Evan's First Job as Deputy

(OOC -- This is a Personal Thread involving Sheriff Matthew Taylor and now-Deputy Evan Williams, just after Evan gets his badge. It is being written separately to allow us to take the time to complete it without keeping the main IC Thread from moving onward to the next day.)



Taylor watched Evan's reaction to receiving the badge with a bit of personal conflict. Evan had wanted this for ... well, for as long as Taylor had known him. The romance of being a Law Man, depicted in the Penny Novels, was powerful. But then, so were the guns that the young man would be facing down in the future.

And that future ... was now.

"Load that thing," Taylor said, nodding his head toward the shotgun in Evan's hands. He'd been avoiding taking on a particular task for several days because while it was in fact something he should have done as Crossroad's Sheriff, he'd been putting it off because Jonathan McGuire had pushed him to do it. "We have somewhere to go, and ... well, if you're gonna be a Law Man, this is as good a way to start as any."

As they made their way down the street to the Stables, Taylor explained the problem. He was pretty sure that Evan knew of Yuli Gwinn, the old hermit who lived near the southern edge of the McGuire ranch, but he was certain his new Deputy didn't know how Gwinn made his living: slaughtering other men's cattle. The old Swede, who'd been pressured into selling his claim to McGuire back before Taylor had arrived in the community, had been rustling, killing, slaughtering, and selling the cattle baron's stock to an assortment of people over the years, from wagon train settlers to Indian renegades to other locals fed up with McGuire's antics.

But the man was smart; he never got on the McGuire ranch or got caught with branded hides ... until finally this month.

"I don't want him harmed," Taylor explained as they saddled up, "And I certainly don't want him killed. But ... and Evan, please keep this in mind ... while I don't think the man would ever lift a gun against us ... well ... he'd becoming more desperate ... and a bit crazy. If you feel you're life is in danger..."

He didn't finish the sentence. He never liked to tell another man how or when to use potentially lethal force. But at the same time, he was throwing an 18 year old boy with a badge at a nutty old codger that Taylor wasn't even sure would understand the significance of shooting at the Law.

"You up for this ... Deputy?" Taylor asked before he mounted his horse.

Evan followed Taylor, loading the shotgun's two barrels quickly. He was nervous, but somehow he wasn't afraid. Okay he was afraid, but still he didn't want the Sheriff to know that.

"Sure Sheriff, I know Gwinn, but he always seemed like a likeable sort for a Swede." Evans responded. To say though that Evans was shocked, but not unsurprised that Gwinn had been stealing from McGuire. Evans thought about the lands his father had been forced to sell when their crops had failed to come. He knew McGuire had arranged so they had bad seeds, and the farming tools had been a joke. They had nearly broken their backs trying to get their lands up, only to see it all end poorly.

Evans stood there as they entered the Stables. "Yeah, Sheriff. I'm ready." He wasn't, and he really didn't want to go after someone that was sticking it to McGuire... but he had accepted the badge. So it was only right they up held the law. Great his first job as Deputy... and it sucked.

He helped Taylor saddle a pair of horses and followed the Lawman out. His mind racing and his heart pumping.

They leisurely rode to Yuli Gwinn's hideout -- an old dugout cabin hidden in a grove of young trees -- and when less than a half mile out, slowed their horses to a walk so Taylor could continue his little training session with his young Deputy.

"A man like Gwinn can be very dangerous," the Sheriff said, his gaze shifting often from Evan to the trail before them to the land about them.

Taylor had always been a cautious man, something he'd learned early in his bounty hunting career. In tracking down two dozen men over the last many years, he'd rarely come up on one without running into some sort of ambush or perimeter security, like lookouts, barking dogs, or booby traps designed to bring a horse to the ground or simply alert the pursued to the approaching pursuer. He'd been out near or even to Gwinn's place several times over the last two years and new the ground, but that didn't mean he was just going to ride up casually, wave, and say hi without showing some concern, particularly while trying to show Evan how to do his new job.

"Desperate men," he continued, "won't hesitate to put a bullet through you if you push him too hard, because they have nothing more to lose. Yuli lost his land, his stock, his future. The only thing that kept the man from going on a rampage out at the McGuire Station was not losing his family. I think if he hadn't been a bachelor farmer ... well, I hate to think of what might have happened if he'd lost a wife ... worse, a child."

Taylor could still remember tracking down one outlaw early in his career, working off a wanted poster that accused the man of murder, only to find out he'd killed a man who'd burned down his home with his three children inside. Taylor had only learned the facts as the man -- who'd drawn on him and, of course, lost -- laid against the saloon bar, dying, and talking about his family as if they were sitting right there with him as his life faded away.

Taylor had nearly quit his new career, but instead ensured in the future that his targets were in fact truly bad guys. It had been a good choice; it had brought him to Crossroads, of course.

Taylor slowed them to a stop. He pointed off to the tops of a pair of trees sticking up over a slight hillock. He explained that Guinn's dugout was on the far side of the hillock. "I want you to head out west, past that little draw, then come up on the top of the ridge. You'll be ... perhaps a hundred, hundred fifty feet from the dugout. I want you to make yourself obvious, but don't get any closer. Guinn carries a Sharp Rifle--" He smiled. "--but his eyes aren't what they used to be. That means he won't be able to see your badge, so he won't know you're the law ... but that also means he won't be able to shoot it off your chest, either."