There are sheriffs and there are sheriffs. Here’s one
of my favorites:
Sheriff Quick was no Andy Taylor, but Andy rarely
had blacksmiths blasted into hamburger helper in the Mayberry Diner.
Slimy killed Mike Finn, and the loose coin that came of it made the
regulars at the Rosa Linda sanguine (whatever that means) about the
whole thing. But eventually the sheriff had to get involved.
This is the fifth and concluding post of my excerpt from
chapter one of Trouble in Taos. If you want to read from the beginning, here is part-1
part-ii estevos-shotgun and part-4
Mike Finn was lying there dead. There were bits of
him still hanging on the bar, and being such a large man, he was hard
to step around and even harder to ignore. Mike didn’t have any
family, so no one knew exactly what to do with him. Claybourne
Petree, who you might remember was the undertaker and had the chair
shot out from under him, searched the body to see if Finn had enough
money on him to pay for a decent casket and hole. It turned out that
Mike’s pockets were bulging with silver. No one knew that the
smith was such a rich man.
Of course, some of that silver went for more whisky,
which greatly relieved Estevo who had lost two shotguns and a nice
chair in the business. The blacksmith’s inflated fees became the
topic of conversation. Finn’s fortune was sufficient to supply a
first class funeral, a good drunk for a rapidly crowded barroom, and
even a couple silver dollars to compensate Flossy for her loss of
business.
By the time Sheriff Quick (who was quick only in the
sense that he wasn’t dead) arrived, Claybourne had Finn’s body at
the mortuary. Estevo had cleaned up most of the blood and other body
parts, and the universal opinion (with the exception of the doomed
card-cheat Lefty Hagar) was that Slimy had done no great harm. After
the sheriff downed a tumbler of real whisky, he agreed, told Slimy to
be careful with those shotguns, and hauled Lefty off to the
jailhouse.
I don’t know where W. G. C. R. Colmes got the bit
about Slimy using a pearl-handled Colt to shoot Mike Finn. I’ve
only seen Slimy handle a Colt once in my life, and that was to
bludgeon a man who was unfortunate enough to stand between Slimy and
someone he was shooting at. The poor bystander was gut shot, and so
he was going to die anyway, but Slimy didn’t club him to put him
out of his misery. The man was too absorbed in his wounds to pay
proper attention to Slimy’s story about the dog his mother almost
bought him just before the family was run out of Arkansas.
If you want more of Slimy’s adventures, you’ll have
to download the book – well there is another excerpt at Go Figure Reads.
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