Scratch sighed. “No, I suppose not.” He paused. “I’m glad Biscuits ain’t here.”
“Why’s that?”
Scratch nodded toward the bar. “Because I got a hunch that no matter what you said, he’d be down on his knees behind that bar right now, lappin’ up those puddles of who-hit-John like a dog!”
News of the shoot-out spread like wildfire from one end of Mankiller to the other. In less than twenty-four hours as deputies, the Texans had killed seven men, wounded another, and arrested three members of the most powerful family in town, plus the shoot-out Scratch had had with the bushwhackers at the hotel. People couldn’t stop talking about how the new lawmen were going to either clean up Mankiller at last…
Or be dead before they had a chance to do anything else.
When they got back to the sheriff’s office, Biscuits O’Brien was still asleep on the cot in the back room. Bo and Scratch got him up and forced him to drink black coffee until he was reasonably awake, if not sober. He refused to reveal where he’d had the extra bottle of whiskey hidden. Short of beating it out of him, the Texans didn’t know what else to do.
Reuben and Simeon yelled complaints from the cell block, but Bo and Scratch ignored them. Bo left Scratch there to keep an eye on things and went to pay a visit to Edgar Devery.
“You need to come down to the jail,” Bo began, and when Edgar started to shake his head, he went on, “Hear me out. Your boy Thad’s in a bad way.”
“Is that wound in his arm festerin’ up?” Edgar asked with obvious concern in his voice. “Dang you, Deputy —”
“His arm’s fine,” Bo cut in. “But he messed himself last night, and he needs some clean clothes.”
“That ain’t my responsibility.”
“He’s your son, and nobody else is going to take care of him.”
“His sister will,” Edgar said with a scowl.
“His sister? You’d send a man’s
“All right, all right, damn it! Quit pesterin’ me. I’ll go up to the house and get him some clean clothes, then I’ll be down to the jail after a while.”
“Thanks,” Bo said. “And I’m sure Thad will be grateful to you, too.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. Boy’s as mean and surly as a bear with a toothache.”
“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” Bo commented. “In fact, I haven’t seen any female Deverys.”
“Yeah. Name’s Myra. She don’t come out much. Mostly she stays in her room on the second floor.” Edgar tapped the side of his head. “Poor gal ain’t quite right. She’d rather be shut up readin’ books and such-like. Seems sort of embarrassed about bein’ a member of the family.”
From what he had seen of them so far, Bo would have said that Myra Devery might just be the sanest one of them all, if she felt like that.
He wasn’t sure if Edgar would live up to his promise or not, but true to his word, the liveryman showed up at the jail that afternoon with some clean clothes, a handful of rags, and a bucket of water. Scratch patted him down to make sure he wasn’t trying to smuggle a weapon to the prisoners, then they let him go into the cell block. Scratch unlocked Thad’s cell and then relocked the door behind Edgar. When the liveryman called to be let out half an hour later, he said, “Ought to smell better in there now.”
“We can dang sure hope so,” Scratch said.
The one drawback to having Edgar come in and help Thad clean up was that he got to take a good look at the jail and its defenses, such as they were. Bo still expected an attempt to free the prisoners, maybe as soon as that night.
However, the night passed quietly. The Texans took turns sleeping and standing guard, just as they had taken turns going across the street to the cafe for meals. Lucinda reported how everybody was talking about them and how there was a sense of law and order growing suddenly in Mankiller that the citizens had never experienced before.
The next night, the Texans were summoned to one of the town’s saloons, where a couple of drunken miners were brawling. Bo left Scratch at the jail and answered the call for help, and as soon as he pushed the batwings aside and stepped into the saloon, silence fell like a hammer. The two men who’d been wrestling on the floor picked each other up and quickly started righting the tables and chairs they’d knocked over. They weren’t completely sober, but they weren’t nearly as drunk as they had been a few minutes earlier, either.
“We’re sorry, Deputy Creel,” one of them said.
“Yeah, don’t know what came over us,” the other miner added. “We got to arguin’ and just got carried away a mite.”
“We’ll pay for any damages,” the first one offered.
“Well…” Bo looked at the proprietor, who nodded his agreement to the suggestion. “All right,” he told the two men, “but next time find some way to settle your argument without causing any trouble.”
“Yes, sir, Deputy, we sure will!” Both men nodded vehemently.
Outside the saloon, Bo paused, grunted in surprise, and shook his head. A reputation as a town-taming lawmen nobody wanted to cross was one thing he’d never figured on having. It seemed to be pretty effective, though.
Over the next week, he and Scratch found out just how effective. After the extraordinarily violent first twenty- four hours on the job, the next seven days were relatively trouble free. There were no murders, the first time in memory that an entire week had gone by without a killing, and only a few fights broke out that the Texans had to break up.
The Deverys also seemed to be lying low. Jackson Devery didn’t make any more appearances demanding that
