Paper Sheriff

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  Paper Sheriff

  Luke Short

  1

  In the stifling June day court-room the Judge, distaste in his gaunt, exhausted face, addressed the all male jury.

  “Normally, at the end of a long trial I thank the members of the jury for their patience and for their honest effort to arrive at a just decision. Eight of you men I do thank. Four of you will never receive my thanks.”

  He leaned back in his chair and seemed to welcome its support. “You four have totally disregarded the sworn evidence of your elected Sheriff as well as the evidence of other witnesses. I can only believe this was done wilfully. By doing so you have made a mockery of justice.”

  Now he put both his hands flat on the bench and leaned forward. “I think I know why you did it. The Assistant District Attorney is a woman prosecuting this case because her father, the District Attorney, was too ill to appear in court. To you she did not represent the court. She was only a lowly woman trying to get a man hanged. The court-room is no scene for the battle of the sexes, but you four took it upon yourselves to make it one. As a consequence, the jury could not agree and the defendant goes free. I doubt if you even feel ashamed—but I assure you I do.” He paused. “Bailiff, free the prisoner. The jury is dismissed; the court is adjourned.” He gavelled once sharply but the sound of it was lost in the uproar of the court-room.

  The hard-packed earth in front of the stone Sutton County Court House was soon thronged by the crowd who had witnessed the trial. They seemed reluctant to leave. The last act of the drama was yet to come—the sight of a man they thought as good as dead walking down the Court House steps a free man. Men in worn range clothes, men in bib overalls, men in proper suits and their womenfolk, all waited for Orville Hoad, the man who shot Will Flowers in the back, to walk into the free summer sunshine.

  When he did come out he was accompanied by his brother, Ty Hoad. Both men were middle-aged, but that was all, save their dark inheritance, they had in common. Orville Hoad, the taller and younger, had not bothered to clean up for his trial, as if it were of no consequence. He wore a dirty, collarless shirt, worn levis, scuffed cowman’s boots and dusty Stetson, the clothes he had been arrested in two weeks before. His beard-stubbled face was long and the smile under his blade of a nose revealed stained and crooked teeth as he surveyed the scattered crowd.

  Both men were met past the bottom of the steps by a half dozen men who moved forward in a group, shouting their pleasure. Ty Hoad stepped aside, smiling, so the men could take turns at wringing Orville’s hand and clapping him on the back. Ty Hoad, dressed in the seedy propriety of a dark suit, was all chunky softness. The luxuriant pale moustaches only accentuated his buck teeth and gave him the appearance of a benevolent woodchuck. A yellowed panama hat and black string tie completed the illusion that this man might have been a visiting river boat pilot who had strayed a thousand miles from the broad Mississippi.

  “Uncle Orv, you’ve got a fool’s luck,” one of the young men shouted drunkenly. He pushed a bottle toward Orville, who accepted it and took three long gulps of the pale raw moonshine. When he had got his breath, he said, “I been missin’ that, Buddy.”

  To an observer watching this, the men around the Hoads would have seemed of a type. They were mostly lean, shabbily dressed, dirtier than necessary and in their unshaven faces was a pride of ignorance worn like a badge. They were all Hoads or married to Hoads and come to welcome one of themselves back into their shabby, whisky-sodden clan.

  Buddy, facing Orville, now looked over his uncle’s shoulder and said softly, “Oh, oh. Here comes Callie with her purty Sheriff.” He pronounced it as if it were spelled “Shurf.” Now he glanced at Ty Hoad. “Pa, you going to invite the Shurf to our party?”

  Ty Hoad glanced sideways at the Court House steps where Sheriff Reese Branham and his wife Callie, Ty’s daughter, were standing. Branham was a tall man with a dark and saturnine face which, at the sight of the Hoads, altered from its expression of sober friendliness into one of watchful reserve. He was dressed in a dark suit and tie, polished cowman’s boots and an ancient, dust-colored Stetson. At thirty, he appeared to have the maturity and authority of an older man.

  Even standing away from him, Callie Branham looked almost diminutive. She was a full-bodied girl, wearing a long-sleeved dress of blue print cotton that contrasted pleasantly with her thick reddish hair under its tiny bonnet. Hers was a Hoad face too, but a refined one—thin, without much color and with the sharply ridged nose separating pale eyes.

  Now Callie tripped down the steps, ran up to her uncle and embraced him affectionately. “Uncle Orv, I knew they wouldn’t hang you, I just knew it!”

  Orville Hoad looked past her to the Sheriff and said quietly, “They sure tried, Callie.”

  Now Reese Branham, his badge of office hidden by his coat, came slowly down the steps and approached the group, his grey eyes scanning each face, reading rightly in them the old dislike that now bordered on hatred.

  Halting by his wife, Reese said, “Shall we go, Callie?” He didn’t even look at Orville Hoad, who was watching him with a faint gleam of malice in his eyes.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything to Uncle Orv after what he’s been through?” Callie asked.

  “We’ve said enough to each other in the last two weeks. No.”

  “Ain’t you going to shake his hand?” one of the Hoads jeered.

  “Sure,” Buddy said. “Reese only tried to hang him but he don’t hold no hard feelings, do you, Uncle Orv? You’d be proud to shake the hand that would’ve put a rope around your neck, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, I think I’ll use my hand to wrap around that bottle, Buddy. Give over.”

  Buddy handed back the bottle of moonshine and they watched the older man drink. The onlookers, satisfied that they had seen the disappointing last act of the drama, now began to drift away. Orville Hoad handed back the bottle, wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve and said, “All you folks come over to my place now. We’ll have us a celebration.”

  “The Sheriff too?” one of the Hoads asked slyly.

  “Why, him too,” Orville said sardonically. “Ain’t he one of us Hoads through Callie? Don’t us Hoads stick together and help each other? Ain’t he been helping me this last two weeks, feeding me, keeping me out of the rain, watching over me, taking real good care of me? Why, I can’t thank him enough. Sure, he’s invited.”

  “I think I’ll let Callie represent me, Orv. I’ve work to do tonight,” Branham said.

  “Well, now, that’s too bad,” Orville said. “I bet I know what you’ll be working on. A frame for somebody else, now that you couldn’t frame me.”

  “Wrong guess,” Reese said patiently.

  “Then maybe on that pretty woman lawyer,” Orville said.

  Instinctively, unthinkingly, Reese backhanded him with his right hand with such force that Orville had to take a step back to keep his balance.

  With a surprising lack of anger, Orville said quietly, “That must have come pretty close to where you live, Sheriff.”

  “No. I just don’t like her name in your mouth.”

  Ty Hoad put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders and said quickly, “I never like to see a ruckus around a woman. Now all of you quit. Let’s move out to Orville’s place.” He squeezed Callie’s shoulder. “If Reese has got to work, you come with me, Callie. Afterwards you can drop me off and take the buggy home.” He looked at Reese now. “That all right with you, Reese?”

  “Whatever Callie wants,” Reese said
indifferently.

  “I’ll be home in time to get your supper, Reese,” Callie said.

  All the Hoads, even Buddy and Orville, appeared satisfied with this compromise but each in his own way indicated to Reese by a look at him or at the others that this was at best a temporary truce. Branham turned and headed back for the Court House steps, with a premonition that would not be stifled. During the long days of Orville Hoad’s trial, the testimony that he had been required to give had damned Hoad in the eyes of half the population of this county seat of Bale. Because he was married to a Hoad, he knew the Hoad clan, to a man, had expected him to lie unblushingly to protect one of the family. During the trial they had sat with mounting fury and hatred as he presented evidence of Orville’s guilt and at the end of each court day they avoided him, losing themselves in the exiting crowd. They planned a reckoning with him, he knew, and didn’t care. At the moment his bitter disappointment at the jury’s actions was deep and sore. Mounting the steps, he tramped down the now empty corridor, heading for his office, a tall, tired man with rancor in his heart.

  As he passed the open doors of the now empty court-room, he saw Judge Heatherly and Jen Truro seated at the defense’s table, facing each other across it. Immediately Reese turned and walked into the court-room and the sound of his boots on the wood floor caused both Jen and Judge Heatherly to look in his direction. Reese took off his hat, walked through the gate in the railing and came up to the chair beside Jen Truro. She was watching him from wide-spaced eyes so black they were colorless. Her dark hair, a little dishevelled, framed a face that was now thoughtful and tired, holding a resignation that marred its almost classic beauty. She was dressed in a simple suit of dark grey with a white blouse underneath. She wore no jewelry and Reese knew that she had worn this unbecoming outfit during the long trial only because she did not want her clothes or her face to influence the jury and because this somber outfit looked as close to the lawyer’s traditional dark suit as possible.

  “Your father will be proud of you, Jen,” Reese said.

  “I’ll see that Sebastian hears it in detail,” Judge Heatherly said and gave Jen a wan, tired smile.

  “Proud of me losing for him?” Jen asked quietly. “He’s proud of a winner, not of a loser.”

  Reese pulled out one of the attorney’s chairs beside Jen and slacked into it, looking over at Judge Heatherly. “I liked that benediction you aimed at the jury, Judge. You might have been speaking for me and for Jen.”

  Judge Heatherly grimaced. “I caught on to those four fairly early in the week. They never said a word, of course, but you could read it in their faces.” He hesitated, musing for a few moments that were not interrupted. “There’s a type of man who’s born hating all women. As soon as he can walk, he resents their discipline and he escapes it as soon as he can. He’s the kind that beats up women because that act proves to him that he’s superior and they’re inferior. He’s the unsworn enemy of their sex—I say unsworn because he isn’t conscious of despising them. That feeling is just part of him, like the act of breathing. He’ll neither love nor respect a woman until the day he dies.”

  Now he looked at Jen with fondness and with sympathy. “You can’t keep this kind of man off a jury, Jen. He wouldn’t admit to this prejudice even if you asked him, because he doesn’t know he has it. When he gives all the right answers to the questions put to him by attorneys for both sides, he’s accepted as a responsible juror and seated.” The Judge squared his hands in a gesture of helplessness and added, “Then what happened today is inevitable. Those four men weren’t casting a ballot on the guilt or innocence of Orville Hoad. They were simply voting against a woman, all women.”

  Now he put his palms on the table and pushed himself upright. “I’m tired and at the moment I’m disgusted with the human race. And I’m sorry for you both.” He picked up his hat and briefcase from the chair beside him. “Now I’ll say goodbye.”

  They bid him goodbye and watching him as he tramped slowly down the hall and turned into the corridor.

  Jen and Reese regarded each other for a moment and then Reese said, “I can understand why he feels sorry for you, but why should he include me?”

  “Maybe for the same reason I feel sorry for you, Reese,” Jen said quietly.

  “And why do you?”

  Jen shrugged slightly. “You’re married into the Hoad family, Reese. I don’t think they’ll be forgiving.”

  “No, they won’t,” Reese said, just as quietly. “But as long as I know that, I can handle them.”

  “Is Callie bitter about it?”

  Reese smiled crookedly. “Up until today she thought I was only doing my routine job. I haven’t talked with her since I was on the stand this morning.”

  “Poor girl,” Jen said softly. “It can’t be easy for her, can it?”

  Reese said dryly, “I can tell you that later.”

  Jen turned and picked up her black briefcase from the chair beside her. She said, without looking at Reese, “No, don’t tell me later. I don’t want to know.”

  “You’ll know,” Reese said. “You’ll see it in me or in her and it won’t change anything, will it?”

  Jen stood up. “Nothing will,” she said quietly. “I have to go, Reese.”

  Reese came to his feet and said, “Tell your father I’ll be around tonight. Between the Judge and me we ought to convince him you’re a passable lawyer.”

  For the first time that day Jen smiled. She said goodbye and Reese watched her leave the court-room, her back proud and straight once more, thanks mainly, he thought, to Judge Heatherly’s words.

  Reese sat down again, grateful for the silence and solitude of the empty court-room. He wanted to assess the importance of this day’s events, now that the trial was over. The testimony that had been given this morning had been explosive and had seemingly assured Orville Hoad’s conviction for murder in the first degree. It came from a surprise witness whom Jen and Reese had hunted down, questioned and then hidden. Orville Hoad had been charged with the murder of Will Flowers on a May night two weeks ago. The two men, both presumably drunk, had quarrelled openly at a card game at the Best Bet saloon.

  The quarrel, which took place in the early hours of the morning, was broken up by the other card players before the two men could come to blows or gun play. Will Flowers, a heavy drinking, dry-land farmer with a passion for gambling, never carried a gun. After the quarrel, the game broke up and Flowers headed for Hunters Feed Stable to get his horse. Orville Hoad followed him minutes later, heading for the same destination and on the same errand.

  Orville Hoad’s story was that Flowers waited for him in the stable back out of the light from the lantern hanging in the archway. Hoad maintained that Flowers took up a position at the entrance of a stall over whose partition some puncher had thrown his saddle. Over the horn of the saddle he had looped his shell belt and gun, a customary practice of cowhands who wanted to do some drinking but who wanted to stay out of a shooting spree. Hoad claimed that Flowers gave him a tongue-lashing in the half-lit stable, then turned to the shell belt and reached for the gun in its holster. Out of self-defense, Hoad pulled out his own gun and shot the half-turned Flowers before he was shot himself. There were no known witnesses and Hoad’s story was plausible.

  But Reese’s persistent questioning of the day hostler at the stable had turned up the fact that a strange cow puncher that same evening had asked to sleep in the hayloft, was given permission, turned over his matches to the hostler and then had gone out into the town hunting for a saloon.

  On a quiet and painstaking search, with only the hostler’s description of the stranger to guide him, Reese had hit every town and ranch within a fifty-mile radius of Bale. He was looking for a recently hired hand. He turned up a dozen of them, but only one had fitted the description given by the hostler. Under Reese’s questioning, this man finally admitted that he watched the shooting. Flowers, according to him, was searching the stalls for his horse when Orville Hoad came in and
re-started their quarrel. He tried to goad Flowers into a fight, but Flowers had cooled off and wanted no more of their quarrel. When he turned away, Hoad shot him in the back. It was true the puncher had left his saddle, shell belt, and gun on the stall partition. Hoad had simply walked over to the stall, drawn out the gun, pitched it on the stable floor by Flowers’ body and walked out. The stranger, afraid of what he had seen happen in a strange town, simply got his horse and rode out.

  This morning Reese had taken the stand and stated simply that he had uncovered a witness to the murder. The stranger was put on the stand, gave his testimony, which was unshakable under the cross-examination, and afterwards Jen gave her summation.

  Now, what was Callie Branham going to think of her husband, who had kept the secret of the murder witness from her, Reese wondered. She would think he had not trusted her and she would be right. Beyond that she would think he and Jen had secretly conspired to hang one of the Hoads and again she would be right.

  Unconsciously he sighed and then rose, tramping back into the corridor, turning and going down it to his small office in the rear corner. As he stepped into the room he saw his deputy, Jim Daley, seated at the single roll top desk. At the sound of his entrance Jim Daley turned and the two men regarded each other silently. Daley was a stocky, middle-aged man, dressed in clean range clothes. Surmounting his broad, fight-scarred face was a thick mat of short-cut grey hair that burred out from a round skull. Now Daley said in a low-voiced, mocking drawl, “Bailiff, free the prisoner.”

  Reese smiled crookedly at his deputy’s recollection of Judge Heatherly’s orders. Daley was bailiff of the court and he was not likely ever to forget those words. Reese slacked into a chair beside the desk and said tiredly, “I guess I married into a lucky family, Jim.”

  “Any chance that family got to those four jurors, Reese?” Then he added, “Excuse the question, but is there?”

  “It’s possible, but I don’t think so,” Reese said gloomily. “I think, and so does the Judge, that they didn’t like the idea of a woman trying to get a man hanged. You can add this too. I think they might have been afraid that the Hoad clan would gun them down if they voted to hang Orville.”