Summary: Justice proves dangerous when the Cartwrights are caught between vigilantes and a new sheriff in Virginia City.  

Rated: T (8,780 words)

 

                                                         Rough Justice

 

 

The man’s boots hung inches from my face. I had to duck back just to keep from getting hit while the others were trying to get him down. I was pretty short for my age and could see that his sole leather was worn down to the nails. They’d hung him from the old Sycamore, the same one that used to stand in the clearing behind the general store. Even though I was squinting into the sun, I could see that his eyes looked straight into death, mouth open, tongue swollen and-Almost before I was done looking, Adam had me hoisted up and over his shoulder, before Pa could do it himself. In the efficient way that is my big brother’s alone, we marched down the street, leaving the man and the Sycamore behind.

 

As we turned the corner, I could hear Pa tossing out orders and the answering voices of our men, taking care of those orders. I tried to squirm my way to the ground, but Adam was holding on tight. Even though I’d turned eleven that summer, they still acted like I was ten. This time, I couldn’t blame them for it. What I’d seen was bad – real bad – and I knew it. It wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen by any long shot, but it was the first time I’d seen a man dead from hanging. Adam planted me on my feet in front of the sheriff’s office.”Stay,” he told me like I was one of Hoss’ pups. He turned heel as if he fully expected that I’d obey.

To this day, I don’t know what he was thinking. I didn’t listen back then any better than I do now, and Hoss’ strays weren’t all that good at listening either. Adam hurried through the door, and I stood there in front of the threshold, still trying to make sense out of what I’d seen. The sun felt hot on my face, and my fingers were sticking from where I’d spilt sassafras earlier in the afternoon, before we found the man hanging. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and the sun had baked his face into ugly blisters. My own hat fell off when Adam put me over his shoulder, and I wasn’t all that sure that Pa would have picked it up, not with everything else that was happening. It was a new hat, but I didn’t really care if I ever wore it again. I was still standing outside the sheriff’s office, thinking about my hat, when Adam firmly shut the door behind him.

Roy Coffee was our sheriff back then but hadn’t been for long. The Virginia City Responsible Citizen’s Council only built his jailhouse and office a couple months earlier. The VCRCC, as they called themselves, took donations from all across Nevada territory to build the jail and hire a sheriff to put folks in it. People in the town were real proud of the new building and ordered the bars for the cells to be welded and shipped from a forge in Sacramento. Folks said that the town was coming into its own the day they arrived on the stage, since we could finally do justice right with posses and jail bars and an honest to goodness judge, come to town once a month. Sheriff Coffee even had shackles in his desk, a fact that made Mrs. Henson say she slept better at night. Only problem was, as Pa liked to say, that the old ways of doing things died real hard.

I didn’t understand much of it but knew that Pa and Adam had been getting in lots of fights with our neighbors. Nobody could agree on whether the new sheriff was up to the job. Folks around the territory had been handling justice without any help, and they weren’t real eager to pass it off onto a lawman, no matter how official he seemed. My pa had been the law in those parts, unofficial of course, and nobody was all that happy to see it done differently.

The new jail was too new to prove its worth, and so was the sheriff. Even as I leaned against the outside wall, the whitewashed planks still felt tacky underneath my fingers. They hadn’t even put in glass for the windows yet. Burlap sacks, ripped at the seams, were tacked up instead, and I peeked underneath them over the sill, wanting to catch a glimpse of my big brother having it out with the new sheriff.

“So that’s what amounts to justice in Virginia City… a fast gun and a short rope! I thought your fine jail here was supposed to put an end to all that.”

Adam was spitting out his words with his fists clenched tight by his side. He was real mad, even though he wasn’t hollering, and I knew that Pa would have asked the same thing, even though he might have hollered it. Pa was usually louder than Adam when he was riled, but Hoss said that’s why Adam got his way more often. Adam had his hands on his hips and was standing stiff like a rail. That’s how I knew how mad he was. He wasn’t even bothering to act like he didn’t care.

“Now you listen to me, boy.” Sheriff’s Coffee was jabbing the air with his finger like he could poke holes in it. “I’m the law in these parts, and it’s up to me to see how justice is handed out. I didn’t say I was gonna do nothing. I just aim to do things the right way. Now, I don’t want the Cartwrights telling me how to do my job. It’s bad enough that these vigilante groups are – ”

“This is the fifth lynching since you’ve been here.” Adam’s voice got quiet all of a sudden, and I ducked under the sill, figuring he was worrying about me listening in. “For God’s sake, Sheriff. Poor old Collins’ boots almost hit Little Joe in the face. They didn’t even bother to hang him outside of town. What does that say about your authority?”

“Don’t forget you’re talking ‘bout Tanner Collins,” Sheriff Coffee retorted. “From stories I hear, the man didn’t have an honest bone in his body. It’s a miracle he lived as long as he did! Horse thieves get fast justice in these parts. You know that.”

“But they should get justice!” Adam fired back. “You were hired to take back control of this town. You’re going to have to step up, if you expect anyone to take you and your authority seriously!”

It scared me, suddenly. Adam was threatening the sheriff. That wasn’t something my big brother would have done ordinarily, if the stakes weren’t so high. I knew I shouldn’t be listening, but for once, I was kind of doing what I was supposed to. Adam told me to stay put, and I figured I’d have been able to hear them all the way from across the street. It was all starting to hit me, once the first rush had worn off. Despite how horrible the whole thing had been, I’d been a little excited even though I knew it was wrong. But suddenly, I thought of old Tanner Collins hanging from that tree, and I felt positively ashamed of myself for even thinking something like that could be exciting. I hadn’t even known the man was Tanner, with his face swollen and purple like that. I could feel my stomach turning on me, and suddenly I had to be holding onto the building to keep myself standing up. My lips felt cracked and dry as trail dust. I couldn’t swallow.

I might have fallen over if Adam hadn’t been suddenly right there beside me, keeping me on my feet by holding onto my elbows.

“You all right, boy?” he asked, and I didn’t have time to answer before Hoss and Pa were standing there with us.

Hoss took over holding me up, just like he always did with his arm held tight around my shoulders.

“You all right, Short Shanks?”

It was funny. My brothers weren’t anything alike, and yet, I was having trouble telling them apart right then.

Pa didn’t seem angry any more; he was all gentle, and all of a sudden, I didn’t feel quite so afraid. He took my face between his hands and looked down at me in that way he had of letting me know everything was under control.

“I’m sorry, son. That was an ugly thing to see, and any man would be upset by it. You have a right to feel the way you do. We need to find someone to take you home.”

“No!” I’d found my voice at last. “I want to stay with all of you.”

“Impossible.” Unfortunately for me, Adam had never lost his voice. “You’re going home. Anything could happen here. You can’t stay in town.”

Anything could happen. I didn’t like the sound of that, and it made me feel funny inside. I expected them to notice. Yet, they were all fixing each other with looks I reckoned they usually saved for when I was in bed. The feeling wormed its way into my upset belly, and I had to fight back being sick. I didn’t like the way they were looking at each other. Not one bit, and it had nothing to do with being left out of things. I’d heard what Adam told the sheriff and knew Pa would agree. My family believed in justice. I just wished it could be someone else’s family who was looking after it.

“Hoss, take Little Joe home.” Pa issued the order before I could work up a protest.

Hoss set his jaw at that, and he looked hard at Pa. I knew it right away. Hoss wasn’t taking me anywhere. Standing there with his legs set apart, I knew that he wouldn’t be budged. My brother was only seventeen but had been in a man’s body for so long, nobody thought of him as a kid anymore.

“No sir,” he said quietly. “I’m staying with you and Adam. I’ll go and round up someone to take Little Joe home, but it can’t be me. I’m sorry, sir.”

It was polite defiance, but it was defiance all the same. My pa had never been one for that sort of thing, especially coming from his seventeen year old son. I reckoned that even though he was so used to it with me, he didn’t expect it from Hoss.

“Son -” he started to say, but Hoss cut him off.

“Pa, I reckon we know who’s behind this,” Hoss said evenly. “And I reckon you’re going to need me backing you up. Tanner was a right nice fellow – ”

“He was a horse thief,” Adam cut in, repeating the sheriff’s words, as if we all needed reminding.

“I know that he was, Adam,” Hoss said, “but he was also a nice fellow. He didn’t deserve what he got.”

I wasn’t sure anyone deserved an end like that, but definitely not old Tanner. He’d been a horse thief, sure enough, but I’d known him all of my life. Folks who’d lived in the territory for a while knew to first go to Tanner’s spinster sister when their horses went missing. Sure enough, they’d be corralled in the pasture behind the house they shared together. Nobody knew why Tanner kept on stealing them. He was dang peculiar that way. He didn’t even like horses and never rode them, except when he was stealing them. He had other habits that got folks riled up. The church ladies complained he was introducing the youth of the town to bad morals. I know he introduced me to one of his other bad habits, besides stealing. Old Tanner was the one who gave me my first taste of tobacco back when I was ten years old. Made me sick as a snake-bit dog, and Pa put me to bed in the middle of the afternoon, before I had any supper.

Pa was downright riled when I wouldn’t tell him who gave the tobacco to me, but Old Tanner told me the next time I saw him, “Be that a lesson to you, boy! Don’t start habits, iffen you don’t like ‘em much in the first place!”

I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I stayed away from chewing tobacco, right as rain. I wondered if that was what happened with Tanner and why he kept stealing horses that he didn’t even want or need. Maybe he got stuck in a habit so bad he couldn’t find his way out of it. Nevertheless, that habit was a dangerous one in our territory, and it was what brought an end to him. We all knew it.

Standing there on that dusty Virginia City road, Adam echoed Hoss’ words. “No. Tanner Collins certainly didn’t deserve what he got.”

The long and the short of it was that Hoss couldn’t be budged once his mind was made up, and he intended to stay with Pa. By the time that was decided, Sheriff Coffee came back from investigating the hanging and declared that Tanner Collins was dead and that the cause of death was hanging. We all looked sideways at each other, and I swear I saw Adam roll his eyes. But Pa cleared his throat, and we remembered to show some respect. After all, Sheriff Coffee was downright new at the job, and he was trying to be the law in our town. We’d had word that he’d up and tamed a couple of border towns, but hearing about something was different than seeing it done ourselves.

Once Hoss declared that he intended to stay in Virginia City, the sheriff volunteered to take me home in his rig before he went out to the neighboring ranches to round up a posse. He was still getting used to where everything was at, and I don’t know that he realized how long it would take to get me home. He was new at so many things. Even Pa had to hide his smile at the sheriff’s plans to bring in a whole passel of men who would track down the men responsible Tanner’s hanging. It wouldn’t take much tracking. All he had to do was walk around Virginia City’s business district and start knocking on doors. I didn’t want to go with the sheriff, and I certainly didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay in Virginia City with my family. Yet, the look on Pa’s face told me it wasn’t the right time for much negotiating.

“Stay with the sheriff,” Adam commanded me, using that “stray dog” voice he’d tried already. I’d obeyed him the first time, mostly because my feet had forgotten how to do their own moving, but I wasn’t so sure I’d be able to obey so easily again. “He’ll get you home.”

“Yes sir,” I said again, forgetting for the moment that Adam was not a “sir” at all but my oldest brother. He sounded so grim and serious that I didn’t know who he was at that moment.

Pa pulled me aside as Sheriff Coffee drew up with the buckboard.

“Listen to me, Little Joe,” Pa said, holding my shoulders square to keep me looking directly at him. “I need you to pay close attention to what I’m going to tell you. There are things that men need to do – unpleasant things – if they’re going to stand up and call themselves men. Do you understand that, son?”

“Yes sir,” I said and nodded. I did understand. It was all I really wanted. To stand up and be a man alongside my pa and my brothers. Lawmen, like Sheriff Coffee, were only a recent addition. Prominent ranchers like my pa had always been the law in those parts.

“Son, doing the right thing isn’t easy. Sometimes, it means standing fast against friends and neighbors. You understand that this isn’t something your brothers and I would do unless we had to? It’s something that justice demands of us.”

Standing fast and doing right were rules I’d heard all my life. They were like food and air. I didn’t know how a body could get by without them.

“Sometimes you have to do something hard to make things right again,” I said.

Pa smiled and hugged me. “That’s exactly right, Little Joe, but it doesn’t make it easier. I want you to ride home with Sheriff Coffee. You’re needed at home. Help Charlie take care of the horses tonight, and you do your brothers’ chores in the morning. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” I tried to swallow. And then I let it come out. I just couldn’t help myself. “But, Pa, Mr. Cooper will try to kill you if you go to stop them.”

Pa had never been one to lie to me. Instead, he tucked back the strands of my hair from the rim of my hat, which he had found for me after all.

Glancing back to check that the sheriff wasn’t listening to us, Hoss said, “Don’t you worry about Cooper. He doesn’t have enough grit to fill a thimble.”

“You get your hair cut next time you’re in town, you hear, boy,” Pa said, smiling over at Hoss, and he cuffed me lightly on the back of my neck. “Now get!”

I didn’t feel the least bit better, sitting in the buckboard, next to the sheriff. Sheriff Coffee would end up eating brambleberry pie and sitting on porches with farmwives, while the real action would be taking place in town with my pa and brothers. It made my throat hurt just thinking of it. We knew who’d killed Tanner Collins and didn’t need a posse to track them down. In fact, everyone in the territory knew who did it… everyone except for Sheriff Coffee that is. Why didn’t we tell Sheriff Coffee, you may ask? It was for the same reason that Old Tanner’s body had been hanging from the tree. Justice was still rough in those parts. Civilization hadn’t staked its claim yet. We were used to doing things ourselves.

On the other hand, rough justice had been taken too far lately, and everyone knew it. That’s why the VCRCC had hired Sheriff Coffee in the first place, even though nobody really thought it would do much good. The sheriff was an uppercut against a group of men who’d vowed to make Virginia City civilized one way or another. They called themselves the Justice Committee, and they’d set themselves up against the VCRCC, which hired the new sheriff. At first, the idea of the opposing committees seemed kind of funny.

“The war of the initials,” Adam had told Pa over supper once, “Well, you’ve got to admit the JC wins that one.”

Pa had laughed, and he and Adam shared looks that meant something, but I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention. Back then, because I wasn’t all that interested in justice working itself out in Virginia City. That evening, I’d been planning how Harry Kendall and I could climb to the top of Diablo Ridge and spend the night without our families noticing we were gone. For the amount of trouble Harry and I got in for our campout, I’d have been better off listening, because that was the last time the three of them laughed over the Justice Committee. Once the hangings started, Pa and Adam didn’t seem to laugh any more, and I wished I’d taken notes that night.

“Vigilantes,” Pa had said after the fourth hanging, like the word was an oath. “As ugly and mundane as that.”

Everyone knew who the leader of the vigilantes was. The most important man in town, besides my pa of course. Marcus T. Cooper. Mr. Cooper owned the mercantile, the livery, and the feed and grain, back in those days. Adam said he could have worn a coronet around town and been less conspicuous. Adam was always saying things like that, and I didn’t pay a lot of attention to what he meant. Sitting in the sheriff’s rented rig, I wished I’d paid a little more attention. All I knew about Mr. Cooper was that he always handed me licorice when I came into the mercantile with my brothers and would wink and put his finger to his lips, so that Adam wouldn’t notice that my hands were full of it.

“Don’t let him buy you off so cheaply,” Adam snapped at me, about the third time I’d gotten a handful, and I had to scowl at my big brother. Mr. Cooper’s licorice never tasted so good again after that.

The sun was setting behind the mountains, and I could have used my winter coat, even though it was late summer. Sheriff Coffee tucked a horse blanket around my shoulders and nickered to the team, holding the reins loose in his hands. Even though he must have been in a hurry, he never acted like it. The sheriff was by far the most relaxed man I’d ever met, totally different than my pa and brothers and the quick, wiry men we usually hired as cowpunchers. Heavy, slow men were hard on our horses. Sheriff Coffee was supposed to take me home first. That’s what he told Pa he’d be doing, but I convinced him he’d be a lot better off having me help him find the neighboring homesteads before we headed back to the Ponderosa. It didn’t take too much talking on my part. Before long, I came to understand that Sheriff Coffee really didn’t know where he was going. It would be dark soon, and he wouldn’t have had any luck on his own anyways, driving his team around in the night.

So that’s how I came to help Sheriff Coffee look for his posse, as that day turned into a dark evening. It was tough going, taking the rig down such practically impassable roads. I missed my own horse, Red, a pretty little mustang that Hoss had captured on the rangeland. I helped tame her to the saddle, and she could have found every ranch in the territory on her own. My horse had a lot of sense, and I decided that Hoss and I should ride out in the spring and find the sheriff a good saddle pony of his own. It would have been a help to him. A man without a good horse wasn’t much good to himself, let alone to anyone else.

Finding the neighboring ranches wasn’t easy for a newcomer like Sheriff Coffee. Some homesteads weren’t more than lean-to’s at the end of a rough path and would have been downright difficult to find in the daytime. It was rough country, thickly wooded in stretches, broken up with hundreds of canyons and ravines. Everyone knew who everyone was and where they lived. Only Sheriff Coffee was in the dark, so I did try to help him as best as I could.

“Are you sure you ain’t getting me lost, Little Joe?” he kept asking, but sure enough, just when the night seemed to stretch out forever, there we’d come on it. A lamp lit in the darkness. Another farmer and his family sitting after supper, before getting ready for bed and for another morning, up before dawn.

At every house, they welcomed us in, the men shaking the sheriff’s hand, and the women hurrying to warm up some supper. We must have had five suppers that night, eating beans and johnnycake, as Sheriff Coffee tried to rattle up support for his posse. I could have told him what would happen. I’d seen it happen lots of times with my pa. Folks talked the right talk, but when it came to endangering their families, tended to play it pretty close to the vest. Every man to the last, one after the other, turned him down. Sheriff Coffee didn’t give up easy. He told them about Old Tanner, even quoting Hoss that he was a “right nice fellow.” The sheriff told them how the Cartwrights were in town and were determined to see a stop to the hangings. It was a strange night. Even as I ate their food, not a one of our friends and neighbors would look at me. I’d known most of them all my life. I’d run wild with their children, helped put up their alfalfa, and gathered their strays during roundup. They were our neighbors. Pa called them friends. They knew my pa and brothers might be in trouble, and not a one would look me in the eye.

I felt bad for Sheriff Coffee. He was taking it hard – the fact that no one would join his posse. It wasn’t from lack of trying. Mr. Cooper was an important man in town. Back then, every basic supply needed for homesteadin’ and running a ranch came directly through Mr. Cooper. If he wouldn’t sell to you, then you weren’t likely to get through the winter. Sheriff Coffee couldn’t have known that. I tried hard to think of a way for him to feel better about the job he was doing. He was an awfully nice fellow, our new sheriff.

“So that’s how it is,” Sheriff Coffee said, after took to the road. I’d taken him to every ranch for miles around. He sighed and shook the reins. “All right, Little Joe Cartwright. Let’s go on and get you home.”

I admit that anyone might have been suspicious about what happened next. I was a boy who’d spent my life tramping across every known inch of the territory, and I knew every gorge, creek, and trail like the freckles on the back of my hand. I could have found my way home blindfolded and tied backwards on a saddle-shy horse! But for some reason, I had some trouble that night. Riding in that rig in the dark, I just couldn’t seem to find my way home without my pa and brothers.

“Dadburn it, Little Joe!” I finally saw the temper in our new sheriff start to flare, but I didn’t flinch at it. I’d gotten my own family a lot more riled, and it took more than that to intimidate me. “This is the fourth trail we’ve taken, and it don’t look a bit right to me. Feels to me like we’re headed back the way we came. Surely this can’t be the right way back to your ranch!”

“The Ponderosa’s a big place,” I said, arrowing up a prayer that I’d be able to find my way around a lie. “Besides, it’s awfully dark, with the moon hidden behind those clouds. Does it look like rain to you, Sheriff Coffee?”

I heard him sigh and didn’t blame him.

“I need a cup of coffee,” the sheriff mumbled, and he pulled back on the reins, bringing the team to a stop. “This ain’t what I came for. Letting a mule-headed boy give me the run-around in the middle of the night, when Lord knows what’s going on in town right now-”

“Take me back to town!” I interrupted, not even bothering to hide how desperately I wanted it. “You could put me up with Mrs. Carlson for the night. She’ll take me in, I know she will. Sheriff, my pa and brothers need you. There’s gonna be trouble!”

I could feel Sheriff Coffee looking at me, even though I couldn’t see his eyes, shadowed like they were.

“I told your pa and Adam I’d get you home tonight,”

“I’ll tell them you tried,” I promised.

The next time he spoke, his voice wasn’t nearly so gentle.

“You get me lost on purpose, boy?” he asked.

Now, I’m not proud of what I did next. My pa had taught me to never tell a lie. On the other hand, Adam had taught me that sometimes a lie was only what you intended to do with it.

“No sir,” I answered as honestly as I knew how. And it was true. I wasn’t the least bit lost.

Sheriff Coffee set down the reins, and I could hear the horses blowing and snorting in frustration. They wanted to get back, just like I did. We’d stopped next to the river, just beyond the ford. He got down from the buckboard and took some time tramping in the shadows as he made his way to the shallow, running water. I could hear him treading heavily on the branches and brambles, the carpet of the forest, and I hoped he wouldn’t fall in. You could get in over your head pretty quickly. The sheriff seemed awfully tired, like he was a lot older than when he’d been hired not so long ago, and he needed some sleep. If he needed me to, I would have happily driven the team back to town while he napped a while. I’d have told him so, when he finally got back, if he hadn’t already come to his own conclusion.

“All right, boy. You win. Can’t exactly leave you in the middle of nowhere. We go back to Virginia City on one condition.”

“Yes, sir?” There was something in the lawman’s voice that made me uneasy.

“You stay out of the way,” he said. “And on the way there, you tell me what you know about Marcus Cooper.”

I swallowed. Maybe Sheriff Coffee wasn’t a tenderfoot after all. I figured that I hadn’t fooled him about getting lost on the Ponderosa, and I’d have to account for that later. No matter. My pa and brothers, were in trouble. I knew it in my bones, and even though I didn’t know what in blazes I could do about it, that had never stopped me from trying. Pa hadn’t told the sheriff about the Justice Committee, and usually that would have been enough to hold me back as well. My pa usually had good reasons for the things he did. We didn’t know the sheriff. He was a stranger to us and to our way of doing things. The hangings had gotten worse since he’d come to town. And yet, I’d been raised to be hospitable to newcomers and help them find their way. If Sheriff Coffee was willing to help me, then I was downright obligated to help him back. My family might not have known him all that well, but he seemed to know us more than we had reckoned.

“You, see sir, it’s like this,” I began, and on that long ride back to town, I told him all I knew. It was a long talk that ate up the miles, but from me, he learned about how hard it was for ranchers like my pa to keep order, and the way things were done in Virginia City. I told him about Mr. Cooper and the Justice Committee and about how folks were pretty used to taking care of things on their own.

Sheriff Coffee didn’t say much after that, but I knew he was listening. Adam sometimes teased that I had a leaky mouth – said I talked enough for all of us – and I reckoned he was right. But, I told the sheriff what I knew, and even though it wasn’t much, it was surely something. Sheriff Coffee still acted right calm, but I did notice how tightly his fists gripped the reins, as he spurred the team back to Virginia City.

**********

We arrived back in town before the moon was over our heads, and thankfully the sheriff didn’t ask how I’d suddenly recovered my sense of direction. The streets were alive with laughter and the sound of drunken curses, with an occasional gunshot from over by D Street. Uneasily, I glanced at Sheriff Coffee, underneath the yellow lamplight. I hoped he wouldn’t get distracted. There was plenty of need for his services at midnight in Virginia City, but I had a feeling my family needed him the most.

“I know I can find them,” I said, hopping down from the rig.

“No, sir,” Sheriff Coffee said, taking my arm in his surprisingly firm grip. “You are going to Mrs. Carlson’s. I’m gonna find your pa and take care of this myself.”

I can’t say that I’m proud of what happened next, but there’s no way around it. If I’d been sized like my brothers, I could have reached back into a powerful uppercut that would have taken the sheriff down like a man. But I was still small for my age, and my choices were limited. Just as he started to march me towards the featherbed waiting for me at Mrs. Carson’s rooming-house, I bent down and bit Sheriff Coffee on his wrist. I bit him hard, and it ain’t a point of pride that he let go of me really fast.

“Sorry, sir!” I said as apologetically as I could. Then I took off down the street at a dead run. I skirted drunken miners and slipped past a couple bemused saloon girls. I took to the alleys behind the gambling parlors, where the cartons and garbage were piled high. I could see rats scuttling across the path ahead and took care to avoid them. No good could come from my getting bit too.

I ran so fast, I almost lost my footing in the deeply rutted alleyway and abruptly collided into the rough-planked wall of the town livery. It turned out to be a very fortunate collision. In escaping from the sheriff, I’d inadvertently found my way after all. From inside the livery, I could hear the familiar voices of Pa and Adam. Despite myself, I’d found my pa and brothers.

I picked myself off the ground and tried to get my breathing back in order. In and out, up and down, and inside the gaps between the planks, I could hear my oldest brother talking.

“It’s over Cooper,” Adam was saying. “You went too far with this one, and your little reign in Virginia City has run its course.”

“That’s nonsense, Cartwright and you know it,” Cooper replied. “I have the support of every law abiding citizen in this town. Go ahead and turn me in to your hired sheriff. You’d never find a jury willing to sentence me to an afternoon in jail. Before we took over, a churchgoing woman couldn’t cross the street without a derringer tucked in her skirts. Think it over, Cartwright. When was Virginia City’s last bank robbery? Our last murder? We’re purging the rabble in this town, and once we’re finished, I guarantee you that not a single soul’s going to come to Virginia City looking for trouble.”

“And what kind of trouble was Tanner Collins?” The voice of Ben Cartwright filled every hole in the darkness. “How did he manage to threaten your perfect little town?”

“The man was a horse thief, Cartwright.” Cooper almost sounded bored. “A much tolerated and coddled horse thief, but a horse thief nonetheless.”

“He was a man,” Pa said, “and he deserved more than he was given.”

Suddenly, I wanted my pa so badly that tears filled my eyes, and I stepped forward out the shadows. Any of them could have seen me, if they’d been looking. Coal oil lanterns swung from the eaves, and the barn was dim in the smoky light, but I had trouble believing what my eyes were showing me. I don’t know what I had been expecting but truly believed that my pa and brothers would somehow save the day. I was a Cartwright too, but sometimes I felt like my name was hitched to their wagon. My pa and brothers could take care of just about anything, and yet the situation in the livery didn’t look much like what I’d expected.

Adam was bleeding. Sitting on a bale of hay, he was holding his arm kind of funny and was leaning a different way than usual. Hoss was heaped in a corner on the dirt floor and wasn’t moving. I could see blood running from a gash above his eyebrow, and his eyes were closed. Pa was straddling the space between my brothers, and I quickly saw the reason why he wasn’t moving in either direction. Jeremy Stanley, the clerk from the International House, had a six-shooter aimed at my father’s head.

With a start, I realized that I knew every man in the room. It was all so bewildering that it reminded me of the game Hoss and I liked to play, imagining that our friends and neighbors had secret mysterious lives like the ones I read about in the dime novels. We practically used to fall out of the hayloft laughing, imagining hardworking farmers as spies and gunslingers. Suddenly, our game didn’t seem so funny any more. In front of me, men I’d known all my life had taken a stance that I couldn’t square with our lifelong neighbors. Marcus Cooper wasn’t even wearing a gun, but it didn’t matter. His men were armed enough to take care of him. There were about six of them altogether, and I’d known most of them all my life. I gaped at Mr. Kendall, the father of my best friend, Harry. He’d set my finger last spring when I broke it, after it got stuck in a gap underneath his kitchen table. It hadn’t been a particularly impressive way to break a bone, but Mr. Kendall made me feel better by telling me how he once broke his toe tripping over a pair of long johns lying on the floor. Now, Mr. Kendall had his revolver pressed against the back of my oldest brother.

They were all familiar, and yet when I tried to connect them to the people I knew, it made my vision go sideways, like someone had taken the world and spun it like a top. How I kept my footing on either side of that spinning world, I’ll never know. All I know is one thing – my pa taught me keep moving forward, even if the world around wasn’t making good sense. Just ‘cause I had no idea what I was going to do, it didn’t mean I was going do nothing.

It wasn’t like it was my big moment or anything. I didn’t come springing out of the darkness, knocking guns out of the bad guys’ hands. Instead, I ran through the pack of them, pushing past shoulders and elbows, until I made it to my downed big brother. Why they let me through, I’ll never know, but I reckoned they were too surprised to shoot me. Hunkering down beside Hoss, I rested my hand on his chest just to feel his heart beating. My big brother was as tough as they come, even though he’d been hit pretty hard. I could see the bruise behind the gash, and it was blooming.

“Wake up, Hoss!” I ordered, shaking him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “It’s time for you to get up!”

Worried over Hoss, I didn’t notice that the room had gone dead quiet. When I finally turned around, I saw them. Pa, Adam, Mr. Cooper, Mr. Kendall. All of the others. Each and every member of the Justice Committee, standing in front of me. Even though they were holding guns, they didn’t look much like vigilantes right then. They’d gone back to looking like our neighbors. It was hard for me to keep from waving at them; it seemed so strange to be looking at them from the other side of a gun barrel. Hoss groaned underneath my hands and reluctantly opened his eyes. He glared at me right off, and I knew he was remembering where he was and how I wasn’t supposed to be there.

Sure enough, he muttered right away, “Little brother, I’m gonna wallop you! Ain’t ya never gonna listen to no one but your own fool sense?”

Satisfied that Hoss was going to be all right, I fired back, “At least my fool sense got me here!”

“Joseph!” I didn’t have to look at Pa to see his glare. I turned my attentions to Adam instead.

“Are you all right, Adam?” I asked.

“Fine.” The single word told me that Adam wasn’t all that happy with me either. “Now, you turn tail and walk out of this right now.” He looked at Mr. Cooper beseechingly. “Please let him leave. He’s just a little kid…”

Of course, I should have had sense to have not taken that remark personally, but it rankled all the same. The novelty of the situation had begun to wear off, and I stood up in that room of angry men and walked right over to my big brother.

“I’m old enough to know that your arm might be broke, Adam.” I looked over Adam’s shoulder at Mr. Kendall, who knew all about broken bones. “What do you think, Mr. Kendall? When Harry fell out of the hayloft, his arm looked the same, do you remember? Sure’s a good thing we didn’t break any bones last month during our camping trip, ain’t it Mr. Kendall?”

It was the both the wrong and the right thing to say. Immediately, the shared anger of that ill-advised camping trip rose into a bridge between Mr. Kendall and my pa. They both glowered at me from either side of the room, and I knew they were remembering the all night search party they’d led together, which ended by the embers of our man-sized fire on the top of Diablo Peak. I was still satisfied with that fire and that trip. Even though I should have learned my lesson, I couldn’t help but grin a little, just thinking of it.

“Of all the coddle-brained- ” Mr. Kendall started to say. He’d lowered his gun on Adam but looked like he’d prefer to use it on me.

Pa beat him to it. He pointed his finger at the door.

“Out, Joseph! Out this moment! I want to see your backside leaving this room right now, or so help me -”

What happened next was something I’d never done before, and it surely wasn’t anything I planned out. All I can say is that it was the bravest thing I’d ever done…

I ignored my father.

If I’d thought hard about it, I might have done differently. Adam said my body was always moving before my brain had an inkling that anything unusual was going on. I guess that’s what happened, because before my brain knew what my body was doing, I was walking right past Pa and over to Mr. Cooper.

“Mr. Cooper,” I said, planting my feet in front of him and trying to get a good look at his face. “I’m sorry, sir, but you got it all wrong about Ol’ Tanner. He stole horses, I know it, but he didn’t mean it like it seems. It was a habit that went bad on him, sir, like chewing tobacco. He wanted to stop, but I reckon he couldn’t figure out how.”

Staring down at me with his mouth gaping open, Mr. Cooper looked a lot like one of the golden trout that Hoss was always hauling out of the lake. He didn’t seem to have much to say, and neither did anyone else, so I figured I’d best keep talking.

I continued, “Sheriff Coffee is in charge now, and it would probably be the best thing to let him, seeing as its his job and all. He’s got that whole jail sitting there empty and practically brand new. He’s even got shackles! He brought them with us when we went looking for a posse.” As an aside, I added to my father, “I tried to take him around to the ranches, Pa, but there weren’t anyone interested in being a posse for him!”

The room was silent, and all the men were looking at each other like they’d been caught on D Street on a Sunday. Weapons were still out of their holsters, but they weren’t really pointed at any of us. It was like they’d forgotten what they were doing with them in the first place. Adam took a step towards me, with his jaw clenched in a way I didn’t much like, and I took a step back. Even hurt like he was, I was a little more afraid of my oldest brother than Mr. Cooper.

“Leave the boy be,” Mr. Cooper said in a downright curious voice, like he was puzzling over something. I was just looking at him to see what it could be, when I heard the click of a hammer being cocked, clear as day from behind me.

We all froze before we saw him. Sheriff Coffee, looking more undone than when I’d left him, had his six shooter aimed at the lot of us.

“Now, I’ve had just about enough of this,” the sheriff said. “Blazes, boy! That’s about the last time I’m taking you home! I’ve been over every inch of Virginia City lookin’ for you! Ben you do have my sympathies… this one can’t be an easy one to raise, at any age…” Then the sheriff glared at the other men in the room, “I gotta admit I agree with the boy. And it ain’t just you, Cooper. Ben Cartwright, you’ve a share in this too! What did you and your boys think you were doing, going off on your own, while letting me go after a posse that you knew was gonna prove scarcer than a hen’s teeth? Now if you won’t listen to me, listen to your own boy, and let me do my job!”

I walked across the crowded room to stand next to the sheriff. Considering everything, I wanted to explain things before he took out those shackles and locked my pa up with the other men.

“It’s just the way things been done,” I said. “If Pa didn’t take care of things, nobody would, Sheriff. We’re still learning about doing justice your way, with jails and judges and shackles. Adam says that’s why we hired you. So we could get back to ranchin’ and not having to worry about being the voice of reason. That’s the way Adam said it.”

Adam raised an eyebrow. “Glad to hear you listen to at least something I say, little brother.”

I smiled at that and decided I wanted to stand near my big brother more than I was afraid of him. Adam put his good arm around my shoulders and squeezed so hard that it hurt. For once, I didn’t complain.

Mr. Kendall was the first to toss his gun onto the ground, and he came around to take a look at Adam’s arm. One by one, the other men in the room followed, and Pa hurried over and picked up his own gun. He then hurried over to Hoss’ side.

With a voice more husky than I’d heard it before, Mr. Kendall said, “Don’t know if it’s broke but it needs a sling all the same, then you’ll be needin’ a doctor. Little Joe, let me use me your jacket.”

I obeyed right away, peeling off my jacket and handing it to him. Oddly enough, I didn’t feel a bit cold. But I was already feeling relief washing over me, the natural order of things slipping back into place. Pa had gone first to Hoss, then to Adam, and then finally to me. He took my chin hard in his hand and lifted it. His face was a mixture of every emotion I’d seen on my pa’s face, all ajumble, and I knew he wasn’t up to sorting them out right then.

“I’m sorry, Pa,” I said.

“We’ll work it out later, boy,” he answered, frowning down at me, but then hugged me real hard.

It all took a heap of time to work everything else out. The vigilantes, the Cartwrights, the new sheriff… The consequences to the fact that I bit the new sheriff… Justice… I’d like to say that we got used to the new way of doing things right away, but it didn’t happen like that. It was a long time before Virginia City got itself civilized, but I reckon the same could be said about any town, seeing that the world is fallen like it is, just like the preacher says on Sunday.

Sheriff Coffee got to use his brand new shackles on Marcus Cooper. He locked up the other men until he could sort out who needed to stand trial and who wasn’t accountable for much of anything. My family helped him with the sorting, describing all sorts of good qualities about Mr. Kendall and some of the others, but we also kept out of his way. Adam said we had to let the new sheriff do his job right, and Pa agreed. For Tanner Collins’ sake, I was glad that justice was getting less rough in Virginia City. For a long time when I passed the old Sycamore tree, I remembered how right and wrong were a lot more complicated than an old man who stole horses, even though he never wanted to ride them. I wasn’t sorry when the old tree finally burned down, when a bunch of boys threw a firecracker into its branches.

As we followed Sheriff Coffee and his prisoners out of the livery that night, Pa was supporting Hoss who still felt peaked enough that he needed to see a doctor, and the two of them left first. Adam needed to go to the doctor too, so I was all set to trail after them, when my oldest brother came up behind me, his arm still slung in my jacket.

“Why did Pa do it?” I asked him suddenly. “Why’d he try to catch Mr. Cooper without the sheriff?”

Adam thought on it a while, while we stood there under the livery threshold.

Finally he said, “Justice is a big responsibility, and Pa knows that. Sheriff Coffee’s wanting his share of it, but you mark my words. It’s the sheriff’s job but it’s always going to be our responsibility. Yours too, Little Joe. You ever heard the phrase, ‘to whom much is given, much is expected’?”

I nodded. I’d heard it all my life.

Adam continued, “Well, don’t you forget it. Nobody else is going to forget it either, so long as you’re a Cartwright. It’s a lot to live up to. You remember that if you’re tempted to go judging Pa.”

“I’m not,” I said automatically, and I wasn’t. My whole life I’d watched my father make the hard decisions that other folks shied away from. Unlike the vigilantes, he made those calls in the full light of day where everyone could see and judge them. My brothers had followed his footsteps even though my pa had a longer stride than any man I’d ever known. I added, “I’m going to do the same.”

Adam smiled, the big sort of smile that made me catch my breath, because he didn’t do it very often.

“I believe you,” he said, guiding me out of the livery. “But here’s my warning for you, little brother. Pa’s kind of justice takes a hell of a lot of living up to.”

I already knew that. I’d seen it before, even if I didn’t know what was to come. There were lots of vigilantes who would come to town. They would have plenty of business. Hooligans, thieves, hired killers… Evil men who didn’t give a hang about the law.

Lawmen like Sheriff Coffee would come and go, but there was only one Ben Cartwright. My pa took a lot of living up to. We might be handing things back to the sheriff, but we’d always be the law, almost as much as he was. I was a Cartwright like the rest of them. That was the way of things. Justice wasn’t all that easy to come by, not in Virginia City, and not anywhere else. Even a kid could tell you that.

Whispering a prayer for Old Tanner Collins, I followed Adam out of the livery and into the shadows of that night.

The End

 

 

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