Support Your Local Deputy: A Cotton Pickens Western by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Zimmer’s famous tonic. Buy it now, to relieve the sorrows of dogs, babies, horses, mules, goats, women, schoolteachers, merchants, law officers, and hoboes. And to improve all nighttime activities.”
    Well, I had to credit Zimmer. Those cowboys ponied up in a long line and began to shell out their hard-won cash for the tonic, instead of blowing it all in the saloons. But then an old gray cowboy reached into his britches to buy some of that joy juice, and came up empty.
    “I been robbed,” he bawled. “Some light-fingered whelp’s made off with my purse.”
    That sure caused a commotion, and pretty quick, most of them cowboys were digging into their pants, making sure they still had their cash and private parts, and a mess more came up missing their pay.
    “Some little whelp’s gone and dug into my pants,” yelled another son of the prairies.
    I didn’t doubt what started the crime wave, and headed straight for them little orphan buggers, who were racing around there. I’d had my eye on one, a carrot-topped little punk that looked mean as a lobo wolf, and pretty fast. I snatched him by the collar and flattened him on the dirt, and dug into his pockets, and sure enough, there were three purses he’d purloined while working that crowd, and by then Rusty had snagged another punk, this one with blond hair and a big jaw, and he proved to be another light-finger genius, with four more cowboy purses stuffed into his pants.
    Them cowboys saw all this, and snared the rest of the orphan boys, and dug into their pockets, while the McCoys sounded like a pair of squawking pigeons. But the cowboys came up empty. Rusty and me, we’d got the two pickpocket punks. It took a while to get the purses back to the right owners, and have them count up the cash, but in time we got it all squared away, and they got back into line and bought Zimmer’s Miracle Elixir for their horses and their own carcasses. There wasn’t a man or woman or merchant around there that wasn’t checking purses and wallets and pockets. And the orphans, male and female, vamoosed over to their own camp and hid out. I sure wondered how the adoptions would go the next morning on the courthouse steps.
    Zimmer, he got his performers to strike up a tune, and pretty soon the next acts, the fat woman in the grass skirt and the fiddler, were hard at it in the yellow light of the lamps.
    Rusty and me, we dragged those two little hooligans off to the jail and set them down for some serious palavering.
    “You first,” I said to the red-haired one. “What’s your name?”
    “My name’s whatever you choose. I don’t got none, but Mickey’ll do. And if you want me to fess up, you got it. I’ve been snatching purses since I was six, and I almost got enough to retire tonight.”
    “You with that orphan train?”
    “Them turds. I almost got away tonight.”
    I turned to the blond kid. “And you?”
    “Call me the Big Finn, copper. I got more loot than Mickey, and I’ll whip his ass any time.”
    “Where’d you grow up?”
    “Nowhere. Hell’s Kitchen, but you’re too dumb to figure that out.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “I don’t know. That’s where this orphan outfit caught me. Regular snare net come down over me and they hauled me off to here.”
    “You want to spend the rest of your days behind them bars there?”
    “Beats getting adopted and having to work my ass off for a living. That’s what it is, pal, slave labor. That’s a slave labor outfit, selling us out.”
    “You been doing this all your life?”
    “Since I was old enough to spit, copper.”
    “You want to go to the pen, the big brick pile, and hammer rocks the rest of your life?”
    “Hey, they feed me, right?”
    “Yeah,” said Mickey, “toss us in there. We get three squares a day, and don’t have to lift a finger.”
    “You got any remorse?” Rusty asked.
    “What’s that? If it’s worth something, I’ll cop some for you.”
    “I stole a bottle of Zimmer’s dope,” the