Centennial

  “We need towns in this state,” they argued, and Seccombe told them, “Not on our land you don’t.”

  Worst of all, the sheepmen led by that damned Messmore Garrett were more and more digging in and running their sheep on what had always been considered cattle territory. The situation was becoming intolerable, and on his first day home Seccombe ordered Skimmerhorn and Lloyd to ride out with him to warn Garrett’s men: “Vacate or suffer the consequences.”

  They rode east to where Amos Calendar had parked his lonely wagon—bed, commissary, refuge from storms for months on end—and it was some time before they could find the lean Texan. He rode toward them with his rifle across his saddle and grunted a meager hello to Skimmerhorn and Lloyd.

  “I’m Oliver Seccombe,” the Englishman said. “You’re trespassing with your sheep. This is cattle country.”

  “It’s open range,” Calendar said.

  “I’m warning you to get your sheep out of here.”

  “I’m stayin’ till Mr. Garrett tells me to move.”

  A dog now ran up, a collie-type with white and black hair. “Good-looking dog,” Seccombe said. “You ought to get him out of here, where he’ll be safe.”

  “Rajah’s safe anywhere,” Calendar said slowly. “Long as I got my Sharps.”

  The ranchers were getting nowhere with this difficult man, but Seccombe was determined to deliver the warning: “If you don’t move the sheep, Calendar, we’ll move them for you.”

  “You tried that before and failed.”

  Seccombe flushed. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Them gunmen who tried to kill me didn’t come from Brazil.”

  “Are you suggesting that I ...”

  “I ain’t suggestin’ nothin’. I’m simply tellin’ you that if any of you sonsabitches fire at me, I’m gonna fire back.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Seccombe said, spurring his horse and starting west.

  They headed for Line Camp Four, among the piñons, and as they rode Skimmerhorn said, “I better explain Buford Coker, Mr. Seccombe. He’s a hot-tempered Confederate from South Carolina. He’s not like Calendar at all. As you’ve seen, Calendar likes being alone. Coker don’t. He’s gone in to Cheyenne and spent a lot of time at Ida Hamilton’s House of Mirrors, and last time I saw him he’d persuaded one of the girls, Fat Laura ...”

  “I’ve heard of Fat Laura,” Seccombe said.

  “Well, you’ll find Fat Laura in the sheep wagon with him. Or maybe in a shack. Corker’s building himself a shack at Fox Canyon.”

  “Building!” Seccombe exploded. “That’s cattle country. We let him build, we’ll have half the sheepmen in the west ...”

  Coker was building. He and Fat Laura had hired two men to come down from Cheyenne and build them a substantial shack at the mouth of Fox Canyon. It was not elegant, but it was sturdy, and when Seccombe saw it he wanted to shout, “Skimmerhorn! Have that thing torn down!” for it was a visible warning of what would happen across the range if corrective steps were not taken, and quickly.

  At the door of the new house stood Fat Laura, a Virginia woman in her late twenties and obviously a graduate of Ida Hamilton’s academy. In her teens she must have been pretty in the buxom, bucolic way that cowboys appreciated, but ten years of hard life and constant movement from one brothel to the next could not be disguised, and the accumulation of forty pounds gained through the only activity she really enjoyed had made her a slattern. She was six inches taller than Coker and thirty pounds heavier, and why he had associated himself with her remained a mystery.

  But here she was, a Cheyenne castoff, living on the edge of nowhere with a sheepman. A woman could hardly sink any lower, Seccombe thought, and he had no desire to enter into conversation with her. He let Skimmerhorn do the talking.

  “Where’s Coker?”

  “Out.”

  ‘Which direction?”

  “Make a noise, his dog might bark.”

  “You living here permanent?”

  “Looks like.”

  She was a repulsive woman with fat lips and heavy eyes and faded hair. She had no intention of informing these men as to Coker’s whereabouts, and now she stood gross and ugly in the doorway as if daring them to enter.

  “I have a gun,” she said, “so don’t start nothin’.”

  “We don’t shoot ladies.” Skimmerhorn laughed. “But tell Coker to get his sheep off this land. And get that shack off it, too.”

  “I homesteaded this shack.”

  “You what?” Seccombe shouted “A Cheyenne whore homesteading cattle country?”

  Fat Laura stared at him with her basilisk eyes and said nothing, but from behind the doorjamb she produced a heavy shotgun. Bringing it forward, she plopped the butt end in the dust, then leaned her fat bosom on the barrel.

  “You tell Coker to get off this land,” Seccombe warned, and Fat Laura’s huge face broke into a contemptuous smile.

  “Up your fancy ass, Englishman.”

  The three ranchmen rode back to headquarters, bewildered as to what they must do next. If Venneford sat by supinely while sheepmen invaded the range, and if they made no protest when immigrants squatted on the outer edges of the ranch and homesteaders took up government land, pretty soon the whole intricate structure would begin to fall apart, the trend would accelerate and a noble way of life would be lost.

  “Thing I cannot understand,” Seccombe said as they approached headquarters, “is how a decent man like Levi Zendt could sell his land to sheepmen.”

  “There’s a theory going around,” Skimmerhorn said, “that the open range is ended. Zendt told me he thought sheep were a better investment, especially with a man like Garrett supervising.”

  “Garrett!” Seccombe exclaimed: “Isn’t there any way to run that scoundrel off the range?”

  Skimmerhorn ignored the question and continued with Zendt’s reactions: “He says maybe we ought to consolidate around the land we own. Fence it in and concentrate on about half the cattle we now run.”

  “But this is cattle country!” Seccombe said. “It belongs to us.”

  Skimmerhorn was reluctant to point out that for the past seven hours the riders had not once been on Venneford land. They were on open range, land that belonged to anyone; it was cattle country only because the cattleman had always said so.

  Confusing days followed. This was the finest time of year, late August before the first frost, with calves grown sturdy on rich grasses. A man should be enjoying these days, and Charlotte entertained numerous visitors at the castle, with her usual flair and merriment, but Oliver Seccombe enjoyed none of it.

  He could not comprehend how the citizens of Centennial could permit sheepmen to invade their land. “The animals are filthy,” he said to the banker. “Look at the pitiful men who work them. This fellow Calendar, a miserable hermit talking to his dog. And that wreck of a man, Bufe Coker, living with his Cheyenne harlot. Hell, he’s slept with sheep so long he probably can’t tell the difference.”

  All cattlemen believed the accusation that the lonely sheepherder engaged in sexual intercourse with his charges, and many funny stories circulated regarding this supposed custom: “You hear about the Englishman countin’ sheep in Wyomin’?” ‘One, two, three, four. Good mornin’, Pamela. Don’t forget. Tea at five.’ ”

  “Look at a sheepman when he comes to town,” Seccombe said bitterly to the editor of the Clarion. “He walks alone. His eyes are downcast. He’s ashamed to speak up to people he meets. In a bar he stays at the far end, drinking with no one. He’s an outcast and he knows it. His smell alone, sleeping with those woollies, would make him a lonely man.” He shook his head mournfully, then brightened.

  “On the other hand, you take a cowboy. Frank, honest, clean-cut. He sleeps with girls, not sheep, and his joy shows. He’s never alone. Likes a crowd. In a bar he heads right for the middle, where the people are, and when he speaks to you he looks you in the eye. The cowboy is a clean, fine man. I’ve seen thousands of them.
But the sheepman is craven. They ought to be run out of here.”

  The Old Testament bothered Seccombe. It was full of sheep and shepherds, and he began to wonder if perhaps the Jews were not also contaminated people. “They spent all this time worrying about pork,” he told Charlotte’s guests at dinner one night, “when their real problem was mutton, and they didn’t recognize it.”

  “Abraham was a shepherd. David was a shepherd. Joseph was a shepherd,” one of the guests pointed out.

  “Yes!” Seccombe cried. “But when Our Lord was born you didn’t find Him looking for a sheep pen. He was born with the cattle, where He belonged. I could have little respect for Him if it had been otherwise.” His tirade was proof of his total adaptation to American customs, for certainly in his native England, where there was no inbred resentment of sheep, fine spring lamb was as welcome on the discriminating table as beef.

  “Don’t forget, Oliver,” an argumentative guest said, “that the first man born on earth tended sheep, Abel, and when he handed God one of his sheep, God accepted it and blessed it.”

  “God was careless that time,” Seccombe growled. “It’s a sad day when I hear sheep being defended in my own house,” and he stiffly excused himself and headed for the Cheyenne Club, where he could associate with men dedicated to cattle and the proper use of the range.

  He found little levity. Claude Barker was bitter against the invasions made by sheepmen on the north end of his Horse Creek ranch, and the Chugwater people felt the same. “This country is goin’ to hell,” Barker protested, and various plans were proposed for counteracting the drift.

  “All we’re asking,” Seccombe said, “is to have things go on as they were. We don’t need cities out here, and sheep, and homesteaders trying to grub out a meager living. This land should be kept open. It was made for cattle the way Chicago was made for people. There’s an honesty about raising cattle ... a dignity ...”

  The younger ranchers allowed him to finish his speech, knowing that it meant nothing. When the difficult decision of what specifically to do had to be faced, Seccombe would board a train and head for business out of town. He was not much for difficult decisions, and sure enough, two days after this first planning session he found reasons for visiting bankers in Kansas City.

  He was at work in that city on the afternoon that the five-thirteen Union Pacific pulled into Centennial from Denver. The usual inquisitive locals and wide-eyed children were at the station to watch the train arrive, and they remarked on the various local people who disembarked, making shrewd guesses as to what they had been up to in the capital. But as the last of the customary passengers had left the train, a man whispered, “Hey, look!” and everyone turned toward the rear car, where two slim men in black suits and broad-brimmed hats were alighting. The older stepped onto the platform, looked cautiously about him, beckoned to the other to follow. When they were free of the train, a porter handed down two valises and pointed to the Railway Arms, saying in a voice loud enough for the watchers to hear, “Over there, Mr. Pettis.”

  “The Pettis boys!” someone cried in a hoarse whisper, and all other arrivals were ignored as men drew back while the two visitors walked solemnly through the station and across the road to the hotel. There they registered boldly as Frank and Orvid Pettis.

  For the next two days Centennial buzzed with speculation as to what had brought these two aging gunmen to town. The Pettis boys! What a travesty of language! They had never been boys. At fourteen they were vicious killers, and now at fifty-seven Frank was a black-toothed, scrawny man with sharp, battle-worn eyes. Orvid, in his fifty-second year, was a hardened assassin living out his years with the small funds he received for one or another routine murder.

  Yet they were known as the Pettis boys, and their arrival in any frontier town signified that someone with a grievance to settle had grown impatient with the law. They had never been apprehended in cold-blooded murder; they were too clever for that. Even when they were arrested, with every item of evidence pointing to their guilt, as in the Pueblo murders, where they were seen at the crime and where their footprints matched exactly those found at the site of the triple assassination, clever lawyers were brought in from Kansas and the jury exonerated them.

  The pitiful aspect of their lives was that whereas they had done much work for men with money, they got little for themselves. They killed and threatened and evicted, but they never lived well. When they came to a town like Centennial they had funds for the purchase of horses and their hotel bills were taken care of, but when the job was done, whatever it was, they would move on to a similar town, buy a couple of horses, eat free at the hotel. But they did not prosper. From the cattle they stampeded on the Skimmerhorn Trail in the years from 1868 through 1880, they made barely enough dollars to subsist on, and thirteen of their equally underpaid men were shot. They now lived in a small town in western Kansas, always ready for a telegraphed invitation.

  A few days later they rode out of town, two dark and silent men heading east. “They’re after Calendar,” boys whispered, and one gallant fellow only fifteen years old, who had grown to respect that somber sheepman, jumped on his horse and rode out to warn him. “Calendar! Calendar!” he was shouting long before he reined in his sweating horse, “Pettis boys are after you.”

  But they were not headed in his direction. After a long detour to the east, they cut north, left Colorado and went deep into Wyoming to a draw leading into Horse Creek, where a sheepman was herding some two thousand woollies. They shot him from ambush, then stampeded the sheep into the quicksand river, where they floundered, bleating piteously, and perished.

  They then rode far west, beyond the Laramie River, to a remote spot where a Mexican was tending twelve hundred sheep. Seeing that he was alone and unarmed, Frank Pettis said, “Let’s gunnysack him,” and they threw a bag over the shepherd’s head, tying it about his waist. They lashed him to a rock and he had to listen as they methodically clubbed his sheep to death. The sad cries of sheep beaten but not yet dead so affected the poor man that he began to whimper in sympathy, and Orvid said, “Let’s put him out of his misery,” and each of the brothers emptied his revolver into the sack.

  The boys then swung south in a long loop which brought them finally to Fox Canyon, where they spent a day secretly observing Buford Coker’s new shack.

  “There’s the whore,” Frank whispered to Orvid as Fat Laura appeared at the doorway.

  “I don’t want to kill no woman,” Orvid replied.

  “She ain’t no woman,” Frank said, and as they watched they saw, coming from the north, Wyoming way, a man riding full blast toward the cabin, shouting, “Coker! The Pettis boys is on the loose! They’re killin’ sheepmen!”

  “Son-of-a-bitch!” Frank mumbled. “Just when things was goin’ good.”

  They continued to watch as the man galloped up to the cabin, dismounted and began talking agitatedly with Fat Laura.

  “We better knock them off,” Frank said with professional judgment. “We don’t want three guns against us.”

  “Three?” Orvid asked.

  “I bet that whore can fight like a cornered badger,” Frank said, indicating with his right shoulder the fact that she was already going for her rifle.

  “Here goes,” Frank said. “I’ll get the man. You get the whore.”

  With no more talk, the two killers edged themselves closer to the cabin, and at a signal from Frank, they fired. The man dropped with a bullet through his head, but Orvid had less luck with Fat Laura. He merely shot her through the left shoulder. He saw blood spurt out, so he knew he had winged her well, but she was not dead, for she succeeded in crawling back into the shack.

  “You missed!” Frank said with disgust. “And look!”

  There, edging his way down the draw behind the cabin, was Bufe Coker, shouting encouragement to his woman: “Hold on, Laura. I’m comin’.”

  Dodging bullets, he made his way to the back door of the cabin and in to where Laura leaned against the wal
l, blood dripping from her shoulder. Ignoring the bullets that zinged through the shack, he tended the fat woman, binding her wound and giving her assurance that it could not be fatal.

  “We’ll hold ’em off till help comes,” he said. “Who are they?”

  “Kellerman said they was the Pettis boys.”

  “Where’s Kellerman now?”

  “Out there, dead.”

  “Hell. We could’ve used him.”

  “Will they kill us?”

  “They got to come in here to do it.” He gathered his guns, giving one to his woman, and began shoring up the front door with furniture. He was preoccupied with this task when he heard Fat Laura scream, “No! No!” and he looked out in time to see his dog Bravo run toward the house.