A Scheme There Was: A Story of the Whittling Sheriff of Mohave Wells

Buck Brady stopped whittling long enough to brush aside the damp lock of roan colored hair from his forehead and consider the two passengers on the Mohave Wells-Lone Mule stage. The girl did not look over eighteen; she had hair the color of spun gold, and a delicate oval face. Buck could not tell the color of her eyes at that distance, but he knew they were blue. She was wearing a blue dress.

The man was possibly less than twenty-five, rather delicate looking, and his hair was of nearly the same color as the girl’s.

Buck looked them over thoughtfully, a rather sad expression in his faded blue eyes. Buck was tall and lean, with a long face, high cheekbones and a mop of roan colored hair, one lock of which seemed always to hang down below the edge of his sombrero.

Buck was the sheriff of that county. He was slow moving, slow of speech. He was barely thirty-five and looked forty-five. He never seemed in a hurry, always deliberate, yet there were men in the Mohave who swore Buck could draw a six-shooter and shoot it straight faster than a rattler could strike. But Buck’s obsession was whittling. Hour after hour he would sit in the shade of his little office, peeling off dainty spirals from soft pine. Whittling and meditating.