“It means an outcast; someone no one else wants to go near. So I asked her what she meant, and she looked at me like I was shot in the belly. You understand? Like she was sorry for me. Me! Frank Leinard, the Sheriff! Sorry for me. Then she went ahead and said, ‘Frank, you're a good man, under it all, and maybe a better man before you came here; but they've hired you to kill and that's what you are ... a hired gun. No matter if you got the law with you or not, you're a hired killer. And they know that. No matter how much anyone likes you as a man, Frank, they see that gun and what you are, and no one is going to associate with you. Because you're a pariah. They made you that, and that's the reason I'm not going to marry you, Frank.”
Leinard sat back down carefully, and he turned his head away so they could not see his eyes. “So that's why I've never been invited to eat with any of you, and that's why I never got married, and that's why I made so much about this town bein’ my town, and I wanted it to be the cleanest, best town.
“Now you come and tell me, ‘Thanks, Frank, you risked your life every day, and you neatened our town for us, and now it's done, you can go.’ Is that it? Is that what you're sayin’ to me?”
He folded his hands; and now he turned back so they could see his face; and they saw, perhaps for the first time they truly saw that big Frank Leinard the Sheriff was not a young man any longer. They looked at one another, and Morn Ashley nudged Pete Redallo with his elbow. Pete said: “But, Frank, you don't get what we mean. I—I know, I mean, I know it's your town and all, but times has changed and we don't need a hired gun—I mean, we don't need your kind of Sheriff no more.”
He stammered to silence, and looked ashamed.
Then they saw Frank Leinard's body stiffen, and he looked up with that strength in him, and he said levelly, “This is my town, gentlemen. I helped clean it, helped make it safe for you little men to run your businesses and get rich with. Now you think you're gonna throw me out and tell me to go find a nice tree out there somewhere, and bed down under it till I die, so's I don't embarrass you?
“Well, there ain't many trees out there in barranca country; and there ain't many towns; and this one is mine. This is my time and I'm stayin'.
“There ain't one of you who can outfox me or outdraw me, so just try and get me out!”
Then he stood up, and his chest swelled, and it brought the .44 into their sight even bigger, so they left. He stood by the window, watching them talking as they crossed the street to the Palace. It still felt like rain was coming.
* * * *
It got worse. Much worse. They started crossing the street to avoid him, and a petition was shoved under the office door one morning.
On the following Wednesday, a riot broke out in the telegraph office while he was eating at Fenner's, and they did not call him; they settled it themselves. That made him feel insecure, hurt, angry. So he got back at them by arresting Bill Pillby for carrying a gun in town.
Everyone knew Bill had been hunting that day and had only stopped in town to pick up some staples on his way back to his spread; but Frank saw him and threw him in the single cell before anyone could do anything about it. A delegation from the Council came, then, and told Frank he was getting too rambunctious, and he ordered them out. When they gave him trouble, he pulled the .44 on them. Then it took Doc Crenkell and the Judge to get Bill out.
But he held onto Pillby's well-tended and much-loved Sharps 74, and sent him out of town telling him he'd drop by the spread to return it, one day next week when he was out that way. And there wasn't anything Pillby or the Judge or Doc Crenkell could say about it being a necessity, about it being Bill Pillby's right arm, that could make the Sheriff accommodate.
A week later, in a slamming rain that had turned the main drag into an ankle-deep river of mud, he beat into insensibility two fence-riders from the B-slash-D who had brought in some forgework for the blacksmith, Quent Farrier.
Because they had to wait overnight and half the next day, the two waddies had spent some time at the Palace. Maybe they were a bit louder than they'd have been without having emptied a bottle of Kentucky between them, but everyone swore that when they offered to tote home the groceries for the piano teacher as she came out of the General Store, even when she resisted their roughhouse good humor — even Anse Pfeiffer, who was right there—swore to it—they were at worst tipsily polite. But all the witness they made probably couldn't have stopped Frank Leinard, who pistol-whipped and fisted them into the mud; and in the process dumped the piano teacher's goods into the mire, where they were split open and trampled.
Things went from bad to worse, and one day the bartender at the Palace had to throw Frank out for being drunk and smashing steins on the fioor. He barely missed getting shot.
No one knew what to do.
So they decided to hire a gun from Silver City to wing Frank, and get him out of town.
Frank killed the pistolero when the swarthy, pimple-faced man tried to take him out from under cover in an alley between the Palace and Fenner's. Then Frank went and arrested the men he thought were behind it. Three of them were innocent, but it didn't seem to matter to Leinard.
So they decided to bushwhack him.
* * * *
Frank Leinard lay outside the Palace, in the dusty street. The night had closed down tightly, and a few folks had come into town for the dance. They passed him as he lay there, drunk, with his twisted, sewed-up gun-arm thrown out in a crazy S beside him.
One woman—Morn Ashley's wife—pursed her lips and shook her head as she went by, saying, “Ever since he got shot up like that, he's been just no good. Drunk all the time. Why do you men on the Council keep him on pension, Morn?”
And Pete Redallo came by with his three kids. He stood for a moment, spread-legged, staring down at the drunken ex-Sheriff, and cursed softly, so the kids would not catch it.
“Should have run him out of town, not just crippled him,” he said. “But you can't simple turn away a man that helped clean up the town.”
They went on.
Others came by, not wanting to be late for the dance, and carefully stepped around Leinard. They all went by, and few of them heard what he was muttering, face in the dust.
Even had they heard, none of them would have understood what he meant when he said, “There's damn few trees out there in the barranca.”
No one missed the dance that night. It was a good dance; a friendly, civilized dance, with no fights. That was because it was such a friendly, civilized town, was Bartisville.