CHAPTER 7

Mort tromped up the wooden steps to his office and flung himself into his chair with a sigh. Some  people, he thought.  No, not SOME people.  The Hoolahans.  Mort stared out the picture window in front of his big desk and watched as Clem Hoolahan and his crew-boss, Manuel, herded their stock back to the holding pen they maintained five miles north of the railroad pens.  Clem’s hand waving, middle finger extended, until they were out of sight.

Mort believed that every man-hour he invested in making sure the stockyard operated smoothly was time well spent.  To this end, he enforced the strict loading schedule that had been in place since the end of the range war in 1906, making sure the cowboys and sheepherders would never meet.  It was very simple: cattle on Mondays and Wednesdays,  Sheep on Tuesdays and     Thursdays, Fridays were for produce, pigs, and chickens.  Leave it to a Hoolahan to think he had the right to bring in fifty head of cattle on a Thursday.

The Hoolahan men had been the scourge of Jerkwater for seventy-four years, ever since 1899 when young Horace Hoolahan had wangled a seat on the town council and bargained with the Union Pacific Railroad behind everyone’s back.

The original plan had been to start a Farmer’s Line, a privately owned single rail, paid for and managed by the county’s herders and beet growers.  It was to run in a slight curve to the south of Jerkwater, the thinking being that, since it was easier to drove  livestock than it was to move beets, the switchback would be near the warmer side of the valley.   But Horace, as a parting gesture to the council who had kicked him out due to other improprieties, stole the  town’s charter and sold it to Union Pacific; thus creating a tax that was three times the amount the private line would have been.

As a further insult, Horace convinced the large company to alter the rail course so that it swung North, coming within one-hundred yards of a small canyon that the Hoolahans used as a holding corral, but cutting the town in half and earning the unending ire of the JCBC.  The feelings ran so  deep that, a scant two years later when a spring mudslide wiped out the Hoolahan’s corral and the the tracks, the Pastor of the JCBC, a Reverend Coldwood, changed his sermon about Divine Love and Forgiveness to one expounding on God’s Righteous Vengeance.