“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 sister in to help him clean up after something like that?” Bo didn’t bother trying to keep the contempt out of his voice. “What kind of man are you, Edgar?”
“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 café 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 his sons and nephew be released. The prisoners complained incessantly, but they seemed to be getting used to being behind bars. Edgar visited Thad a few times, which perked up the young man. He began to get some of his natural piss and vinegar back, which Bo wasn’t sure was a good thing.
Thad’s sister Myra came to visit him, too. She was a pale, blond young woman who spoke in a shy half-whisper when she said anything at all and kept her eyes downcast. Her visits seemed to lift Thad’s spirits, too. Bo was convinced she was the person he’d seen peeking out through the curtains in the second-floor window of the old Devery house.
With one of the Texans keeping an eye on him nearly all the time, Biscuits O’Brien had suffered the torments of the damned. He had been sick at his stomach, he’d had the shakes, he had been drenched in a cold sweat. But by the time a week had gone past, he was sober…and mad as hell about that fact.
He was complaining about that very thing one afternoon when the office door opened and Lucinda Bonner came in. Bo and Scratch were straddling ladderback chairs, but they stood up instantly and nodded to her. “Ma’am,” Scratch said.
“You boys are too polite,” Lucinda said as she waved them back into their chairs, but her smile said that she liked the attention.
“That’s our Texas upbringin’,” Scratch told her. “My ma would’a kicked me from heck to Goliad if I didn’t stand up when a lady entered a room.”
“Mine, too,” Bo agreed.
“Well, that’s nice of you,” Lucinda said, “but you can sit down and relax. I brought something I want you to see.”
She had a stack of papers in her hand. They looked like handbills of some sort, Bo thought, and as Lucinda held one up, he saw that he was right.
The printing was big and bold and read:
ELECTION, JUNE 5th
COLORADO PALACE SALOON
VOTE
Mrs. Lucinda Bonner for MAYOR
Dr. Jason Weathers • Harlan Green
Sam Bradfield • Wallace Kane
for TOWN COUNCIL
Col. Horace Macauley for JUDGE
VOTE for Progress
VOTE for Law and Order
VOTE for Mankiller’s Future!
“Well,” Bo said as he looked at the handbill and thought about how the Deverys might react to it, “that ought to do it.”
CHAPTER 24
It didn’t take long, either. Lucinda paid a couple of local boys to nail the handbills up around town, and as soon as they started appearing, folks began to talk. It was like a tidal wave of sensation washed over Mankiller. Everybody was talking about the impending election, which was only a week away.
Bo was in the café having a cup of coffee when the door opened and heavy footsteps sounded. The place was busy as usual, but silence fell as all the conversations abruptly ceased. Bo turned his head and saw Jackson Devery stalking toward the counter.
Devery didn’t appear to be armed, but his face was flushed with barely contained rage, as usual. He slapped one of the handbills down on the counter in front of Lucinda, who had been talking to Bo. It was torn in the upper corners where it had been ripped down.
“What the hell is this?” Devery demanded.
“Keep a civil tongue in your head, Devery,” Bo snapped. “There’s no law against cussing in town, so I can’t arrest you for it, but I can give you a thrashing if I have to.”