go through it?”
“No gate. Just fence.”
“Can they do that?”
“It's done, Rusty. The world's changing. Leonard Silver told me he's selling enough wire each day to build a mile of fence. It ain't ever going to be the same.”
“How's a lawman supposed to chase outlaws if there's fence everywhere?”
“I guess they think there won't be any outlaws anymore.”
“You're looking pretty blue, Cotton,” Sally said.
“Oh, I'll get by, somehow.”
“Cotton, you're really in sad shape. I know how to fix that,” she said.
“Leave me be,” I said.
“I can brighten your day,” Rusty said. “There's been a mess of cowboys at the courthouse fixing to vote.”
“Yeah, I ran into Big Nose and his bunch. He says every cowboy in Puma County's vowed to get registered and vote. He says they're going to elect us, no matter what, and we should get busy and repeal all them new laws so they can start whooping it up around here again.”
“Well, maybe they'll pull it off,” Rusty said.
That didn't cheer me. I'd seen the future, and I didn't fit anywhere in it.
“Cotton, what you need to do is become a politician,” Count Cernix said. “Just promise to cut spending, dole out favors, and get us into a war now and then so everyone profits.”
“Go to hell,” I said.
I wasn't sure what was gnawing at me, but it was making me impossible to live with, even among my friends and allies.
“What are we supposed to say? Bring on the past? Repeal the future? I just saw the future. It's a barbed-wire fence across an old trail.”
“I liked you better when you were sheriff,” Sally said.
A few days later the next debate rolled around, this time between Count Cernix von Stromberger, Lester Twining, and Manilla Twining. Again it was a fine May day, and a crowd collected at Courthouse Square to hear the candidates. Hubert Sanders again moderated, and Manilla led off.
“My argument for woman suffrage is that men shouldn't vote at all,” she began. “Men are the prisoners of their passions, whereas women maintain a cool and objective approach to all the issues of the day. That is why men get into war, while women keep the peace. If men didn't vote, we could be living in a world without bloodshed and battles and all the false glory of killing one another in the name of some cause or other. All one needs to do is make sure that women vote, women dominate each government, and women edit the press and the magazines, and you will see a revolutionary change in the way human life is conducted.”
She went on like that a while, and I thought it was pretty good. Maybe men shouldn't vote or hold office or edit newspapers or any of that stuff.
Next up was Count Cernix, and he offered a little different perspective. He said female monarchs were top notch when it came to beheading rivals and fighting wars. During the French Revolution who were in the front row during all the guillotining? Women, knitting away, while enjoying the way that eyes blinked and lips moved when the executioners held up the severed heads of the victims. And of course, he went on, who could compete with Catherine the Great of Russia, or Elizabeth of England, when it came to intrigue and blood?
That sure entertained me. I thought maybe I'd like to have a few guillotines available in Puma County.
Hubert Sanders next invited Twining, the incumbent supervisor, to speak to the cheering throng. Lester was a retiring sort, not at all comfortable in front of people, and yet a man radiating dignity. I scarcely knew him, because the supervisors all spoke through the voice of Amos Grosbeak, who had a gift of gab. But here was Lester, who nervously adjusted his cravat, eyed the transparent blue sky, and plunged in.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “I am running on my record, and I think I can give you a very good account of what I've achieved, simply by inviting our fine new sheriff, Lemuel Clegg, to the podium here, to answer a few questions.”
He waved, and sure enough, Lem Clegg lumbered up there, about as wide and muscular as he was tall, his whole body shaped by his lumberman's skills. But he wasn't a lumberman now; he was the county lawman, and the little badge on his plaid shirt shone in the glowing sunlight.
“Lemuel, you took office shortly after the county closed down all the saloons, houses of ill repute, gambling parlors, and so forth, and prohibited the sale of spiritous drink in the entire county. Could you answer the following please?”
The sheriff nodded.
“Since you took over as sheriff, how many murders have occurred in Puma County?”
“None, sir.”
“How many assaults against males?”
“None, sir.”
“How many assaults upon women?”
“None, sir.”
“How many robberies?”
“None, sir.”
“How many burglaries?”
“None, sir.”
“How many times have you charged and jailed a prisoner since you came into office, sir?”
“Just one. I got him for spitting in public, and he got himself fined and left an hour later.”
“And how many jail meals has the county served prisoners since you took over?”
“None, sir.”
“And how many complaints have you heard; people reporting a crime or a fight or trouble?”
“Well, there was that boy beating up a dog, sir. I stopped him.”
“Anything else?”
Clegg shook his head.
“That's my record as incumbent, and I'll stand on it,” Twining said.
“Fine, fine, thank you, Supervisor Twining,” said Sanders. “And now, once again, the esteemed new citizen of the republic of Wyoming, Count Cernix von Stromberger,” he said.
I had to give the count credit. As he made his way toward the lectern, he smiled, bowed almost to the ground, lifted his wide-brimmed straw hat, saluted the crowd, and finally settled quietly behind the lectern.
“I imagine I am the first titled person most of you have ever seen,” he said.
“And hopefully the last,” someone shouted.
“Well, I agree with your sentiments. We are progressing toward democracy. Now I am running on the sin ticket, and I'll tell you why. It's the way to save money. The entire budget of Puma County and the fair and sweet city of Doubtful can be raised with various sin taxes, quietly applied. So I am offering you an argument that goes straight to your purse.”
I could see that the count had his audience caught and hog-tied.
The count sighed, smiled, and said quietly, “It's fine to have expert witnesses, such as we've just enjoyed. Sheriff Clegg made an impressive argument. But my witnesses will not be experts, they will be yourselves. You yourselves will answer my questions, and you yourselves will come to your own verdicts, and you yourselves will let those verdicts guide you as you vote for county supervisors in a few days.”
He smiled and began, almost casually. “You who own real estate in Puma County, how much have you paid in tax assessments upon your holdings until this year?” He waited patiently and then pounced. “None! Because there were no property taxes. The entire county budget was raised by other means!”
He let that sink in and then pounced again. “Now then, all of you who hold real estate in the splendid town of Doubtful, Wyoming, how much were you assessed in taxes upon your homes and businesses and yards and lots?” Again, he paused. “Nothing, right? There were no taxes, because the city's entire operations were funded elsewhere, and no burden was placed on you.”
I looked around. Count Cernix was sure making his point, and all those faces turned his way registered it.
“My friends and fellow citizensâyes, I am a naturalized Americanâthe entire burden of government in Puma County was indeed paid by someone. By saloon owners who bought licenses, and gamblers who bought table licenses, and the operators of bawdyhouses, who paid licenses not annually, but quarterly, and the inmates who paid monthly, creating a fine revenue flow. Let me point something out to you. All this burden placed on dubious enterprises had the economic effect of discouraging such enterprises. They were heavily taxed and licensed, which discouraged their growth and kept them carefully confined to one small corner of our beautiful city. So my argument is, take advantage of human nature. Take advantage of those whose appetites require these anodynes. Remove the prohibitions, but let the fees and licenses form their own barriers, and you will have a city without the burden of property taxes, and a city that has turned certain appetites into an engine of bright and shining prosperity.”
I wasn't so sure about all that. It sounded a little made up. But it sure had started that mess of people to thinking.