slouched their way up to the nearest porch pillar. Slumped against either side of the veranda’s wooden prop, then cast sneering, self-important glares our direction and passed a smoking, hand-rolled ciga-reet back and forth. Looked, for all the world, like they wanted to amble on over and slap us nekkid just for the belligerent, hellacious fun of it.
Don’t think Boz noticed the gunnies. He sliced a smirking look back at me. “Should be hereby noted that I take umbrage at the snide remark you just made about my personal handsomosity, Dodge. Want you to know they’s many a beautiful woman in Tejas as will gladly testify that I’m a damned good-lookin’ man, and will likely be so till the day I die.”
Pitched my reins over the hitch rack’s cross bar. Kept a corner of the eye check on the men watching us from across Rio Seco’s empty main thoroughfare. As I eased up beside my friend, I slapped his shoulder. “Yeah,” I said, “but all that proves is that there must be troops of females in Tejas that’re blinder’n a row of fence posts long enough to circle the entirety of Val Verde County.”
Still yammering at each other, when we stepped up to the jailhouse door and tried the knob. Turned it, but the heavy entry wouldn’t give way.
Heard a less-than-friendly voice from inside the sturdy building call out, “Who’n the hell are ya? Best speak on up and be damned quick about it, lest I cut loose with this here coach gun of mine. Got ’er loaded with heavy-gauge buckshot. Blast’ll take down the door, most of the frame, and probably blow your dumb asses back into the street with ’em, by God.”
Crazy-sounding son of a bitch sure as hell got my attention.
3
“MIGHT JUST SEND YOU TO JESUS MYSELF.”
TO SAY OUR reception, in one of south Texas’s more secluded villages, wasn’t exactly what we’d expected can only be described as a blue-eyed understatement. Course we’d considered an encyclopedic list of deadly possibilities for the trip, but having a local lawdog draw a bead on us with a shotgun wasn’t one of ’em.
In an effort to get away from a potential flesh-rending gob of buckshot, Boz took a higgy-jiggy step to one side of the jail’s iron-hinged door. I hopped the opposite direction. Boz knifed several quick, darting glances at the shuttered and barred windows of the fortresslike poky.
Then, appearing convinced he was fairly safe, my partner leaned back against the wall and hooked both thumbs over his double-row cartridge belt. Twisting his head toward the disembodied voice inside, he yelled, “Now don’t shoot us, friend. We’re rangers. Have official business with Marshal Jacob Cobb. Come on and open up.”
A long pause followed. Then sounds of shuffling and scraping went on behind the door. We heard a couple of loud bumps and an odd thumping noise. Finally, a grinding racket like something big being dragged aside.
Slotted peephole in the thick slab of wood popped open. Hands raised, we moved out onto the boardwalk so the guy inside had a reasonably good view of his visitors. Set of disembodied, bloodshot eyes floated up in the slit and flicked nervous glances from one of us to the other.
“You bastards prove that?” feller behind the door yelled.
Look of tired disgust, and fleeting resignation, etched a path across Boz’s face. “Tell Marshal Cobb that Ranger Randall Bozworth Tatum is out here in the street waitin’ to see him at his personal request. And be damned quick about it.”
Second later the peephole slammed shut. Action left us standing there with our faces hanging out. We stared at our feet for what seemed near a minute. Then we heard one heavy bolt snap aside, then another. Door swung open on a set of hammered iron hinges in sore need of some attention from an oilcan.
We eased over the threshold and into an office so small a feller couldn’t cuss a cat in there lest he ended up with a mouth full of fur. Thick-walled, dirt-floored, poorly ventilated room couldn’t have measured more than twenty feet across and maybe half again that deep.
Much-abused banker’s desk sat on our right, just inside the door. Ragged, dog-eared map of Tejas, tacked to the wall behind the desk, looked as though it just might end up on the floor with passage of the slightest breeze. A half-empty rack for weapons covered most of the entire wall next to the map. Total armament stored there didn’t amount to anything but a couple of old Henry rifles and one of them ancient black-powder Walker Colts with what looked to be a busted cylinder.
Pair of four-by-eight cells made from two-inch-wide, basket-woven straps of hammered metal that matched the front door’s hinges stood against the back wall. Farthest of that pair of chicken coops appeared the only one of the closet-sized spaces occupied. Looked as though the entire building had been erected around that brace of tiny, metal enclosures. No air circulated in the room at all. Place was sure enough ripe. Smelled like an open chamber pot.
Sounded like a cannon shot when the door slammed behind us. Both bolts clattered into place with loud metallic clanks. Badge-wearing feller armed with a short-barreled scattergun crab-walked around us to his station of authority. He pushed a banker’s chair, located behind the desk, aside with one foot.
Jaw clenched and red-faced, the local lawdog flopped into the raggedy seat with that big popper laid atop across one arm. Had it aimed at a spot about level with our bellies. Haggard-looking gent eyeballed the pair of us as though he just might cut loose with that intimidating blaster at the least provocation. Figured if the twitchy feller got heavy fingered, he wouldn’t leave enough of me and Boz to scrape up in a saloon swamper’s best dustpan.
Boz took plenty of time as he peeled his leather riding gloves off. He tossed an amiable, toothy grin at the red-faced feller. Sure he tried his level best to sound sociable when he said, “You Marshal Cobb, friend?”
Gent behind the desk didn’t look old enough to be Jacob Cobb to me. Not a wrinkle on his face, as I could detect. And his droopy moustaches appeared a fairly recent cultivation. He confirmed my suspicions when, with a sneering insolent look, the local star toter leaned back in his squeaky seat.
Chapped lips peeled away from tobacco-stained teeth. He fiddled with the hammers on that massive smoke pole. “Nope. Marshal Cobb ain’t here right at this exact moment. Name’s Rufus Cosner. Deputy City Marshal Rufus Cosner. What can I do for you boys?”
Boz chucked our thick sheaf of bona fides onto the deputy’s desk. “Well, ugly sucker wearin’ three pistols and leanin’ against the doorframe yonder’s none other than famed Texas Ranger Lucius ‘By God’ Dodge. I’m just the poor son of a bitch who has to put up with his unending verbal abuse—Senior Corporal Randall Bozworth Tatum.”
“That a fact?” the impudent deputy snapped.
“Is indeed,” Boz went on. “Based on a telegraph message from your Marshal Cobb, we’ve been sent down here from Company B, up in Fort Worth, to relieve the good citizens of Rio Seco of a murderous brigand named Boston Teal. Figure on taking his more’n worthless ass back north and stretching his neck.”
Cosner’s truculent attitude changed quicker than a minnow can swim the inside of a tin water cup. He hopped out of his squeaking seat. Dropped that double-barreled blaster onto the battered desk’s scarred top. Grabbed up our wad of papers. Slapped them back into one of Boz’s hands and then grabbed the other and shook it like he was the happiest man in south Texas.
A toothy grin now plastered on his face, the deputy said, “Sweet Lord Almighty, but I’m serious glad to see you rangers, and that’s the God’s truth. Teal’s just about to rub my last nerve as raw as a slab of fresh butchered beef.”
From the corner cell I heard, “You bastards won’t get me past the town limits of this one-dog, jerkwater hellhole. Probably won’t get me off the boardwalk outside. So much as try to leave this stink hole of a jail with me in tow and you’ll all end up deader’n a trio of rotten cottonwoods.”
I turned to see a scruffy, bearded joker leaned against his cage’s chained and padlocked door. A set of nasty moustaches hung down past the prisoner’s chin and swept the upper part of a thick chest. Smart-mouthed jackass had one foot wrapped in a wad of blood-encrusted bandages. Big ole dressing made the end of his leg look about the size of a sixty-pound, yellow-meat watermelon.
“Brother Irby’ll kill the hell out of both you ranger sons a bitches ’fore he lets you take me anywheres, much less Fort Worth for a hangin’,” the foot-shot idget growled. “Ain’t neither one a you bastards got grit ’nuff to string up any us Teal boys.”
Cosner rolled his eyes and looked like he wanted to puke his socks up. “He might be right. This jackass’s
