Boeotia
A short story by James Ballantyne
The last vestiges of what had been a particularly clear summer’s day were gleaming on the horizon when Cy Canny walked his limping horse down the dark main street of the prairie town of Boeotia in Wyoming. The name of the town, the bounty hunter had been informed, came from the classical region of ancient Greece and was bestowed by some early Greek immigrant who put down roots in this part of the world, possibly by establishing a minor trading post. Locals, he had also been told, pronounce the name ‘Beeosha’.
Canny was heading past open saloons on his way to the livery stables to have his horse stabled and fed for the night and to have a horseshoe replaced. A man idling by the door of one of the bars pointed him the way. Canny had walked no more than twenty feet further when a rifle shot whiplashed and he cried out and fell to the ground. The man in the doorway called out to those inside the saloon and ran over to the prostrate body. That was the start of a complex chronicle for Boeotia.
It couldn’t have been more than ten days later when Doc Chene, on his returning from a call, discovered a second dead body on the road to town. Another male, also with the air of a bounty hunter or gunman about him. Nearby his horse was champing lazily on the grass along the verges. Later, at the Sheriff’s office, faded and tattered papers on the victim identified him as another licensed bounty hunter but the name on the documents was illegible. He too had been shot with a rifle.
Sheriff Cal Sheedy was at a loss to explain the double slaying of the men of such a dubious profession but assumed that they had to be in pursuit of someone in the area for them to be assassinated locally. In a town of less than one thousand inhabitants, most of whom he knew or could identify, it was not easy to hazard an opinion about whom the hunters might be targeting. Was the double killing the end of it or might he expect other bounty hunters to put in an appearance and face a similar summary execution? Fine to speculate, but he had to face the fact that he already had two unexplained murders on his hands. And at that moment he had no knowledge of from where the victims had set out to meet their fate.
Three weeks went by during which he had telegraphed and written to various US Marshalls and Sheriffs Offices seeking information about the two bounty hunters. Replies confirmed that they were from out of state and had left no traces of their last whereabouts. They were known to law enforcement agencies as unsavoury bounty hunters and gunmen suspected of involvement in a number of unexplained murders in surrounding States. It was anybody’s guess what was bringing them to Boeotia.
Then came news of a third killing just over the state line in the settlement of Lamar in Nebraska. The salient fact here was that this man too was executed by rifle fire. The other item of note was that this victim was totally unknown to any state law officers. On him there were no papers that could identify who he was or where he came from. However, he carried no firearms and didn’t have the look of a bounty hunter.
But there was someone in Boeotia who knew only too well what was bringing such men to the area. This man knew too that still others were likely to follow them in pursuit of an undoubted substantial reward. He also knew the name of the person in faraway Chicago that was hiring them to ferret him out. The man in Boeotia was aware that his nemesis, lurking in his past for decades, had finally tracked him down. It was then he decided it was time to stand his ground, making it clear to his enemy that if he wanted him dead he would have to come west and attempt it himself.
Came another day, a fourth male body was discovered high on a ridge some five miles from Boeotia. No identification papers were found on it either. This armed bounty hunter, if he was a bounty hunter, had not been dropped by rifle fire, however, but was found with a javelin stuck in his chest. There was also the puzzling fact that he was an Arapaho Indian, the clincher to this being the traditional series of small circles tattooed on the body. In times past the Arapaho tribe was known to be a sometime enemy of the Shoshone tribe but that was long before Sheriff Sheedy’s time. He did not link this killing to those of the other bounty hunters at first. But then he wondered, ‘What if the javelin is intended to convey a different message?’
By now, the unusual story of the Boeotia assassinations had caught the attention of law enforcement officers in the States neighbouring on Wyoming. Shootings by rifle fire were not unusual in the West but the javelin employed in the fourth murder raised some eyebrows. Was this murder, in fact, connected to the first three killings at all? Was it linked to a separate vendetta? Local newspapers now began to pose the same questions and probe why so much statewide attention was focused on a series of assassinations in and around a small town in the mid-West that no one had ever heard of before? And what of the Indian? Might there be a connection there, some relict of the Indian Wars?
The hunted man in Boeotia maintained his quiet lifestyle well away from the spotlight. A senior resident of some years in the town, Joe Leneghan, was a respected loner and skilled carpenter, never known to carry weapons of any description. An accomplished horseman, he liked to go on solitary, sometimes overnight, rides into the surrounding countryside and seldom took a drink. He was not religious.
Things went quiet for some months during which time Sheriff Sheedy had made no advances with his investigations, in spite of Marshall Henson coming up from Cheyenne for a few days to lend his assistance. Then one day a different type of stranger arrived by stage in the town, professing to be a landscape artist. He checked into the town’s only hotel, The Olympias, owned and run by Circe Lambros, for a few days, signing himself in as Colonel Rory Wilson. A Southerner, possibly, by his drawl, he was on an extended trip west to stay with his sister in Portland, Oregon, he said, and was keen to make sketches of some out of the way places, like Boeotia, and Indian reservations, on his way there.
After a day or two it was noticeable that he had struck up something of a relationship with the carpenter Joe Leneghan whom, on Circe’s recommendation, he had approached for assistance when one of his folding wooden easels was in need of repair. Circe remarked further that he even managed to entice Leneghan to the quiet hotel bar for a drink on three successive days afterwards where they became immersed in deep, and at times intense, conversation throughout the evening as if they were unravelling a twisted narrative. Slowly, it dawned on the hotel owner that they must have known each other in earlier times. Later on, she was to recall that on their last night in the bar together, when they stood up to go, they exchanged a firm handshake like two cattlemen sealing a deal.
Well before dawn after their third evening together the men hired two horses at the livery stables, waking the owner and blacksmith Andros Sanna out of a deep sleep in the process. ‘They said they were going on a long ride into Shoshone country,’ he was to tell the Sheriff the following day, ‘Paid me generously up front. Colonel Wilson had his box of tricks with him. I expect he was going to do some painting. A fine pair of horsemen. They rode off straight as cavalrymen.’”
The elderly men rode on stoically until they were well into Shoshone territory. It was still early morning by the time they reached a lakeside by a flower-strewn meadow from which a rising sun was coaxing clear the last veil of mist. A pair of loons were echoing mournfully to each other across the expanse of water. The men dismounted and gazed silently in the direction of the calls. The Colonel reached into a saddlebag and took out a flask of whiskey and two small glasses. Leneghan approached and they raised their glasses to someone they had dearly loved. Then the Colonel reached down an antique wooden case from his horse. In it was a pair of duelling pistols.
When the two men failed to return that night Andros Sanna raised the alarm with Sheriff Sheedy. The next morning a small posse rode out the trail the missing men had followed. It was late in the afternoon when the bodies were discovered by the lake. The horses, chewing contentedly on the lush meadow grass, had attracted the posse to the site. They were tethered on long ropes and their saddles and bridles had been removed and carefully set aside. At first glance it appeared that the men had held a duel and had had the misfortune to die in the shoot-out, an unusual coincidence, to say the least, made even more unusual by the fact that both men had been shot full frontally through the mouth. A duelling pistol was still gripped in the shooting hand of each. Sheriff Sheedy held his counsel but it was his opinion that each man, rather than pointing his pistol at the other had turned it on himself in a mutual act of suicide. ‘Let others, including the newspapers, speculate on such things,’ he told himself. He was not going to talk ill of Joe Leneghan, a man he had come to admire for his old-world courtesy and honesty.
The bodies were taken back to town for Doc Chene to certify their deaths, after which they were buried side by side without ceremony in the Boeotia graveyard. Cal Sheedy had ventured the opinion that it would have been more appropriate to let them rest in the meadow where they had chosen to die but nobody volunteered to trek them back there again.
With their passing came to an end the spate of killings in Boeotia. Were the two antagonists, in fact, equally responsible for the murderous vendetta? If so, their three nights of intense discussion in Circe’s bar suggested, perhaps, that they came to a mutual admission of guilt that led them to their act of expiation? For months, the newspapers, local and national, speculated on the reason for the murderous spree and why those two outwardly civilized men had fought their duel to the death by a lonely lake in Wyoming, but they neither unearthed an answer to that nor established the actual identities of the two men. No one ever came forward to claim either body. Sheriff Sheedy had his own private theory about the conflict. Among the possessions of Colonel Wilson he had discovered a small painting of an elegant woman in Shoshone costume that he put aside for himself, reasoning that whatever lay behind the tragic events had now been atoned for. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Exactly a year after the double death, a beautiful, fortyish Shoshone woman on a pinto horse rode unnoticed through Boeotia at dawn and entered the cemetery. She dismounted and made her way straight to the graves of Joseph Leneghan and Colonel Rory Wilson over which she stood with bowed head in silent contemplation. She stayed a while and, before she left, deposited a posy of red windflowers tied with prairie grass on each man’s grave. Some days later when Sheriff Sheedy was attending the funeral of a townsperson he happened to notice the now faded posies on the two graves. After the service he immediately went home and took out the small painting of the Shoshone woman again. He had remembered correctly. She was indeed holding a posy of red windflowers in her right hand.
Photo credits: Mark Ingraham
