Ralph Compton Death Along the Cimarron by RALPH COMPTON

he’d taken from her husband and shoved down into his belt. She had a sudden urge to grab the pistol and use it on herself before he could stop her. But something kept her from doing it. You don’t deserve this, she told herself. You’re not the one who should die. She put the notion of grabbing the pistol out of her mind for now and said in a meek voice, “I’ll be all right.” Then, biting her tongue to keep from shouting it aloud, she said to herself as she imagined her hand closing around the pistol butt the first chance she had when he wasn’t looking, I’ll take anything a worthless pig like you can dish out.

Chapter 7
    For more than two hours Cherokee Earl’s men pillaged and terrorized the helpless town. With a bullet through his right shoulder and another through his left hip, Sheriff Oscar Matheson could do no more than get out of the gunmen’s way and stay out of their sight. Avery McRoy and Dirty Joe forced the town doctor, Latimar Callaway, to clean and dress Sherman Fentress’s leg wound and the many cuts, scraps, and broken ribs Fentress had received when he’d blasted headlong through the front wall of the telegraph office. Once the doctor had finished, he left Fentress lying on the billiard table and nursing a bottle of red rye in the New Royal Saloon. Making sure no one was watching, the old doctor hurried from the saloon to the livery barn, where he’d left Sheriff Matheson resting on a pile of fresh straw.
    â€œWho goes there?” Sheriff Matheson asked, hearing the barn door creak open as a sliver of sunlight striped across the dirt floor.
    Dr. Callaway whispered as he closed the door and heard the sound of a pistol cock in the grainy darkness, “It’s me, Oscar, dang it! Don’t cock that hammer at me. The shape you’re in, that thing could go off. Then who’d be left here to look after you?”
    â€œSorry, Doc,” Sheriff Matheson said in a weak voice. Lying with his back propped against a stall post, he let the cocked pistol drop across his lap. The doctor stepped into the stall and frowned, seeing the pistol in the faint striped sunlight through the cracks in the barn wall. “Give me that,” Dr. Callaway said, stooping and taking the gun from Matheson’s hand. He let the hammer down and shoved the pistol into the holster lying by Matheson’s side. “Confounded guns!” he growled. “They’re the cause of all the trouble in this world.”
    â€œDon’t start on guns, Doc,” Sheriff Matheson said in a voice labored with pain. “If I hadn’t had this with me a while ago, I reckon I’d be dead right now.”
    â€œI suppose,” the doctor grumbled, already opening the dressing on the sheriff’s upper right chest. “Of course, if those jackasses didn’t have guns, they couldn’t have shot you in the first place. That’s how a more civilized man would reason with it.”
    â€œI’m all for civilization, Doc,” Matheson said, offering a tired, painful smile. He nodded toward the street beyond the dark, quiet shelter of the barn. Distant laughter rose above the sound of breaking glass. “How bad is it out there?” Two pistol shots roared from the direction of the saloon.
    â€œIt’s bad enough,” the doctor said, shaking his head as he examined the sheriffs wounds. “The blacksmith buckshot one of them, sending him sailing. The ringleader laid up at the Crown Hotel with some woman under his arm before the smoke cleared. Poor Gerald’s dead, so’s our telegraph clerk ... our banker, the blacksmith too. We didn’t have many folks here to begin with. This will just about do us in.”
    â€œThe Crown Hotel, huh?” said Matheson.
    â€œI saw him go there,” the doctor replied. “Can’t say the woman looked real happy. They might’ve just had a lovers’ spat or