But Bud had mouthed off to the sheriff, and the sheriff had shot him down in the street. Funny how only the Cullen cowhands seemed to wind up that way — half a dozen were already buried here on Boot Hill. Now among them was a Meadow, planted but never to blossom.
Who were his parents? Willa wondered. Did he have brothers or sisters? Friends forged on trail drives?
They would never know. No date of birth, no full name. Just a white wooden cross, freshly painted but soon to be windblown and blistered.
Willa was a pretty thing but not delicate, near tall as her father but with her late Swede mother’s hourglass figure and also the same straw-yellow hair worn up and braided back. She had been called a tomboy in her youth, but was too much of a woman for that now, though she often wore ranching-style riding apparel like today.
She meant no disrespect to the late Bud Meadow. She just knew she needed to be dressed to ride, though her father — in his black Sunday suit and string tie and felt hat — had brought the big buggy, drawn by a pair of horses, with plenty of room for her to sit beside.
Really, this was about Papa’s stubbornness. In buggy or wagon, he refused to let his daughter take the reins, leaving her to ride alongside on Daisy, her calico, and surreptitiously guide the hitched-up horses, should Papa need the help he refused. Leaving the hard-packed, rutted road to take the turn into Boot Hill was an example of that.
But for a blind man, George Cullen got around well.
Her papa’s blindness had come on gradual over these five years past, until now his unseeing stare had a disturbing milkiness. He would wince and narrow his eyes and widen them, as if that would somehow summon vision that was only a memory now. Still, their world was small enough — ranch, road, town — that Papa could manage. Mostly.
When the service was over, and the grave diggers gone to shoveling, Papa sent Whit Murphy, his foreman, back with the boys, and — with Willa’s subtle help — steered the buggy back onto the road and headed into town. Whit had offered to come along and several others chimed in their willingness, too.
It had been Willa who discouraged them.
“If just Pa and me ride in,” she said firmly, “there’ll be no trouble. You boys chaperone us, we could be back out here at another service tomorrow. Maybe more than one.”
Whit, lanky and weathered with a Texas-style Stetson and droopy, dark mustache, only nodded, touched his brim, and rode off, the rest following.
It didn’t have to be said: a blind man and a girl could ride in and, no matter what transpired, ride back out again. Even Sheriff Harry Gauge had to respect some things.
The buggy and its calico escort took it easy down Main Street’s row of facing frame buildings. At this end of Main, the white wooden church seemed to stare all the way down at its bookend, the bare-wood livery stable whose high-peaked hayloft mirrored Missionary Baptist’s steeple. The street itself wore a layer of sand, carted in from the nearby Purgatory River, to hold down the dust. Wooden awnings shaded the boardwalks, a few women in gingham out shopping, encouraged by the cool breeze, always welcome in this hot dry climate.
All very civilized, Willa thought.
Hardware store, apothecary shop, barber, hotel with restaurant, mercantile store, bank, telegraph office, saloon. From Main’s stem several streets shot off and modest houses hid back behind the tall false-fronted clapboard stores and the occasional brick building. Trinidad existed to serve the ranchers, large and small, who lived and worked in the surrounding area. The population here was merchants and their employees. Nicely dressed, genteel folk who depended on the rough men and frontier women who made making a living in this hard country possible for those softer than themselves.
Down toward the livery stable, with its blacksmith forge out front, was a scarred adobe building that had once been a Mexican army outpost and still sat apart from the rest of the town, across from a scattering of adobes, the homes and businesses of the town’s modest Mexican contingent.
Seated under an awning that had been added onto the tile roof, watching the world go by, were two big rough-looking men in their thirties, one leaning back in his wooden chair with his boot heels catching the railing.
Willa and her father were only halfway down Main when her father asked her, “You see him?”
Papa meant Sheriff Harry Gauge.
“I see him, Papa.”
“Where is he, child?”
“Where he always is, when he’s not in that saloon.”
“In front of his office.”
“In front of his office.”
“Anyone with him?”
“Just that nasty deputy. Rhomer.”
“Let’s go on down, then.”
She frowned at the unseeing face as they kept up their leisurely pace. “Papa, you said the telegraph office. We’re almost there. Let’s do your errand and go about our business.”
“Willa, make sure I stop right beside him.”
“Papa, please... let it be.”
“You heard me, girl.”
When they got to the sheriff’s office, Willa cleared her throat just a little and her father brought the buggy to a stop.
Sheriff Harry Gauge took his feet off the rail and let the chair and his boots hit the plank porch, purposely loud. Gunshot loud.
Her papa flinched. “You there, Gauge?”
Gauge was a big blond man with ice-blue eyes, six-two, broad-shouldered, rugged but clean-shaven, with a cleft chin and a propensity for smiling at jokes he never shared. He wore a wide-brimmed middle-creased Stetson, a spotted cowhide vest, and a dark blue shirt with a badge, his dark duck trousers tucked into his finely tooled boots. The Colt .44 hung loosely at his side, its tie-down strap dangling.
Seated near him was Deputy Vint Rhomer, a redheaded, red-bearded man even bigger than Gauge. Eyes so dark blue they almost looked black, Rhomer was in a store-bought gray shirt with sleeve garters and badge and a buckskin vest, denims tucked in his boots. His .44 was tied down with a holster strap keeping the weapon in place.
“Right here, Cullen,” the sheriff said, his voice low and mellow, and a little thick — he was chewing tobacco. “Mornin’, Miss Cullen.”
Willa gave the sheriff the smallest nod she could muster.
Her father’s face was stony with rage, but his voice didn’t show it. “Thought you might make it out to the burial, Sheriff. Seems the least you might do.”
“I didn’t know Mr. Meadow that well.”
“Knew him well enough to kill him.”
Gauge said nothing.
His tone still casual, her father nonetheless pressed: “There was no need to shoot that boy down in the street. Like a rabid dog. None at all.”
“He was a rabid dog, Cullen. Wild kid, liquored up. Threatened me when I asked for his gun.”
“Bud was no gunfighter. Just a kid I give a job.” An edge came into her father’s voice. “But that was enough for you to cut him down, wasn’t it? That he worked for me.”
Gauge turned his head and spat a black tobacco stream. “Nothing to do with it, Cullen. He just had a big smart mouth. Big enough to get him killed.”
Now the rage in her father’s voice was a storm rattling at windows. “You’re no sheriff! You don’t even sound like a sheriff.”
Gauge spat again, put his shrug into his voice: “Well, the good folks of Trinidad elected me one, just the same.”
“Because they’re scared as hell!” Her father’s anger unsettled the horses some. “Scared of you, scared to death of you and your badge and your whole damn bunch!”