Support Your Local Deputy: A Cotton Pickens Western Read Free Page A

she did nothing but sell bonnets and straw hats full of fake fruit to the town’s ladies. And gossip, too. All the local gals went in there to gossip about the rest of us. Sometimes I got a little itchy about sheriffing in a halfway civilized town and thought I should pack up and head for the tropics.
    But my ma, she always said don’t shoot a gift horse between the eyes, and that’s how I looked at my job. That eve, Rusty quit early on me, and headed off to his cabin to nurse his disappointment. He had his heart set on marrying the Ukrainian beauties, and never having to have a conversation with his women because he didn’t understand a word they said. I thought it was a fool’s dream, myself. What if they was saying mean things about him, in their own tongue, maybe even at night with the pair of them lying beside him?
    The town was drawing everything from whiskey drummers to medicine shows these days, and I intended to get out to the east side to have a close look. Half the shows rolling through the country roads of the West were nothing but gyppo outfits, looking to con cash out of the local folks, while swiping everything that wasn’t nailed down tight. And if they could get a few girls in trouble while robbing citizens and peddling worthless stuff, they did that, too, and smiled all the way to the next burg.
    I’d wander over there. But first I’d patrol Doubtful, as I did every evening, wearing my badge, walking from place to place, rattling doors to see if they were locked, and studying saloons closely to see if there was trouble. Sometimes there was, and the barkeeps would be glad I wandered in at a moment when some drunken cowboy, armed to the teeth, was picking a fight.
    So I did my rounds, seeing that all was quiet at Maxwell’s Funeral Parlor, and no one was busting the doors at Hubert Sanders’s Merchant Bank. I peered into Barney’s Beanery, and saw that it was winding down for the eve, and peered into the dark confines of Leonard Silver’s Emporium. I checked the office of Lawyer Stokes, and saw no one rifling his file cabinets. McGivers’ Saloon was quiet, and so was the Last Chance, where I saw Sammy Upward yawning, his elbows on the bar, looking ready to close early.
    There were a few posters promoting Dr. Zoroaster Zimmer’s show. The man had a string of initials behind his name, but I never could figure out what all they meant, but the Ph.D. meant he was a doctor of philandery or something like that. The “KGB” puzzled me, but someone told me it was British and had to do with garters and bathtubs. You never know what gets into foreigners. At any rate, this Professor Zimmer had them all, and they followed his name like a string of railroad cars. I thought I’d like to meet the gent.
    Denver Sally’s place, back behind saloon row, looked quiet, the evening breezes rocking the red lantern beside her door. Most of her business came on weekends. The Gates of Heaven, next door, looked as mean as ever. Who knows all the ways a feller wants to get rid of his cash?
    Doubtful was peaceful enough, that spring evening. So it was time to drift out beyond saloon row, east of town, and take a gander at this here medicine man show. There were a mess of these shows wandering through the whole country, setting up in dark corners of a little town, running an act or two across a stage set up on a wagon. Then the medicine man would step out and peddle his stuff, and when he gauged that he’d done all the selling he could, he’d pull up stakes and head for the next little town and do it all over again.
    Sure enough, east of town, on an alkali flat, there were a couple of torches going, two fancy red-and-gilt wagons, a makeshift rope corral with some moth-eaten drays in it, and a lamp-lit stage on a wagon. There were maybe twelve, fifteen suckers watching some jet-haired woman in a grass skirt wiggle her butt and make her bosom heave. I’d never seen that, and it seemed entertaining, but I had sheriff