The sheriff’s been out, yu know, trail-blazin, says another, and they all bark and hoot at that and explode a fart or two.
A wizened bespectacled hunchback in banker’s pants and watch-fobbed waistcoat spits into the flames and says: Well dont be a stranger, sheriff. C’mon over’n rest yer can a spell.
He shrugs and, using his knees and raps of his rifle butt, he slowly pivots his old spindleshanks around toward the fire, but it’s an obstinate creature and by the time he has managed it, cattle have crowded up around him again and the campfire seems to have receded. Between him and it: the scrawny rumps of a dozen or so cows with their tails up in the air.
Haw. Looks like yu’ll hafta fuck yer way in here, sheriff, says a brawny skew-jawed lout with a bandanna headband and a thin black mustache.
Naw, them ole bossies dont fancy the sheriff, grunts the hunchback. It’s thet handsome white stallion whut’s got their tails up.
Thet hoss is a real byooty awright. I feel a kinder lustful hankerin fer it myself.
Boys, I tell yu, says a squint-eyed old graybeard with a preacherly manner, t’bestride sech a hoss as thet’d be like bein born agin!
They all yea-say that campmeeting style and suck worshipfully from their whiskey bottles — Or t’be bestrid! Yeah! Haw! Aymen, brother! — but meanwhile the cows have nudged him further and further away until he can no longer make out the details up there: just a bunch of dark shadowy figures huddled in their hats around a cold fire, alone in the dark sea of cattle, the chuckwagon a vague glimmerous shape against the black sky like a screen hiding something.
Ho, sheriff! one of them shouts, can’t tell which, his far-off holler all but lost in the shapeless prairie night. Whar yu goin? The beans is agittin cold!
Instead of cows’ bumholes he’s mostly looking at the front ends of steers now, their horned heads down and dangerous. In fact, he realizes that the only reason his poor old mount is still upright is that the steer that has impaled it has its horns stuck in its gut and so is holding up a creature now mainly dead. The campfire off in the distance looks no more substantial than a match being held to a cigarillo. Before it’s snuffed out altogether, he cocks his rifle, shoots the steer below behind the ear, and hops off as both beasts collapse like deflating balloons. Other steers are pawing the ground menacingly but he brings them down with his rifle, then draws his six-shooters and fires away at the lot, clearing space. The sharp shocking report of gunfire in the still night causes those near him to break in panic and they charge off blindly in all directions, pounding into each other and into the massed-up crowd of those around them, spreading terror like a stone slapped into water. Soon the entire herd is on the move but with nowhere to go, the ground quavering under the thunderous buffeting of their hoofs and their colliding bodies like a bedroll being shaken out. Some of the wild-eyed creatures come running straight at him, but he holds his ground, unsteady as it is, bringing them down one by one, pumping lead into their dim cow brains, his weapons growing hot in his hands. The roar of their stampeding is deafening and more than once he is brought to his knees by the violent convulsions of the earth beneath him, but then suddenly the entire herd vanishes into the night like a slate being erased and all is still.
He holsters his pistols, picks up his fallen rifle, reloads it, and begins the long trek on foot to the campfire, stepping over and around the silhouetted carcasses that line his path back like lumpy milestones. Some of the cattle he passes are not yet dead and they gaze up at him pitiably with their big wet eyes, through which he shoots them with his rifle to make their dying short but vivid to them.
He is met at the campfire by muttering and grumbling, incomprehensible except for the swearwords, which are in the majority but add up to nothing in particular. Tell me that agin, he says.
We said yu done some serious damage to our herd, sheriff, snarls the wamper-jawed lout with the pencil-lined upper lip. In fact it aint thar no more. We’re gonna hafta dock yer pay.
Thet’s good news. Didnt know I wuz gittin paid.
Well it aint much. We figger after tonight’s deevastation yu’re about forty years in debt to us.
And thet dont include our sentymental feelins toward them pore little dogies, says the preacherly graybeard, snatching a lizard off a rock and tossing it into the fire to watch it wriggle. We been left downright bereft.
He eyes them coldly, rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. Well thet’s most lamentable, he says. But whut wuz yu doin with alla them cattle anyhow? I thought yu wuz ahuntin injun scalps.
Well the problem with thet, sheriff, says the hunchback, shoving a chaw of tobacco into his grizzled cheeks, is we’re plumb outa savages. Aint seed a live one with his skin still on in a coon’s age. He spits into the fire to set it sizzling.
But whut about alla them misabused wimmenfolk?
All them whut?
Oh right, snorts the mestizo, glancing up with his good eye from his whittling. Hah! The wimmenfolk!
They heehaw and whistle at that and, while the ocarina player blows a dancehall tune, a pig-eyed fat man with a waxed handlebar mustache rises from his squat for a moment to drop his pants and wriggle his arse at the fire.
Well lets see, says the squint-eyed old fellow with the high manner. I estimate we did mebbe go dig up a ole burial ground fer some deceased scalps. Jest not t’disappoint, y’know. They’re in a saddlebag over thar. They got a unseemly odor about em, but hep yerself.
But thet aint the point. Yu all been deppitized.
Well we undeppitized ourselves, sheriff. It jest warnt no fun. We tuck up cowpunchin instead.
Beats scalp huntin all t’blazes.
Yu eat better too, says the fat man, rebuttoning his breeches. Less yu got some trigger-happy damfool comin along’n drivin off yer larder. The others rumble and growl at that, while the fat man relights a stubby black cigar butt in the fire.
Whut I caint quite figger is whar’d yu git em all?
Git em?
Yer stock.
Well we, uh, we borried em, explains a weedy wall-eyed runt, picking his teeth with a sliver of bone.
Yu mean yu rustled alla them cattle?
Well yu dont hafta put a name to it, sheriff. But how else yu gonna git yu a steer out in these parts?
We jest kinder pass em around out here, y’see, says the hunchback, peering up at him over his wire-rimmed spectacles, his cheek bulging with chaw. He lets fly another load into the fire. It’s how we do it.
I dunno. I aint never read the lawr but I think yu broke it, he says.
They all just smile back blankly at him. Naw. Haw!
Whut’s agin the lawr, sheriff, says the fat man around his cigar stub, is shootin up other folks’ cows and runnin their herds off. Thet thar’s a capital offense throughout the whole goddam Terrortory. Reckon we may have no choice but t’string yu up fer thet one. Jest t’be proper, y’know.
Less a course yu hightail it out thar’n brang em all back agin.
How’m I gonna do thet? They went off ever which way.
Shit, I dunno, sheriff. It’s yer fuckin neck, yu figger it out.
I kin see thet rapscallion aint gonna rectify his heinous misdeeds.
Nor even repent of em. He’s a hard case.
Only trouble is, whar kin we hang him? They aint no trees out here.
We kin use the chuckwagon, says the fat man, taking up a coil of rope and cutting off a length with a butcher knife. Ifn it aint high enuf, we’ll hitch up the hosses’n drug him along behind it.