Chapter Text
Buck's one and only brush with the right side of the law began and ended in Mason, back in '66, when Dick Mason was trying to found a town and Buck was trying to convince Miss Susanne to take a nice little stroll in the moonlight with him. Of course, Miss Susanne, being a bright and pretty young thing, saw right through Buck almost immediately (Buck managed to snag a kiss or two in a barn before Miss Susanne's revelation) and told him in no uncertain terms that she wasn't going to be seen stepping out with him until he'd cleaned himself up and got a proper job.
The cleaning weren't hard – Buck did enjoy a nice bath whenever he could afford it – but the job? Hell, he wasn't much good for nothing but riding and fighting, and he made a pretty good living being a hired gun at that. But Miss Susanne said that being a hired gun didn't count because that was no kind of a living and didn't bring in enough money to feed a family.
Anyway, Mason was offering $20 a month to act as the sheriff of his new little town, and Buck figured that shiny little star he got would work wonders to melt Miss Susanne's icy walls (it did, but not nearly as well as he'd hoped).
'Course Buck's luck being what it was, turned out Mason was too poor to buy a buffalo turd fire, let alone pay him for a month of work, and all the women in his proposed town were either old, married or ugly as sin. And even the ugly ones had beaus.
In the end, Buck lasted as the official sheriff of Mason for all of five days, before he had to leave (there was a misunderstanding relating to Buck's purely friendly attentions to Mason's pretty little daughter who'd rode into where the town was going to be the day before, like a breath of fresh air), two jumps ahead of Mason and his shotgun. But that was okay, because Buck had never been one to set down roots – especially somewhere where the roots were still being set – and besides, who else was going to accompany Miss Donna all the way to Carson City?