Word: vail
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Both statements have lisped from the pale, thin lips of Bee County's Sheriff Robert Vail Ennis. And both statements have been roughly true. Day or night a lady could sashay unmenaced up Beeville's streets, past the cream stuccoed Kohler Hotel, the Blue Bonnet Café, and the two-story buff brick jail where Sheriff Ennis lives with his wife and daughter and keeps evildoers under lock...
...Tail Roarer. A Nacogdoches County boy who never finished high school, Vail Ennis high-tailed it for the oilfields when he was 16. He neither drank nor smoked, but he was a heller who would try to whup the pants off anybody he met. The Bee County sheriff cottoned to this abstemious rip-tail roarer and made him his chief deputy in 1941. In 1943, Vail killed his first man when he shot "his way out of a tight place while making an arrest. He was tried for murder, and acquitted. A year later he was elected sheriff. Fifteen days...
...July 1945, Vail was handed a court order, told to go out to a ranch five miles west of town and get Jesusa Rodriguez' two children. Jesusa had been divorced from Geronimo Rodriguez and was supposed to have the children for the next six months. They were living with Geronimo's old man, Felix...
...nearby Victoria County, a jury trying Vail for Felix's murder freed him in an hour and 35 minutes. Later he was acquitted of killing Domingo. The third case never came to trial. Back in Beeville, 21 leading citizens got up a petition for Vail's ouster. But six months later, Vail was reelected...
Deliberate Reloading. Last week he almost met his equal-but not quite. He went to the town of Pettus on a tip that two bum-check suspects might be going that way. They were. Vail got them in front of Houston Prewet's filling station, handcuffed them and pushed them into the station office while he made a phone call. One of them whipped a .38 revolver from a shoulder holster and put four slugs in Vail. That was his mistake...