TEXAS: Trouble in Buffalo Gap

Time was when high-spirited citizens of Buffalo Gap. Texas (pop. 335) let off steam by bucketing down the main street on their perkiest cow ponies. Then came automobiles—but little else changed. Everyone still barreled through town at a breakneck clip. The sheriff was twelve miles away in Abilene, as remote as he was in the old freewheeling frontier days of wagon trains and trail herds.

Last fall the law came to Buffalo Gap. Unwary townsfolk voted to incorporate so they could get a better school and a municipal water system. What they also got, as soon as their aldermen began to exercise their new powers, was a part-time city marshal. And as soon as he pinned on his star, the marshal began to enforce a 3O-m.p.h. speed limit. From hot-rodding teen-agers to throttle-tromp-ing adults, Buffalo Gap was outraged. The marshal got no cooperation; he could not make his summonses stick in court. And since his only salary consisted of a percentage of the fines he collected, he soon quit in disgust.

Flashlight & Six-Gun. Two more marshals came and went before Mayor C. P. Hendrix finally found a long, lean hangover from the old West named Floyd Earl. The new marshal took over like the hero of a TV shoot-’em-up. “This has been my home all my life,” says Earl. “I felt like I was just volunteering for military service.” With neither uniform nor police car to advertise his authority, Earl prowled his territory after dark, wigwagged at speeders with a flashlight, unlimbered his six-gun and shot at them when they failed to stop. Although he has yet to hit a car (or driver), Earl keeps trying to slow them down. When some local toughs threatened to run him out of town, he grabbed the ringleader and promised to pistol-whip him the length of Main Street if he talked back to the law again.

By then half the town was after the marshal’s hide. Last week they called a meeting and tried to get Earl fired. “He jumps out at cars and starts waving this flashlight at them,” said Mrs. Carl Hollowell. “If you were a stranger going through town, would you stop? Then he pulls a gun on you and starts shooting. The other day he was walking down the main street with a pistol and a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. I tell you, everybody’s life in town is in danger with that man loose.”

Curtain Lines. The mayor and the aldermen sided with Earl. He himself scuffled his cowboy boots in the dust, spat through tobacco-stained teeth and stayed on the job. So far he has only collected $9 in fines, but he has no intention of quitting his flashlight-and-pistol technique, or his job. “They threatened to kill me Saturday night,” he drawls. “At least three times they’ve tried to run me over when I was on foot. I’ll tell you, the only way I’m going to leave is if the town fires me, or if they carry me out to the family plot and bury me.”