The debate dragged on for a while more, and then Sanders called it quits.
Sally rushed up to the count. “You clever man, you turned the tide,” she said.
I thought that maybe the count had done just that. There was one more debate left, between Rusty Irons and Reggie and Gladys Thimble, and after that it would be time for Puma County to elect its supervisors.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-THREE
The last of those debates sponsored by the Temperance women rolled around too fast, as far as I was concerned. I didn't like any of it. I preferred to settle arguments with a whack on the head with my billy club and some cooling off in my jail. But that was the past. Doubtful, Wyoming, was marching into a brave new world, and the frontier was vanishing almost day by day.
This one occurred on an overcast spring day with some sharp-edged air pushing through out of the north. Maybe that was good. Anything to shut the mouths of politicians was good. I hadn't any notion what my former deputy, Rusty Irons, was going to blabber about up there in front of the world, so I'd just have to wait and see. I realized that me and Rusty hadn't talked much about all this stuff. We had been too busy keeping the lid on Doubtful during the wild times to think much about what was good and what wasn't.
The best thing Rusty had going for him was a head of red hair, and also a sunny nature. He sure could take some boneheaded cowboy and get the feller to laughing all the way to the jail. That was Rusty for you. He was the quickest feller with a gun if that was needed, which it wasn't anymore, but Rusty's real genius was just being sociable. He enforced the law of Puma County just by gabbing happily with most everyone, by issuing little warnings, by slapping some old rogue on the back and steering him to his horse. So I sure was curious about what Rusty was going to do up there.
Rusty probably would have easy prey. Gladys Thimble was scarcely known, and not a likely candidate for supervisor. She was one of the ladies with an enormous bust and a skinnier south side, while her husband had a narrow top and a middle that expanded like a pear. I thought that was fitting. If the two of them ever got to hugging, they would fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. Her man, Reggie Thimble, had been in office forever and had gotten fat, and some said he'd gotten fat devouring public funds a little too easily, but no one ever proved anything. Gladys didn't have much to say up there; she sort of trilled like a clarinet and allowed as how it was time to put women into office and get all the problems of the world solved in a hurry.
Reggie, he made a different sort of appearance. He was a talker, on and on and on, and pretty quick he got himself on all sides of every issue. He talked about his sentimental attachment for saloons, and how they were comfortable clubs for men to enjoy themselves, and he talked about drunkards and how they ruined families, and he talked about how great it was to be young and full of wild oats that needed sowing, and how great it was to settle down and get hitched and start a family in a safe world. It sure was a performance, all right, and by the end of it he had persuaded those listeners who managed to stick with him for twenty minutes that he was on their side. They all heard what they wanted to hear from his lips, and sort of forgot that he'd said anything else.
I marveled. That feller Thimble was a shooter of words, and he shot more forty-five-caliber words with plenty of powder behind them than any other politician I had ever heard. He had thousands more words than Rusty Irons would ever have, and he fired them all that cloudy morning.
Last on the agenda was Rusty Irons, slim, dressed in ordinary work clothes and not fancied up, mostly because he couldn't afford any better. Now the thing to know about Rusty is that he can talk anyone out of anything. He could talk an old maid out of her maidenhood. But he can also talk anyone into doing something. He can talk an old scrooge into donating to the home for unwed mothers. He can talk cowboys into going to church. He can talk churchwomen into visiting a sporting house. When I was sheriff, I depended on Rusty's gift of gab to get more done than six deputies who were good with shotguns.
So Rusty got up there and sort of scratched his red hair, and told us all that he loved women. “I love women in all sizes and shapes, from little ones to old ladies. I grew up in a household full of sisters, and it just comes natural to me to have a mess of sweet, happy, busy women around, looking after things. That sure was a fine household, because all them girls, they just whipped out meals, ran the carpet sweeper over the floors, and mothered the new babies coming along. I just wish there were a lot more women in the world, and especially in Doubtful where there's about two males for every female, and nothing comes out even. I always figured, when a place has a woman for every man, then that's about right; and when there's a man for every woman, that's what keeps women happy.”
I couldn't imagine where Rusty was going with all that, but it didn't matter. Rusty was a spellbinder.
“Now, until there's equality of the sexes in Doubtful, things just ain't right for either the women or the men around town,” he said. “When there's a dance, there's six young fellows for every eligible girl, but their mamas are telling them these six fellows aren't proper to dance with because they're cowboys, and they're not going to treat a gal right, and settle down and earn some money and have a family and all that. Now that just ain't right. It's bad enough that there are so few nice ladies compared to all the drovers and ranchers in Puma County; it's worse because the mamas of these girls are telling them not to get hooked up with a cowboy or even worse, a sheepherder. No telling what a sheepherder will do if he's desperate.”
I was sort of sliding away. I didn't want to be around when the mob stormed the courthouse stairs and threw Rusty off the nearest cliff.
“Well,” Rusty said, “if I'm elected, I'll do my best to make all our randy young men comfortable. I'll try to even up the men and women in Puma County. I'll import women. We'll get it all evened out some way or another, so long as you elect me, Rusty Irons, and my old pals, Cotton Pickens and the Count Cernix from wherever the place is.”
Well, that was it. Old Rusty, he just smiled and bowed and lifted his sweat-stained Stetson high, and waved it a few times, and then shook hands all around and meandered off the courthouse steps.
“Well, friends, that concludes the debate between all the candidates for county superintendent,” said Hubert Sanders, sounding bankerish. “We'll see you at the polls on the sixth day of June. The polls are at the schoolhouse,” he said.
I was feeling dumber than usual. I didn't know what Rusty was talking about. But Rusty immediately had a few cowboys around him, and then a flotilla of the town's single girls, some of them all dressed up in summer whites, even if they were pushing the season a little. You'd think that Rusty was a vaudeville star, the way they were making cow eyes at him. Trouble was, there weren't six single girls of the right age in all of Doubtful. That was the whole trouble with the town. With the saloons shut down, and the sporting houses boarded up, and even the gambling tables chased out, and not more than six women in Doubtful pining for a husband, things were pretty unhappy for all the young and unmarried males around there. There wasn't anything to do but cause as much trouble as possible.
That old election day rolled around bright and sunny, but some clouds over the distant mountains suggested there might be some thundershowers or hail late in the day. The schoolhouse polling place was to open at eight, so me and Rusty and the count all got down there early, thinking to vote for ourselves. But there was a line of cowboys a block long. There were cowboys from every ranch within forty or fifty miles. They looked like they meant business, and they were ahead of all the locals, who eyed the line and went back home, thinking to vote later when the cowboys got done.
There were horses tied to every post and fence. There were people staring, startled to see so many drovers and ranchers. But I discovered trouble, too. Up near the schoolhouse, Sheriff Lemuel Clegg and his boys were arguing with some cowboys from the T-Bar Ranch.
“You boys, you're wearing sidearms in town, and that's against the rules. And you can't go into a polling place with that hardware. So you just go hang them gun belts on your saddles and wait in line proper,” Clegg was saying.
“You gonna make me, Clegg?” muttered Weasel Jonas.
“You're going to follow the rules, and you're not going to vote until you pull off the belt.”
Jonas laughed. “Guess you're gonna have to pull it off of me yourself, lumberjack.”
I knew how it was building. Maybe a quarter of the cowboys in that line were wearing sidearms, almost as if they were deliberately provoking trouble. There was plenty of resentment out on the ranches, and now it was coming alive on this election morning.
Trouble was, I was a candidate. I shouldn't be getting into a confrontation with voters. Or maybe I should. Clegg needed help.
“Weasel, you unload that belt, and the rest of you, too. You don't go armed into a polling place. I want your vote, and you'll not be able to vote for me if you fellers don't follow the rules.”
But Weasel was just grinning. “You gonna make me, Pickens?”
Clegg didn't like it. “I can handle this, Pickens. Don't mess with my business. Stand back. Me and my boys will see it done right.”
“Sure, sure, Clegg,” said Weasel, who was enjoying himself.
It was eight and the poll workers were opening the door and letting the line move forward.
The first cowboys weren't armed, and they stepped inside, but then Weasel was next, and Clegg stopped him. “Weasel, I'm not going to ask again.”
Weasel started laughing, and in the middle of it swung a haymaker at Clegg. It hit the sheriff in the shoulder and bounced off. The lumberman hadn't even wobbled. Clegg just stood there, his hand out, demanding the gun belt. He sighed. “Hate to do this, cowboy,” he said.
He lifted Weasel up by his shirt and lowered him as if he were a pile driver.
Weasel's friends barreled in to help, but Clegg's boys simply lifted the T-Bar men as if they were feathers and crumpled them into the earth. One of the cowboys went for his gun, but Cash Clegg's foot landed on the man's arm and the man howled in pain.
I had never seen such muscle as I witnessed in the Cleggs. And they weren't half trying. Several more cowboys sailed in, the joy of a good fight written on their faces, and they got nowhere. The Cleggs were rooted like fat oaks to the ground. A Clegg fist connected with a cowboy jaw or nose now and then, and the cattle industry succumbed.
“Look at that!” said Rusty. “It's sailboats against the ironclads.”
“What's an ironclad?” I asked.
“An iron-sheathed warship,” the count said. “Cannonballs bounce off it, just as fists bounce off these Clegg boys.”
I itched to get into it, but knew it would go against me in the voting, so I just watched, acutely aware that Puma County's new sheriff and deputies were handling the brawl better than I could.
The brawl ended as suddenly as it started.
“We're here to vote,” someone yelled. “Hang up the guns.”
It was King Glad, the young master of the Admiral Ranch, imposing order not only on his outfit but all the rest.
Strangely, the drovers obeyed. They unbuckled their gun belts, hung them over saddle horns, and returned to the line, which now was working quietly through the polling place. There were plenty of cowboys who couldn't read, but they'd been instructed where to scratch their X, and talked about it in the line.
The effect of these amassed cowboys was to scare off the other voters, and I didn't see a woman in the voting line. But that would change. Sure enough, after a couple hundred cowboys had voted and ridden off, some of the town people ventured out, including all those women in the Women's Temperance Union.
They smiled at me, and I smiled back, and the sheriff and his boys stared sternly.
After the poll closed, the votes were counted, and Cotton Pickens, Rusty Irons, and Cernix von Stromberger found themselves the incoming Puma County supervisors.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-FOUR
I desperately wished I had lost the election. I felt like a cow stuck in mud. I had no more idea of how to be a county supervisor than I had about taking a wife. I could hardly read those blasted documents.
Maybe there was some way out. I headed for Lawyer Stokes's office, thinking to pry myself loose.
“You sure that election was fair and square? Shouldn't it be challenged?” I asked.
Lawyer Stokes stared upward at me through his rimless spectacles, his lips pursed. “You aren't the only one,” he said. “But the fact is, you and your dismaying colleagues were elected by wide margins. We thought to challenge all those cowboys, since half of them aren't bona fide residents of Puma County, but the sad reality is that you were elected by a lot of people in Doubtful who were publicly saying they support all the new morality laws but privately voted for you fellows running on the sin platform.”
“You mean a lot of people, like businessmen, they want the old days back?”
Stokes sighed. “It's a benighted town, my young friend. So go forth and do your worst.”
“But why? Why all those votes for us?”
“Money. The morality laws cost the county and the city their income. All those licenses, fees, fines, paid for two governments. And both the city and the county were fixing to install property taxes until you gents came along promoting vice.”
“Well, ain't that something?” I said. “You'd think everyone would be happy now.”
“I assure you, your victory is the source of deep pain, Mr. Pickens. It is a woeful retreat from progress and safety and comfort.”
I pondered that. There sure were a lot of bossy people wanting to tell other people how to run their lives. Bunch of bossy Temperance people telling other people not to touch spirits. Bunch of bossy moralizers saying to shut down the sporting houses and deny some poor old cowboy a little pleasure. Bunch of bossy folks telling other people not to lay a dime on a faro bet. Bunch of bossy churchgoers wanting to close down all business on Sundays. Bunch of bossy snobs telling other people not to spit. I thought the busybodies who wanted to tell others how to live and take away their liberties outnumbered the people who just wanted to live and let live.
Well, me and Rusty and the count could repeal all those miserable laws, and maybe then I'd resign. Maybe we could fire the sheriff and his boys, and have the supervisors appoint me and Rusty to the sheriff office again. I liked keeping the lid on Doubtful; that was what I really wanted to do.
When we finally took office in mid-June I thought maybe there'd be a mob of people pressuring me not to repeal all those do-gooder laws, but no one showed up. Lawyer Stokes, acting as county attorney, led us through the process. We had to submit the repeal bills, subject them to public hearings, and then vote them up or down.
I sort of enjoyed being a big shot. They were calling me Sir and Mister. I'd never had a Mister in front of Cotton or Pickens in my life. It sort of invested me with some weight, so I got to tipping my stained Stetson at the ladies, and letting the boy at the tonsorial parlor put a little wax on my boots. And now that I was on salary I took a bath once a month, kept my two union suits washed, and even invested in a white shirt. I discovered I didn't need to wear a cravat; there was a thing called a string tie that would do just fine, so I took to wearing that and a clean shirt.
Funny thing, even those Temperance women were smiling at me. Maybe that was because they could still vote. That was the only part of my program that got shot down. Me and Rusty and the count could do nothing about woman suffrage except try to change the Wyoming constitution, and that was beyond us. Lawyer Stokes told us we couldn't nullify suffrage in Puma County; the county wasn't a separate little nation, seceding from the state. So I learned to live with it, even if women voting was plainly an affront to nature and an evil in its own right.
At the July supervisor meeting no one showed up at the hearings, so we voted to repeal all those laws. On August 1, after publication of the repeal laws, the town of Doubtful and the County of Puma would be wide open, and soon enough there'd be rip-roaring saloons, wild cathouses, gambling parlors, and plenty of good times seven days a week. Word sure got out fast. The story got told in Laramie and Cheyenne, Denver and Fort Collins, and even in North Platte, Nebraska.
The merchants were smiling again. In a little while, the rush would be on. The saloon men would sweep in, buy up those saloons now in the hands of speculators, and madams would arrive with whole wagonloads of women, and the gamblers in their black suits and stovepipe hats would settle in, license a table or two, and set up shop. And just as soon as the booze started flowing and the chips rattled on tables, and new decks of faro cards got cracked open, and the girls got settled in their little rooms, the cowboys would ride in, whoop it up, and blow all that pent-up pocket change they'd been sitting on.
August 1 sure was a hot summer day, the kind that reminded people of hell, and the merchants were licking their chops. So were the supervisors, and Mayor Waller, who desperately needed something more than public spitting fines to keep the city in cash. The city clerk and the county clerk were all primed to issue licenses. It was all set up so that some saloon man coming into town could be up and running within the hour. Mayor Waller had even pre-signed a dozen licenses so as not to waste a second. There were bets on the tables around town as to how fast it would take a saloon man to set up shop and start the booze flowing.
But there wasn't any migration to Doubtful that day, so people ascribed it to word not getting out, and sat back to wait for the onslaught through the week or the month.
Back at Sally's I got curious about Sally's plans.
“You gonna open up again, Sally? Bring in some girls?”
“Hell no,” she said, slapping some oatmeal in front of me. “I'm done with that.”
“How come?”
Sally glared at me. “I'm a countess. How many gals get to be a countess? All my life I wanted to be a countess, so why should I run a whorehouse?”
Well, there was a new argument.
“Nothing keeping you from both,” I said. “You could run Countess Sally's and call it the fanciest blue-blooded cathouse in Wyoming.”
“Eat your oatmeal and mind your business,” she said.
“Now if you'd let me rule over Puma County, we'd do that,” Count Cernix said. “But being a count doesn't fit in with running a bawdyhouse.”
That puzzled me.
And still, no one arrived in Doubtful to set up shop. I walked along the forlorn wrecks of Saloon Row, with their broken windows staring balefully at me, and the rats scurrying around in decaying rooms.
Then at last there were two applications for licenses. The Elks, one of those brotherhoods that were getting formed all over the West, applied for a bar license for their clubhouse. And so did the Moose, a rival outfit with a lot of the town's businessmen in it. But the third, the Odd Fellows, much the most popular of those outfits all over Wyoming and the West, still abstained.
So the brotherhoods got their clubs and bars up and running, and invited the cowboys off the ranches to sign up as members. A few did. Big Nose George and Smiley Thistlethwaite became Elks, and Weasel Jonas joined the Moose, and a dozen more cowboys took out membership in one outfit or another. The Elks bought the place next to Sally's and fixed it up, and pretty soon a feller could have a peaceful drink with his friends in a peaceful saloon run by one of the brotherhoods. But no madams showed up, and a feller had to go clear down to Laramie for a little hoochy-coochy.
Sally had a few cowboys come knocking at her door, but she just got mad at them and told them she was a countess and to mind their business unless they wanted to rent a respectable room from a respectable noblewoman.
Meanwhile the county treasurer was howling, and so was Mayor Waller. Puma County was flat-out busted and its checks were no good, and it would be up to the new supervisors to do something about it, immediately, before the county collapsed and state officials swarmed in and imposed their will on Puma County. The big rush to open up a sin business never happened. Times had changed. Wild old Doubtful was a thing of the past. The world belonged to farmers and preachers and politicians whose idea of progress was to apply nitrous oxide to all citizens so they could fall into painless slumber.
I could hardly imagine it. Somehow, everything was changed. Wyoming was becoming civilized. If a man wanted wild times, the only place left was El Paso or Tucson. All the rest of the West was a big yawn. Poor old Sheriff Lemuel Clegg and his boys had nothing to do. There were entire weeks when nothing criminal happened in Doubtful, and the worst crime anyone had heard of was when some rascal boys tied tin cans on the tail of a billy goat and the enraged goat ran into the middle of a Temperance Ladies picnic and butted Eve Grosbeak in the rear, sending her flying into Manilla Winding as they were sipping sarsaparilla. The rotten boy was remanded to his father, who whipped him with a riding crop, but only once because he thought the boy had done Doubtful a favor.
So the Cleggs hadn't a thing to do but blot up county wages and loaf around, keeping order by sending dogs home. It sure was a strange new world for me. And it was about to get worse.
Sam Peppingwell, the Puma County treasurer, said the county was plumb out of cash and nothing coming in. The money from the sin business didn't materialize. And therefore he couldn't pay the supervisors their salaries, much less anyone else the county owed money to, including himself. So the supervisors had better be quick about enacting a tax, or all hell would bust loose.
Well, that wasn't good news.
“What're we gonna do?” I asked my colleagues while downing Sally's oatmeal.
“Tax real estate. What else?” Rusty said.
“Ten cents an acre for ranches, five dollars a city lot,” said the count.
“Anyone got any better ideas?” I asked.
“Yeah, wear your sidearms to the next meeting,” Rusty said.
I thought Rusty Irons was right.
Sure enough, when I, Supervisor Pickens, put the new taxes on the agenda, it sure caused a ruckus. In fact, the whole town of Doubtful got up on its haunches and howled. When the bills got published in the
Advertiser
, which didn't want to do it because it hadn't been paid for county advertising, it set off pretty near a riot around town, and there were plenty of fellers muttering something or other about stringing up the supervisors to the nearest hanging tree and letting them drop.
I got to visiting some of the people around Doubtful, and every man and every woman was plumb set against the new taxes, and that included any tax at any price. And I hadn't even heard from the ranchers yet.
Sheriff Lemuel Clegg came over to the supervisors' offices about then and said that if they didn't get paid by the next day, they'd quit; they'd sure not work for nothing, and they hadn't seen a pay envelope for two months.
“Lemuel, we're working on it,” I replied. “It's gonna take a bit of time, but we'll get some revenue going here pretty quick.”
“Not if they hang you first, Cotton. And I'll let them do it, too. You haven't paid us a nickel in so long that you deserve to swing.”
“I'm glad I deserve something or other,” I said. “My ma always wondered what I deserved, and I always told her I deserved new boots.”
“Twenty-four hours, Cotton. You pay us our wage by this time tomorrow, or Puma County's got no sheriff and no deputies. Hear me?”
“I always knew I'd get that job back,” I said.