The Sunset Trail

by Alfred Henry Lewis

Several months elapsed, and Dodge had felt no ill effects from Prohibition. Whiskey was obtainable at usual prices in the Alamo, the Alhambra, the Long Branch, the Dance Hall, and what other haunts made a feature of liquid inspiration. Dodge was satisfied. Dodge was practical and never complained of any law until it was enforced. Since such had not been the case with those statutes of prohibition, Dodge was content. The herds as aforetime came up from Texas in the fall; as aforetime the cowboys mirthfully divided their equal money between whiskey, monte and quadrilles. The folk of Dodge thereat were pleased. No one, official, had come to molest them or make them afraid, and a first resentful interest in prohibition was dying down.

This condition of calm persisted undisturbed until one afternoon when the telegraph operator came over to the Alhambra, pale and shaken, bearing a yellow message. The message told how the Attorney General, and the President of the Prohibition League were to be in Dodge next day, with a fell purpose of making desolate that jocund hamlet by an enforcement of the laws. The visitors would dismantle Dodge of its impudent defiance; they would destroy it with affidavits, plow and sow its site with salt in the guise of warrants of arrest. When they were finished, the Alhambra, the Long Branch, the Alamo, the Dance Hall and kindred kindly emporiums would be as springs that had run dry, while, captives in the town’s calaboose, their proprietors wore irons and languished. To add insult to injury, those exalted ones promised that when they had cleansed Dodge and placed it upon a rumless footing, they would address what citizens were not in jail and strive to show them the error of their sodden ways and teach them to lead a happier and a soberer life.

In Disapproval of Its Drinks.

When Mr. Masterson withdrew to Arizona, he did not expect to soon return to Dodge. He found, however, that despite Tombstone and its pleasures he dragged a sense of loneliness about, and oft caught himself wondering what Mr. Wright and Mr. Kelly and Mr. Short and the rest of the boys were doing. At last, giving as excuse, that he ought to put a wire fence about a sand-blown stretch of desert that was his and which lay blistering on the south side of the Arkansas in the near vicinity of Dodge, he resolved upon a visit. He would remain a fortnight. It would be a vacation—he hadn’t had one since the Black Kettle campaign—and doubtless serve to wear away the edge of those regrets which preyed upon him when now he no longer conserved the peace of Dodge with a Colt’s-45. There comes a joy with office holding, even when the office is one attractive of invidious lead, and in the newness of laying down that post of Sheriff, Mr. Masterson should not be criticised because the ghost of an ache shot now and then across his soul.

The first day of Mr. Masterson’s return was devoted to a renewal of old ties—a bit parched, with ten months of Arizona. The second day, Mr. Masterson invested in wandering up and down and indulging himself in a tender survey of old landmarks. Here was the sign-post against which he steadied himself when he winged that obstreperous youth from the C-bar-K, who had fired his six-shooter into the Alhambra in disapproval of Mr. Kelly’s wares. It was a good shot; for the one resentful of Alhambra whiskey was fully one hundred yards away and on the run. Later, the C-bar-K boy admitted that the Alhambra whiskey was not so bad, and his slam-bang denunciation of it uncalled for. At that, Mr. Masterson, first paying a doctor to dig his lead from the boy’s shoulder, gave him his freedom again.

“If Kell’s whiskey had been really bad,” said Mr. Masterson, “I would have been the last to interfere with the resentment of a gentleman who had suffered from it. But I was familiar with the brand, and knew, therefore, how that cowboy unlimbered in merest wantonness. Under such conditions, I could not, and do my duty, permit him to go unrebuked.”

Half a block further, and Mr. Masterson stood in front of the First National Bank. Mr. Masterson recalled this arena of finance as the place wherein he borrowed the shotgun with which he cooled the ardour of Mr. Bowman when that warrior made the long journey from Trinidad with the gallant purpose, announced widely in advance, of shooting up the town. Looking into the double muzzle of the 10-gauge, the doughty one from Trinidad saw that which changed his plans. Turning his hardware over to Mr. Masterson, he took a drink in amity with that hard-working officer, and then embarked upon a festival, conducted with a scrupulous regard for the general peace, which lasted four full days.

Across from the bank was the warehouse, the wooden walls of which displayed the furrows ploughed by Mr. Masterson’s bullets on the day when he fought the three gentleman from Missouri. They were weather-stained, those furrows, with the rains that had intervened. Mr. Masterson being a sentimentalist sighed over his trademarks, and thought of those pleasant times when they were fresh. Fifty yards beyond stood the little hotel where the dead were carried. It was a good hotel, and in that hour celebrated for its bar; remembering which, Mr. Masterson repaired thither in the name of thirst.

Mr. Masterson was leaning on the counter, and telling the proprietor that the lustre of his whiskey had been in no sort dimmed, when the word—just then delivered by the wires—reached him of that proposed invasion in the cause of prohibition. It was Mr. Wright who bore the tidings, and the face of that merchant prince showed grave.