Brewery Gulch Standoff — A Ranger's Badge Excerpt
Bisbee, August 1902. A city marshal and two Arizona Rangers are about to find out whether badges on the same side of the law are enough to keep four armed men from making a bad decision.
Bisbee never quieted down, not even past midnight. The mountain spit ore by day and noise by night, and Brewery Gulch carried the loudest of it, saloons stacked shoulder to shoulder up the hillside, lit windows spilling piano music and laughter into the street below. Mossman had picked the place for headquarters on purpose. A man could lose himself in a crowd like this one, and that cut both ways for the kind of work we did.
I was cleaning the Colt at the table when the runner pushed through the door, sweat cutting tracks through the grime on his face.
"City's got Burt Grove locked up at the marshal's office," he said. "Captain wants him handed over before they ship him out to Tombstone come morning."
Bowden was already reaching for his hat. "Grove. That's the Muheim shooting."
"Goodman caught a bullet meant for somebody else. Three witnesses saw Grove running with a smoking pistol." I holstered the Colt. "Shields won't hand him over easily. Man doesn't take kindly to being told his jurisdiction stops where the captain says it stops."
"Then we ask nice first," Bowden said. "See how far nice gets us before we need anything else."
We walked it rather than rode, quicker through the gulch on foot this time of night. Two blocks shy of the marshal's office, Bowden slowed half a step without a word about it, and I felt the change in him before I understood the reason for it. He'd clocked something. I found it a breath later. Two men posted along the front of the building who had no business being there this late, both of them too still, too deliberately positioned for men just killing time outside a jail.
The marshal's office sat at the bottom of the hill, squat brick with bars on the one window. Marshal James Shields stood on the step, his deputy planted nearby, the man's hand resting on the butt of his revolver.
"Evening, Marshal," Bowden said before I'd gotten a word out.
"Bowden." Shields didn't look at me at all. "If you're here about Grove, you can walk back up that hill and tell Mossman the answer's the same as this morning. He's a city prisoner, taken on a city street."
"He shot a man in front of half of Brewery Gulch," I said. "That makes him ours too, under the warrant."
"Makes him a lot of people's, Harper. Don't make him yours to walk off with."
The deputy's hand tightened on the grip of his revolver. I didn't move mine, but I marked the distance all the same. Eight feet, maybe nine, close enough that whichever man drew first still lost inside two seconds flat. My weight settled onto the balls of my feet.
"We're not looking for trouble tonight, Marshal," Bowden said, as if remarking on the weather, like the four of us weren't standing close enough to smell the gun oil on each other's holsters. "Just looking to settle this clean. No call for men wearing badges to be drawing down on each other over the likes of Burt Grove."
"Should've thought on that before your captain started telling this town how to run its own jail."
"Mossman doesn't want your jail, Marshal. Wants the man who put a bullet into Goodman answering for it under territorial law, same as he'd answer for rustling or murder anywhere else in this county." Bowden's voice didn't climb a half step the whole time he talked, hands loose and open at his sides, nothing about him bracing for a fight even standing in the middle of one.
Shields' jaw worked, but his hand stayed where it was, and that mattered more right now than anything either man had said yet.
"And after the city's finished with him?"
About The Ranger's Badge
Two lawmen. Eleven missions. A bond forged in gunsmoke.
Shane Harper didn’t want a partner—until Kendall Bowden saved his life. Set against the real history of the Arizona Rangers, The Ranger's Badge follows their rides across a gritty territory of rustlers, border standoffs, and siege.
