Being caught up in the middle of a bank robbery is not a very pleasant situation, especially when it’s your bank and you’re the only one there to face three armed robbers. Even more so, when one of the bandits has you flat on your back straddling you with a .44 revolver practically stuck up your nose. To make it worse, he growled, “I’m going to change your face, pretty boy!”

He was about to do just that when I told him, “You better look down first.” Surprised, he glanced downward and saw a two-barrel derringer pointing just inches away from his crotch.

“If you make just one tiny little move, I’m going to cause serious damage to your manhood. Now, I suggest you put that gun down right here alongside me.”

Naturally, he did just that. He got up off me when I suggested he do so.

I picked up his weapon and steered him toward the door to where his fellow thieves were waiting for him. When they saw me with his gun prodding his ear, they wheeled their horses and plunged down the dusty street like proverbial bats out of hell. I then marched their left-behind buddy toward the jail and Sheriff Bull Matthews. I quickly told the lawman what had happened and that the prisoner very likely could tell who the others were and where they might be headed. That turned out to be the case and a quickly organized posse not only nabbed the fleeing robbers but almost got to their hideout before they did. This resulted in the recovery of my missing funds and provided a feather in the hat of Matthews.

If any lawman ever deserved favorable attention as he followed the line of duty it would be Bull Matthews. With him it was pretty much what was right was right and anything else had to be brought into the proper way of doing things. His size helped. He must have been six feet-two or so, with a rock-solid body that probably scaled in around 230 pounds. His arms looked like they were made out of oak and I remember one time when he broke up a saloon brawl by kind of reaching down and literally picking up one of the battlers by the scruff of the neck and, holding him at arm’s length, stated flatly, “That’ll be enough.” The half-drunk cowpoke hadn’t had his fill of punching the other guy around and he snarled, “Oh, yeah,” and took a swing at the sheriff. The blow bounced off his chiseled jaw and Bull shook him like a rag doll and quietly repeated, “That’ll be enough, I said.”

The message got through to the rowdy ranch hand this time, drunk or not, and he subsided sensibly when he finally realized what he was up against. All this time, Bull hadn’t raised his voice or made a threat but you could tell by the glint in his eyes he wasn’t about to put up with any more foolishness. It was that sort of action that kept getting him elected. Throughout the west lawmen would come and go, either because they didn’t stick to the letter of the law or because they ran up against unscrupulous citizens or high-binding ranchers who established little area kingdoms of their own. As for his name, I never did hear what he’d been christened but Bull he was and Bull he remained, and never was a name better served.

I did eventually learn why he stuck so doggedly to the straight and narrow path but the information had to come from somewhere else because he never uttered a word about it. Seems his daddy was a train-robber, not much of a background for a sheriff, but it was all part and parcel of what made him what he was. His old man rode high for a while but eventually the odds caught up with him and he was gunned down while trying to pull off a daring raid on a train making its way through a desolate middle part of Kansas Territory. It appeared everything was going his way but an organized group of lawful citizens had somehow gotten wind of the proposed robbery. It happened through the area where farmers had used limestone posts for their fences and the waiting riders had dug in behind hillocks near the tracks on a rise that meant the engine would be slowing down enough for the attackers to catch up and board the baggage car. Well, the intended theft didn’t work out when the informal posse stormed out of their hiding places with their horses kicking up clouds of dust in the ruggedly arid farmland. Bull’s dad tried to shoot his way out of the ambush but the guns outnumbered him and he was killed. His mama hadn’t known about her husband’s sideline and not long after she died from what everyone figured was a broken heart. Bull, or whatever name they called him back then, decided the rest of his life was going to be devoted to putting her shame to rest. He was just a young one but was already growing into the man he was going to be. Early on, he put in a stint as a deputy under a lackadaisical sheriff and figured he could do a better job himself than the duly-elected character. In spite of his shortcomings, though, the sheriff was pretty well entrenched in a relatively law-abiding town and citizens didn’t see any particular reason to make a change. So, after deciding that was the way things were going to be, Bull decided to head out and do things his own way.