The Flour Sack

Twelve to fifteen shots, about nine in the morning on the Fourth of July, eighteen eighty-three, and if you'd been a guest at the hotel in Grand Lake you'd have gone right on with your coffee. More fireworks. Then a man came running up the road, crying that Commissioner Weber had been shot. Grand Lake's the town at the south end of this valley. In eighteen eighty-one it took the county seat away from Hot Sulphur Springs, and the fight split the county's mining camps down the middle. By that Fourth of July the commissioners had moved to throw out the sheriff. The guests ran down the road. By the hotel's old ice house lay Barney Day, a commissioner, with his head in the lake and a bullet through his heart. Out in the road lay a man with a flour sack over his head, holes cut for his eyes and mouth. The bullet had come so close it burned the cloth. He was recognized afterward as John Mills, chairman of the county commissioners. The chairman of the board, in a mask. Three commissioners and their clerk were dead when it was over. It was charged that Barney Day ran for help to the sheriff, Charles Royer, and that Royer pulled his gun and shot him. Royer, they say, called Barney Day his best friend in the park. Before that summer was out he took his own life in Georgetown, and the story printed nearly fifty years on has him telling a liveryman, just before, "He haunts my thoughts. I see him there right before me, smiling at me like a friend." The deputy, Bill Redman, was gone. A body turned up in Utah with the name William Redman pinned to the saddle, and they say it wasn't him. Men were tried, and no one was convicted. Five years on, the county seat went back to Hot Sulphur Springs anyway. So if you're in Grand Lake some Fourth of July, and somebody's touching off fireworks down by the water, do one thing for me. Count the shots.