The Sheriff

"The Sheriff" is the third track of Miss Helen's Weird West Cabaret.

## Lyrics

[HANK:]

And the sun comes up

Along the eastern desert

Where the wild men ride

Bring trouble in their wake

And there ain't much sense

When love and death come riding

Or the code you find to face yourself each day

Well we always known

Mama had seen trouble

In the days before

My sisters and I came

And she gave us each

Our first gun at seven

For when the wild side came to claim us too one day

And the sun comes up

Along the eastern desert

Where the Barnsdale gang

Is coming soon they say

And mama said, 'it's that gun

That will see you through til' morning

And your code is how you face yourself each day'

I was a teenage boy on a summer night

At a party neath the warm moonlight

When Becky Smith crushed my heart in her hand

I felt the tears well in my eyes

If other kids would see me cry

Their mocking would be more than I could stand

So off into forest there I ran

There's rumors 'bout a werewolf tribe

Outside the town and on that night

I found one laying there beneath the moon

Wounded, bleeding from her side

Half-girl, half-wolf and to my eyes

Such beauty to that point I'd never known

Three days I stayed and tended to her wounds

I never saw a mountain

I never saw a sky

I never saw a sight that looks

Quite like you look tonight

It's you who are the reason

The stars fall from the sky

Into my heart and light my soul

The way you look tonight

I never saw an angel

A sunrise or a light

That held a candle to you

Oh to you here on this night

If I live to be a thousand

Or had seen the birth of time

It would never take my breath away

The way you do tonight

Them summer nights then she would come

Outside my house and out I'd run

Boy and she-wolf running paw and hand

Together in the moonlit woods

The summer smells, her eyes of gold

Together in our magic midnight land

And one night there she made of me a man

I never saw a mountain

I never saw a sky

I never saw a sight that looks

Quite like you did tonight

It's you who are the reason

The stars fall from the sky

Into my heart and light my soul

The way you look tonight

I never saw an angel

A sunrise or a light

That held a candle to you

Oh to you here on this night

If I live to be a thousand

Or had seen the birth of time

It would never take my breath away

The way you do tonight

As we lay there naked, smiling, curled

Her furry ears picked up she heard

Some sounds of trouble somewhere far away

She said that 'it's the Barnsdale gang

they're at your place' and so we raced

In desperation but we took too long

My sisters and my mama they were gone

She caught their scent

We tracked them down

To a ranch outside of town

She told me she was sure they were alive

But 15 men were there and I

Had just one gun strapped to my side

She softly growled and told me not to mind

She said 'my love, I'll get you inside'

I would have wept upon her fallen body

My heart still aches for her to this day

But in that house, upstairs in that bedroom

Barnsdale had my mama locked away

So I burst in, my gun all locked and loaded

That man he had me mama in his bed

And he stared at me with a look I still remember

Before I filled him full of lead

My mama, she looked at me

And lit a cigarette

Glanced at the dead body

And took a nice long drag

'Well boy,' she said real slowly

Then sighed and shook her head

'You just killed your daddy

me and him we go way back'