Support Your Local Deputy: A Cotton Pickens Western by William W. Johnstone & J.A Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone & J.A Johnstone [Johnstone, William W.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pinnacle
Published: 2013-03-05T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three

Me and Rusty, we done the job. That old carny show was roaring away on the midway; everyone in the show was over there, gulling the last dimes out of cowboys and suckers. The camp area, it was plenty dark, and no one was around except once when one of the old gals in the outfit came back to smoke her corncob pipe a while.

Finding the breast collars and unbuckling them and carting them out was a big job. Those things were hard to separate from all the rest of the harness. The breast collars run across the chest of the horse or mule, below the neck and windpipe, and are wider than most of the rest of the stuff. But neither Rusty or me was as good as Turk when it came to harness, so it took some doing.

There were fourteen wagons, each drawn by a pair of draft horses or big mules, and that meant finding twenty-eight collars. It was no ten-minute job, in the dark. But bit by bit, both of us collected what we could, stocked it away from camp, and went back for the rest, always keeping an eye out. The company was pretty well packed up. All the loose stuff was stowed away, and the outfit was going to roll out of Doubtful, maybe around midnight, when the rest of us were deep asleep. They planned to be far down one of the roads; they didn’t let us know where they were going next. But they’d come up from Laramie, and I was guessing they would be heading for Douglas.

After we got all the collars we could find, unbuckled and in a heap, we carted them two at a time over to the jail, and stuffed them all in a cell. That was heavy going, too, all those trips hauling forty or fifty pounds of leather and buckles. But about the time the carny show was winding down, and people were quitting, we got them collars all locked up in a cell, and got the jail all locked up, so there wasn’t going to be any busting in or out.

Rusty, he just grinned. “I get to visit my Ukrainians for a while more, seems like,” he said.

I figured that was good for Rusty, but not for the Siamese twins, who were in a big spat over him and his designs. It sure must be hell to be locked into the same body as your twin, especially if one of you got favored, and not the other. But that was the way things were, and they’d have to figure out living, because no one could help them.

“We gonna sit here with scatterguns and guard the fort, or are we going to bed?” Rusty asked.

“Go to bed. You go look after Riley. Me, I’m going to Belle’s. If they come knocking, I’ll just let ’em hammer on doors.”

I watched him go to his cabin, which was not far away, and near Doubtful Creek, where all

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