
I know the title has "Deadwood" in it, but don't get too excited. Very little of it takes place in the now-iconic South Dakota town—Chick Bowdrie just has to travel there to pick up a prisoner and return him to Texas where he's awaiting trial. So, indeed, most of this story
does take place south of Deadwood, in that Texas is, well, south of Deadwood, and that's where Bowdrie has to take his man.
Before that, though, there's a minor complication. On the stage into Deadwood, Bowdrie meets a young woman whose brother supposedly rode with the aforementioned prisoner in a recent hold-up that turned ugly. The woman is convinced her brother wasn't involved and is traveling to Deadwood to plead her case to the ringleader, hoping the man will tell her what she wants to hear. Bowdrie, ever sympathetic to the common criminal (he himself almost went that route), takes great interest in the woman's plan—if the guy he's supposed to haul back to Texas exonerates a man falsely implicated in a crime, then he might receive a more favorable sentence at trial.
The suspense in the story occurs on two fronts: 1) Will the prisoner admit the woman's brother wasn't involved? (Assuming he truly wasn't, that is.) And 2) How in the world is Bowdrie going to get this guy from South Dakota to Texas when the guy's got tons of friends who know where he's headed and will 100% certain be waiting to ambush the Ranger at some point? These questions linger until the last few pages of the story, and up to that point Bowdrie and his detainee develop a decent
Midnight Run-style rapport—one, albeit, that is mitigated by the fact that the prisoner freely admits he'll kill Bowdrie any legitimate chance he gets. Bowdrie understands this and negotiates the line between friendly repartee and "When it comes down to it, I
will mow you down!" with expert skill.
Bowdrie is increasingly evoking images of a sort of idealized version of Charles Bronson's
Death Wish character. In the first
Death Wish, Bronson transforms from a gentle white-guilt liberal to a chillingly self-assured vigilante—a process that reached ridiculously cartoonish heights by the third installment in that series. Bowdrie, on the other hand, keeps his more aggressive instincts in check, balancing them with an ever-present notion that, in many cases, a man who chooses the criminal life might just as easily have chosen the straighter alternative had things been slightly different. The Ranger also recognizes, though, that just because you might have committed one crime doesn't mean you're obligated to continue that behavior. Choice is always a part of the equation, and if you continue to choose poorly, Bowdrie will balance you out.
Of note:
- In the 50+ short stories I've read for this blog, L'Amour doesn't often go for too much pathos, but this story has some genuinely emotional moments toward the end. You'll have to read it to see what I'm talking about.
- Back to the Bowdrie/Bronson comparison, I realized they kind of look like each other. Spooky!

- Bowdrie has to take a pretty circuitous route from Wyoming to Texas to avoid his prisoner's friends along the trail. Here's a rough approximation of that route:

- "South of Deadwood" originally appeared in the October 1948 issue of Popular Western.

Rating: 3.5 spurs out of 5