A Jury of His Peers

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Orville R. Calhoun, part-time country lawyer and full-time dope smuggler, sat mounted on a horse as nervous as he was and waited under cover of a clump of scrub mesquite for the mule train. Even though he was paying plenty for protection he knew there was no such thing as safe, not in this business. No matter how big or how powerful you were there was always somebody ready to jump you. Double-dealing was the rule in this game.

Having the sheriff get popped with a ton of coke two weeks before at the provocation of one of his rivals didn’t promote complacency, and lately, Joe Schreiber, that agitator over in the county seat, had been getting more and more reckless with the accusations in his radical newspaper, the Tattletale. With the chokehold the dopers had on the local criminal justice system there wasn’t much chance he’d get anywhere, but any chance at all was too great a risk to take.

Though it was still way too early to expect to see any movement Orville raised his glasses and scanned the riverbank around the ford. Usually, he spotted the Mexican soldiers first. They almost always checked things out before sending the first mule across. Hiring them was expensive, but necessary, because while he could pay off the Border Patrol and the DEA only these soldiers had the muscle to discourage rival gangs from hijacking his shipments from the Mexican side.

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