The Desperate Deputy of Cougar Hill Read Free

to surprise. Rafe Arker had not expected him to make a play. He wondered just how much fat the months of easy living had coated his nerves with. Just how slow had he become?
    He would find the answer when Rafe Arker came to town and made his challenge.
    Dusk was settling down as Cameron reached the south limits of town. Up ahead he saw the weekly stage stopped in front of the hotel and he disappointed the roan by riding on past McTigue’s livery barn. It was Cameron’s chore to meet the stage every Thursday and he hurried his horse now. But when he was just short of Hill Avenue, the cross street running alongside the hotel, he saw Marshal Balder come out of the jail office and start down the board sidewalk and he reined up.
    He started to turn the roan around when the last passenger stepping out of the stage halted him. Light spilling from the hotel lobby was barely enough to dent the dusk and Cameron found it hard to make out the man’s features. But there was something in the way he held his lean body and in the way he walked that stirred a memory deep in Cameron’s mind. He sought for a name to put with the memory but it eluded him. When the man disappeared into the lobby, Cameron could only turn the roan and ride slowly back down Main Street to the livery.
    He was as concerned with his own failure to recall the man as he was with the man himself. It was part of a law officer’s work to keep a file of names and faces in his mind. More than once over the years Cameron’s recognition of a wanted criminal, or even of just a troublemaker, had saved problems from developing. But now, search as he would, he could bring nothing more than a feeling of uneasiness from his mind.
    Tod Purcell, Jenny’s eighteen-year-old nephew, was on duty at the livery and he came hurrying from the cubbyhole office to take the reins of Cameron’s horse. His freckled face was flushed with excitement. “The stage driver says Rafe Arker got let out of prison three days ago; Roy. I thought I better warn you because …”
    “Arker’s already home,” Cameron said. He dropped to the ground and patted the roan. “Give him a good dollop of oats tonight.”
    “You saw Rafe?” Todd demanded.
    “That’s right,” Cameron nodded. He started up the board sidewalk, leaving the boy staring after him in obvious admiration for his casual attitude.
    “You’re faking it a little,” Cameron gibed at himself. He was too old a hand at the law business to feel casual about someone like Rafe Arker. But at the same time he was realist enough to know the value of a public attitude such as this. And Tod Purcell would spread the word that he had had his first meeting with Arker and had come through without a scratch.
    And he needed the kind of admiration a story like this would bring, Cameron admitted honestly to himself. Since his first months in Cougar Hill, he knew this was the country he had been looking for. Eleven years of drifting — cattle work along the border, mining in the mountains, and finally law work in Colorado and Wyoming and Montana — with the need to sink his roots growing greater with each passing season. And now he was prodding thirty and soon the settling down would grow harder as the drifting habit bit deeper.
    As he had explained to Jenny Purcell that night they realized that they felt the same way about each other, “There comes a time when every man likes to have something to put his back against. That’s why I put what money I had into the ranch and why most of my salary goes to it for quite a time yet. That means we won’t be able to get married as quick as I’d like.”
    She had kissed him in her quick way and answered, laughing, “You’ll be marshal soon, Roy, and then you can afford the ranch and me both.”
    Cameron had taken the deputy job here with the understanding that he would be first in line for the marshal’s job when Balder retired. For a time, when that would happen made little difference, nor did it seem