The Disappearance of Jack Dawkin!

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth 

to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:       

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JACK DAWKIN!

Folks in Rawbone, Texas called him “The Mercantile Man.”  He owned and operated the general store, and provided all manner of goods and supplies for the town folk, ranchers and

farmers too who lived within a 40-mile radius.  He was always up and at his store mostly before anyone else in the town was astir, and this morning was no exception.  Rawbone was situated almost exactly at these latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates…. 32°54′26″N 96°38′7″W.

Dawn had begun painting the sky various shades of muted grey and blue, then as the morning moved closer to full daybreak, its canvas was splashed with brilliant shades of orange, gold and blue.  It was going to be a fine but hot summer day.  Buford Anders was a short, round man of probable Scandinavian ancestry, though he had no ideas why his forebears settled in this remote part of Texas, and where they’d truly been born.  He wore thick spectacles, and always dressed in white shirt, black string tie, garters at mid sleeve, a striped apron always tied around his abundant middle.  His balding head looked like a melon on which ice cream was scooped, then melted in the sun’s heat and dripping its color down its back and sides, creating a brown and white fringe behind and in front of Anders’ large, pendulous ears. 

A daily obsession just prior to its opening, he swept the front porch of his store.  The wooden surface lay exactly four steps above the surface of the road and just beneath the large hand-painted sign that read, “Buford Anders, Proprietor.”  Soon his customers would begin to appear, to climb those four steps, eager to book or make their purchases of coffee, beans, flour, kegs of nails and other goods, necessities for life on the plains of Texas.  

And then, a faint sound broke the morning calm and caused Anders to stop and turn his bulk toward the long road leading into the town.

“What the…,” he exclaimed, as he squinted and  followed the progress of the oncoming sound.  Slow and rhythmic clopping of hooves increased like the growing drama of an orchestra’s building crescendo.  “What the devil,” Anders murmured.  “I think I know that horse.  Why the deuce is it empty?  The saddle, those conchos…. That’s Cowboy Jack Dawkin’s horse and saddle.  Where the hell is Jack.  Where’s that guitar he always carries, tied to his bedroll?  Rifle’s gone too.  I gotta go get the sheriff.  No way a man as tough and able as Jack Dawkin should lose his horse.”

Wasn’t long before the sheriff appeared, and then several of Rawbone’s citizens as well, as the town began to wake up, loud and lively, horses and buckboards and foot traffic clamoring along its dusty roads.  “Can’t figure it,” the sheriff said.  “Could be Jack was waylaid by Indians, maybe road agents!?  I think I’d better gather up a few of the fellers, a posse like, and go out to look for him.  Aint like a man of his abilities to lose his horse, and himself.  And the geetar!  Where the hell’s that geetar ‘o his’n?”

“Weren’t he a gunslinger at one time, a gambler maybe….  Oh, I think I remembers!  A Indian fighter, too, maybe…?” Asked Hickory Hank Suggins to no one in particular.  Suggins was the town character, just raised like the dead from his drunken slumber and smelling like the horse stable he slept in and the cheap whiskey that kept him permanently inebriated.  Women stared at Suggins with their usual disgust and contempt, staying appropriately downwind.  “I better get to the saloon,” he mumbled, shambling away from the Anders store toward the other end of Rawbone’s main street.

Sheriff Hubert “Handlebars” Pickins wasted no time in deputizing a few of the locals, merchants and cow punchers, to ride with him in search of Jack Dawkin.  “Handlebars” owing to the enormous mustaches that divided his face into two distinct territories.  Among the posse members was Bearclaw Batisse, a half Potawatomi sometime army scout who could track a man straight to hell and back if he had to.  Batisse was a dark-skinned, fine looking man, strong and fit.  He could run miles effortlessly as another, lesser man might do merely walking a hundred yards.  His face wore the blending of his mixed parentage.  Women secretly admired him, his quiet dignity and dark good looks.    

Mavis Pickins, the sheriff’s only daughter had come to Anders’ store with the parson’s wife, Mrs. Mildred Bickel.  “I sure hope he’s not dead somewheres,” said Mavis, as the talk about Jack’s mysteriously riderless horse continued.  “He’s such a fine singer and guitar picker.  Handsomest man in north central Texas to boot!  He loved to sing about all things Texas, made

up many of the tunes he sang, I’m told.”

“Wish he were a church-goin’ feller,” said Mrs. Bickel.  “Would make such a fine addition to the choir in our little church…  if he’s isn’t deceased, of course.”  She sighed audibly, as did Mavis Pickins, each for a very different reason.  Both women watched as the sheriff and his posse rode away.  As the horsemen trotted off a great cloud of dust gathered behind and seemed to swallow them up, like a huge grey-brown beast devouring its prey.  

   

The posse headed in an easterly direction from where the horse had entered the town.  About five miles out, Batisse halted the horsemen, and then dismounted, peering at the ground.  On his knees he scanned the earth looking for signs, got up, sniffed the air and went round the other side of a giant granite boulder.  “There’s the remains of a campfire here,” Batisse announced to the posse, all the them still mounted.  “But I see no tracks leading to or from this campsite.  Can’t figure it.  It’s too unmarked, too clean.  No blood.  No trace of a struggle.  No tracks.  Darn’dest think I’ve seen in all my days of tracking man and beast.”  The men

searched everywhere they figured Jack could have been or gone, scouring a 10-mile area from all points around the center of Rawbone.  Nothing!  No signs, or clues.  No tracks.

In time the Sheriff, Batisse and the posse returned to the town, to their homes or shops or places of business.  Jack was plum gone, disappeared.  Jack’s disappearance happened in the year 1859.  Something like a year passed with no word or sign of Cowboy Jack Dawkin.  And then something strange, almost mystical began to occur in Rawbone.  Late at night, people swore they’d hear unmistakeable singing and guitar strumming, and the soft sounds of hoof beats moving from east to west along the main street of town.  

People said they heard the music of Texas each late night for a long time.  And each night some folks would dash to their windows to try to see the ghost of Cowboy Jack Dawkin, but no one ever saw anything but a star lit dusty road and stuff the wind blew by;  nothing more.

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In the passage of time, the railroad tracked well north of Rawbone, while the stage line traveled some 20 miles to the south of the old town.  Things would change eventually, but not for the people of Rawbone.  In time there wasn’t even the ghost of a town, not the bones or skeletons of town buildings.  The entirety of Rawbone seems to have been carried off on the shoulders of the wind, with nothing but dust and tumbleweeds left to memorialize a once proud and thriving community.

Some folks claim that Garland, Texas, settled for the most part in 1874 and incorporated as a city in 1891, is situated at the epicenter of what was once Rawbone.  In present day Garland there’s a fine community theatre.  Some of its players and crew members claim they can sometimes hear the strains of Texas-loving tunes, over the haunting and beautiful melodies of a finely tuned guitar, sung by the specter of a singing cowboy.   

Humbly Submitted -- 12-20-18 by Joel K.