Scratch went behind the chair and reached down to take hold of the man under each arm. He straightened, hauling the man up and out of the chair.
“What you need is to have your head ducked in a water trough a few times, mister. You scared us outta some time we can’t afford to lose at our age!”
“Take it easy, Scratch,” Bo advised as he caught sight of the tin star pinned to the man’s vest. “You’ll get arrested if you start manhandling the law.”
“You mean this pathetic drunk really is the sheriff in these parts?”
Bo leaned closer to peer at the badge in the bad light. “That’s what the tin star says, anyway.”
“Un…unhand me, sir!” the drunken lawman demanded. “Or I’ll be forced to…to throw you in the calaboose!”
Scratch lowered the man back into the chair. “Sorry, Sheriff,” he said. “I figured you must just be some drunk who wandered in from the street to sleep off a bender. I thought maybe we’d be doin’ you a favor by gettin’ you out of here before the real sheriff found you.”
The man let out a huge belch, then grabbed hold of the desk’s edge with both hands as if the room had started spinning around him. “I…I am…the real sher’f. Sher’f O’Brien at your…your shervice. What can I…do for you two…fine gennelmen?”
Sheriff O’Brien was a thickset man who wore a dirty flannel shirt that was missing a button so that some of his ample belly showed where it bulged against the garment. He had a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard and a thatch of graying hair that stuck up in wild spikes as if O’Brien had run his fingers through it several times before passing out. The butt of a handgun stuck up from a holster attached to a gun belt strapped around his hips.
Lawman or not, Bo wasn’t sure it was a good idea for somebody like this to be carrying a gun. O’Brien might shoot himself or somebody else without even knowing what he was doing.
Bo looked around and spotted a battered old coffeepot sitting on a cast-iron stove in the corner. “You want a cup of coffee, Sheriff?”
O’Brien shuddered. “Can’t stand coffee. Keeps me awake at night. Man with…an important job like mine…needs his sleep at night.” He peered at Bo and Scratch, looking back and forth between them. “Who…who are you? I don’t remember…don’t remember seeing you around our fine community before.”
“That’s because we just rode in. He’s Scratch Morton. My name’s Bo Creel. We’re from Texas.”
“Well, you’re welcome in Mankiller anyway.” O’Brien hiccupped. “Ever’body’s welcome in Mankiller. Bustling—hic!—bustling community.”
Scratch looked at Bo and shook his head. “We’re wastin’ our time talkin’ to this fella. He’s drunk as a skunk. You won’t be able to get anything sensible outta him.”
O’Brien leaned back in his chair and glared. “Drunk as a skunk, am I?”
“That’s the way it looks to me.”
O’Brien pointed a trembling finger at Scratch. “Don’t you…disreshpect the office of…of sher’f. I’m the…the law around here—”
He stopped short, turned in his chair, and threw up all over the floor behind the desk.
Grimacing, Bo said, “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll ask somebody else about those men and that so-called toll bridge.”
He and Scratch had started toward the door when O’Brien grabbed hold of the desk again and pulled himself up. “Wait a minute!” he called. “Did you say…toll bridge?”
Bo stopped and looked back. “That’s right.” He thought that the sheriff appeared slightly less drunk, probably because he had emptied his belly of all the rum he’d consumed earlier. “Two men stopped us at this end of the bridge over the river and demanded that we pay them a toll. Do they have a legal right to collect such a toll, Sheriff?”
O’Brien blinked rapidly. “You…you paid ’em, didn’t you?”
Scratch smiled and shook his head. “No, we sorta persuaded them to let us pass without payin’. Some .44 caliber persuasion, if you know what I mean.”
O’Brien looked even sicker than he had a moment earlier. “Oh, no. Godfrey Daniel and all his thrice-damned brethren! You didn’t…you didn’t kill them, did you?”
“It didn’t come to shooting,” Bo assured the lawman.
“Yeah,” Scratch added, “they saw the light when they found themselves lookin’ down the barrels of our guns.”
O’Brien groaned. “Oh, this is bad, this is bad.” He clawed his fingers through his hair in agitation. “Who was it? Did they tell you their names?”
“Luke and Thad,” Bo supplied.
“Oh, my Lord. Luke Devery is his pa’s firstborn son and right-hand man. Thad’s his cousin, from the crazy side of the family. You made them back down?”
“They rubbed us the wrong way, I reckon you could say,” Scratch replied.
Bo said, “I told them we’d check with the law, and if they have a legal right to collect a toll, we’d come back and pay them.” He shrugged. “Then we made them toss their shotguns in the bushes and get out of our way.”
O’Brien leaned his elbows on the desk and covered his face with his hands. “Lemme think, lemme think,” he half-moaned. After a few seconds, he looked up at the Texans and went on, “Here’s what you need to do. Go up to the next block and over a block. You’ll see a place called Bradfield’s. You go in there and…and talk to Sam Bradfield.”
“Who’s he?” Scratch asked.
“The undertaker. He’s gonna need to size you boys up for coffins and find out what you want on your tombstones.”
Bo and Scratch just looked at him for a moment, then Bo said, “You’re telling us that Luke and Thad are going to kill us.”
O’Brien nodded. “Oh, yeah. Sure as a pig shits in a pen. Them and their relatives, they won’t let that pass.”
“Well, no offense, Sheriff, but we’ll have something to say about that. And if you don’t want a lot of trouble in your town, you’d be wise to speak to those men and warn them.”
“No, sir.” O’Brien shook his head. “I’m not going near the Deverys. We have an arrangement. I leave them alone, and they leave me alone. Actually, they, uh…sort of pretend that I don’t exist.”
Bo bit back the words that sprang to his lips. He wanted to tell O’Brien that he was a not only a pathetic excuse for a lawman, but also a pathetic excuse for a man. Such a tongue lashing wouldn’t accomplish anything, though.
“If anyone attacks us, Sheriff, we’ll defend ourselves.”
O’Brien held up a shaking hand, palm toward Bo. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know anything about it.” He was frightened enough so that now he seemed half-sober, or only half-drunk, depending on how you wanted to look at it. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that you boys are just passing through Mankiller?”
“We heard about the gold strike,” Scratch said. “Figured to do some prospectin’.”
O’Brien shook his head. “I was afraid you’d say that. Would you maybe…as a personal favor to me, maybe…consider riding on? Right now, maybe?”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Bo said, “except to get some rooms in one of the hotels and then maybe a good hot meal in one of the cafés.”
Scratch smiled. “That sounds good to me, too.”
“But you never did answer the question, Sheriff,” Bo went on. “Do the Deverys have a legal right to collect that toll?”
“Some folks in town got together and built the bridge,” O’Brien muttered. “Before that there was just a rope bridge.”
“Then the answer is no.”
O’Brien shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it. The Devery family owns a lot of land around here, including the part where the bridge ends.”
“Well, then, in that case, maybe we should go back and pay them, like I said we would.”
O’Brien gave Bo a bleak stare. “You really think that’s going to do any good now? You insult a couple of the Deverys, pull guns on them…Do you really think paying a few dollars is going to change anything?”