The Duke Of Chimney ButteOgden, George W. (George Washington)
General
The Duke Of Chimney Butte
Ogden, George W. (George Washington)
Badlands (S.D. and Neb.) -- Fiction; Cowboys -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Western stories
He had caught but a flash of the hurrying figure but, with that eye for
singling a certain object from a moving mass that experience with cattle
sharpens, he recognized the carriage of the head, the set of the
shoulders. He hurried after, overtaking the man as he was entering a
hotel.
"Mr. Kerr, I've got a warrant for you," he said, detaining the fugitive
with a hand laid on his shoulder.
Kerr was taken so unexpectedly that he had no chance to sling a gun,
even if he carried one. He was completely changed in appearance, even to
the sacrifice of his prized beard, so long his aristocratic distinction
in the Bad Lands. He was dressed in the city fashion, with a little
straw hat in place of the eighteen-inch sombrero that he had worn for
years. Confident of this disguise, he affected astonished indignation.
"I guess you've made a mistake in your man," said he.
Lambert told him with polite firmness that there was no mistake.
"I'd know your voice in the dark--I've got reason to remember it," he
said.
He got the warrant out with one hand, keeping the other comfortably near
his gun, the little hand bag with its riches between his feet. Kerr was
so vehemently indignant that attention was drawn to them, which
probably was the fugitive cattleman's design, seeing in numbers a chance
to make a dash.
Lambert had not forgotten the experience of his years at the Kansas City
Stockyards, where he had seen confidence men and card sharpers play the
same scheme on policemen, clamoring their innocence until a crowd had
been attracted in which the officer would not dare risk a shot. He kept
Kerr within reaching distance, flashed the warrant before his eyes,
passed it up and down in front of his nose, and put it away again.
"There's no mistake, not by a thousand miles. You'll come along back to
Glendora with me."
A policeman appeared by this time, and Kerr appealed to him, protesting
mistaken identity. The officer was a heavy-headed man of the
slaughter-house school, and Lambert thought for a while that Kerr's
argument was going to prevail with him. To forestall the policeman's
decision, which he could see forming behind his clouded countenance,
Lambert said:
"There's a reward of nine hundred dollars standing for this man. If
you've got any doubt of who he is, or my right to arrest him, take us
both to headquarters."
That seemed to be a worthy suggestion to the officer. He acted on it
without more drain on his intellectual reserve. There, after a little
course of sprouts by the chief of detectives, Kerr admitted his
identity, but refused to leave the state without requisition. They
locked him up, and Lambert telegraphed the sheriff for the necessary
papers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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