The Savagers of Cutthroat Canyon E-Book

Clay Houston Shivers

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

When Abe Kilhoe woke up, he had no idea he'd be shot in the gut before dinner.

It happened anyway, and the scoundrel who did it fled into the desert. Now, he's in for a world of hurt. Abe's brother is the legendary Texas Ranger, Frank Kilhoe, and it so happens that he is friends with the legendary Sheriff Curly Barnes and his two loyal deputies.

Soon, the fugitive will be getting a lot more justice than he bargained for.

Leseprobe

THE SAVAGERS OF CUTTHROAT CANYON

SILVER VEIN CHRONICLES BOOK 2

CLAY HOUSTON SHIVERS

CONTENTS

A Note On The Narrative That Follows

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

A Last and Final Word from the Author

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2022 Clay Houston Shivers

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Chelsey Heller

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

For my dad, who made me a reader. And for papa and granny, who bought me my first pair of cowboy boots and gave me a rattlesnake rattle as a “toy.”

A NOTE ON THE NARRATIVE THAT FOLLOWS

This is the third time I’ve written what you are about to read. The first draft I sort of made a bunch of things up to make myself look good. But my wife Sally, even at her advanced age, even with eyes that basically just take up space in her head doing her no good at all, wouldn’t have it. She reminded me that the purpose of writing these chronicles was to set the record straight. So I rewrote the whole dang thing. And the editor, some guy in New York who puts on a suit just to go to the bathroom at night, declared it to be deadly boring.

So for this version, I did what I didn’t want to do, which was to tell the unvarnished truth, warts and all. There are entire pages of what is to come in which I look and act like a useless pile of old horseshoes. (These, not surprisingly, are my editor’s favorite parts.) Why, sometimes I am not even the hero! The myth of the Old West is a strong one, filled with heroes and villains who loom large over the landscape even now, thanks to the outrageous imaginations of writers who have never wandered west of the Hudson River. And most of it bears no relation to reality.

So this here is the true reality of that time, the unvarnished and embarrassing I-can’t-believe-I’m-putting-this-down-on-paper truth. You’re welcome.

Curly Barnes

August 1927

1

BLACK BEN

Black Ben sat at the poker table of the Oriental Saloon in Amarillo with his back to the wall. There were three other guys at the table. Some guy named Jake sat to his right. On his left was a drunk rancher named Clem who seemed to leave the table to get a drink more often than he played a hand. Directly across from Ben, with his back to the room, was Abe. He was a cautious player, but shrewd, and he slowly but steadily won. He was Ben’s main competition.

The saloon was lively even for a Thursday afternoon in winter. Maybe the saloon’s warmth had something to do with that, Ben thought. It was warm enough in the saloon, what with the fire going and the bodies giving off heat, that Ben didn’t even need a coat. He was wearing all black, as was his custom. It was how he distinguished himself.

He was mostly toying with the men at the table, waiting for his chance to score big. He’d been waiting for a certain hand, the odds of which were not good. Specifically, he needed three club cards. Once he had them, he could use the two clubs he had up his left sleeve. He’d read about the move in a book, which, Ben thought now, didn’t make much sense in real life. As a gambling strategy, it was simply too time-consuming.

There was a commotion at the long wooden bar. Men were smoking pipes and cigars, and sat or stood at the bar three deep. Whores and bar girls worked the room, sitting on laps, giving the grubby ranchers and starved-for-attention cow-boys a cheap thrill. Every once in a while, a cow-boy followed one of the women up the stairs, where rooms were available by the hour. The bar was loud, but Ben could sometimes feel the ceiling above him shake briefly, and he could hear the theatrical moans of the whores. There was no way, Ben knew, that the noises could be anything other than acting. The men in the saloon, with perhaps the obvious exception of himself, hadn’t bathed or given much thought to cleanliness in general.

“I was standing there!” one of the cow-boys at the bar proclaimed, cutting through the saloon’s noise. He said this while shoving the man next to him, who was obviously very drunk, and so fell into the man on the other side of him. That man then took exception, and pushed him back into the man who had pushed him in the first place.

Abe dealt a new hand of cards, ignoring the hubbub behind him.

Ben took the first card he was dealt and lifted up the corner to take a look: eight of clubs. The next card he got was a three of diamonds, followed by the two of clubs, queen of hearts, and seven of spades. He handed back the three of diamonds and seven of spades for two new cards, and he got back the six of clubs and two of spades. He finally had the three club cards he was looking for. His plan, Ben realized, might actually work!

“Get out of my space or I’ll geld you!” the cow-boy yelled, pushing the drunk man harder this time. The man tottered from the bar and lost his balance, bonking into the back of Abe’s chair.

“Calm down!” Abe shouted, turning his head.

Ben looked at Jake and Clem and saw they were also distracted by the drunk cow-boy. So Ben made his move, a flawless switch, meaning he now had a two of spades and queen of hearts up his sleeve and a handful of clubs in his hand. A flush. Nobody could beat that, Ben figured. He was proud of himself, and had to keep that pride off his face.

He looked across the table and saw Abe was no longer distracted by the drunken cow-boy. Instead, he was staring right at Ben.

“What’s that you just did?” Abe asked.

Ben didn’t know what to say, so he just acted as though Abe hadn’t asked him a question. But that didn’t work because Abe said, “Lift up those black sleeves of yours.”

Jake and Clem were now giving him hard looks as well. Ben had read enough about the frontier to know he was very close to being in bad trouble. He also knew he couldn’t show the men at the table what was up his sleeves. Next to stealing a man’s horse or his wife, cheating at cards was about the worst thing one could do to another fella. But it was only a problem when that fella got caught.

Abe put his Colt Navy on the table and said, “Boy, you best hurry up and show me what you’re up to. I’m losing my patience.”

“I got a flush is all,” Ben said, laying his cards on the table. The three men at the table looked at the cards. “I reckon you’re just sore about it.”

“Dang,” Clem said. “Today’s definitely not my day.” He threw his cards down in disgust.

“You didn’t come by them cards the right way,” Abe said menacingly. He picked up his gun.

Ben didn’t even think. He put his right hand under the table and flicked his wrist, and the tiny derringer sprang into his hand and he pulled the trigger in Abe’s direction. The gun made a high-pitched popping noise, but it was lost in the general noise of the saloon.

“Dang,” Abe said, looking at Ben questioningly. Ben had the weird thought that he looked like a confused dog. Abe put his head on the table as if he was taking a nap.

While Jake and Clem looked confused, Ben stood up and grabbed up the money in the middle of the table and stuffed it into his hat.

“You’ve made a bad mistake,” Jake said. “That’s Abe Kilhoe you just shot. His brother is Frank Kilhoe, the Texas Ranger.”

“Don’t a one of you make a move,” Ben said, trying not to air out his insides and hoping they didn’t see his shaking hands. He quickly walked out of the saloon before they could raise an alarm. Once he got outside, he started running.

2

It was a tough year for Silver Vein. More and more of the miners were realizing they would never find silver in the ground. Instead, they were broke and had basically tossed their lives away on a roll of the dice that would never pan out—and they were not remotely happy about it. Many of them became great customers of mine as I own the saloon (Curly's Saloon) in town. There’s another saloon, if you can call it that, and we’ll get to that ugly business shortly. Just as when someone lands a great fortune, when a person realizes the entirety of their one and only life has been one big waste, that at every opportunity, they took a wrong turn—they often turn to the drink. And as long as they don’t puke up their insides on my bar, I let them.

Aside from disillusioned miners, bad men and lowlifes and degenerates and rustlers and scoundrels and bushwhackers and scalawags and brigands and bank robbers and train robbers and just plain robbers of all shapes and sizes were migrating west from the southern states like a disease. With a set of skills left over from the Civil War, skills that mostly had to do with killing folks or blowing folks up or setting folks and their houses on fire, they often looked to the West to put these skills to use.

Silver Vein was a town full of people who hoped they had fled far enough from the bad things in their lives to relax and feel safe. They were attracted to the town because of its peaceful reputation. That, and the silver that was (wasn’t) growing out of the ground like daisies. The citizens of Silver Vein had already had their fill of violence and wanted no more to do with it. So seeing even the occasional ruffian wander into town was enough to put people on edge. A stranger that wasn’t a miner or a local rancher could cause some people to faint straight away.

In January, I was officially voted the town sheriff. The old sheriff, Jim Shepland, a just and great man, had given me the badge from his chest as he lay dying in a puddle of his own blood. And while the town had accepted me as its new sheriff, having been personally chosen by the old sheriff, it wasn’t official until the town voted on it. Only the newspaperman Pap Kickins, editor of The Daily Silver Vein, and Flody, who runs the livery, voted against me. In the case of Flody, I know this because he showed me his ballot in which he simply wrote: “Not Curly.” Pap Kickins wrote an editorial in which he suggested that he himself should be sheriff. His self-endorsement was something that nobody could scarcely believe. He was old, could barely see, was almost always drunk, and had grown all but deaf; he walked about town carrying an ear trumpet in order to hear what people said.

At the time of the vote, I was known as a famous hero and lawman who had freed the town of Silver Vein from the depredations of the depraved rancher Torp Mayfair and his hired henchmen and shootists. The writers back East had elevated me from a saloonkeeper caught up in extraordinary circumstances, which is what I was, to one of the West’s great lawmen—right up there with Wild Bill and Bat Masterson and that no good pimp Wyatt Earp. I was famous wherever highly imaginative dime novels were sold. People knew my name in New York City, Paris, and San Francisco.

I would be lying if I said being famous didn’t go straight to my head. Because it did. I started believing I was the person they said I was instead of the person I actually was. I pranced about the town like a prize rooster, smoking cigars and curating a long, thick, blazingly red handlebar mustache. At one point, I tried to wear a pair of guns in a sash, like Wild Bill, but could never make it work. It’s a tricky thing, wearing a sash, and when you stick guns in one, it tends to ride down the waist and impede one’s walk. And if you forget you’re wearing the sash and the guns, and you sit down, you can squash your nether parts.

When reporters came into town, I’d take them to Kate’s restaurant and talk a blue streak about my own heroics—most of which were things I had read about myself in newspapers from back East that had made their way west—before they ever even asked a question.

I was obnoxious is what it was. One day, Baxter and Merle, my deputies and friends, sat me down and gently let me know I had turned into an asshole.

“Dang Curly, it’s like we don’t hardly know you no more,” Baxter said. I immediately threatened to arrest him for slander, even though he hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true.

“And what’s with all that grease in your hair?” Merle asked. I had taken to slicking down my hair because some artist back East had put me on the cover of a book with my hair slicked back, and I felt obligated to grease up my hair in case some pilgrim showed up looking for it. In short, I had lost my damned mind. I gave my friend Johnny Ringo all manner of grief for feeding the dime store writers what they wanted to hear. And here I was, doing the same thing. It is a heady thing, being a hero, especially if you’re like me and afraid of just about everything. If the town doctor, old Spack Watson, liked to get high on opium and drooled the day away like a leaky plant, I was getting high on my own press.

I immediately discounted Baxter and Merle’s criticisms and walked home. I lived above my saloon with my wife, Sally, and Bart the dog. Sally had been my roommate before we’d fallen in love and gotten married; the only real change in our lives was that we now shared the same straw bed and I no longer had to cook for myself and had therefore gained some inches in the waist. (I also got fussed at if I came up from the saloon after one too many toots of whisky, even though getting drunk was part of my job as a purveyor of whisky.) We also had impressive amounts of sex with one another; something we didn’t do as roommates because I am a gentleman and didn’t push myself on her or use any of my natural charm.

“Do I look ridiculous?” I asked Sally, running my hand through my slick hair and wiping some extra grease on my pants leg.

“Yes,” Sally said, but she was smiling.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I picked up Sally’s hand mirror and gave myself a look over.

“I thought you would figure it out eventually, or someone would come along and let you know. I figured you were just going through a phase and you would work your way through it.”

“Baxter and Merle accused me of being an asshole,” I said.

“You’re not an asshole, Curly. You’re wonderful. You’re just affected by your fame is all. If it makes you feel better, I never did believe you were anything like the cartoon they say you are in those silly books.”

“You don’t see me as one of the West’s great heroes?”

“Not by a dang mile.” I could see she was trying hard not to laugh.

I didn’t know what to say to all that. Luckily, Bart the dog walked in and propped his furry little paws up on my leg and looked up at me with his little brown dog eyes that seemed to indicate I was still his hero. It helped that I kept jerky in my pocket. An appreciation for jerky was one of the things the two of us had in common.

If it weren’t for my habit of having jerky in my pocket, I never would have met Bart. Bart was a little black-and-white dog I stole a year earlier from Torp Mayfair, who was by then tortured and killed by Comanches and no longer in any position to take care of a dog, even a small one. I was sleeping outside in the dirt at the time, and Bart attacked my pocket and the jerky in there, and our bond was formed.

“Well,” I said, “I believe Bart thinks me a hero.”

“Bart thinks you’re a food dispenser.”

“That too,” I agreed, scratching under the dog’s little white beard. “Dang, Sally, I need to get this grease out of my hair.”

“Thank heaven,” Sally said. Then she came up, put her arms around me, and gave me a hug. She doles out lots of hugs. It’s almost as if we were making up for all the time we’d wasted as roommates and pretended we only thought of one another as friends. Sally liked to nestle her nose up under my neck and kiss on me there, then watch my face turn red as a tomato. I am helpless to stop myself from blushing under such circumstances. Half the women in town made sport of my blushing response, and would often wink at me or blow me a kiss just to see it.

Sally drew me a hot bath and I dunked myself in the water. She helped me degrease my hair. It occurred to me once the grease was out that I hadn’t seen anyone in Silver Vein with grease in their hair. Maybe the undertaker, Steve Pool, would grease his hair if he thought it would help him make some money. Mostly, I figured, it must be a look popular back East and some writer had added it into their story because they didn’t know no better.

“I got my hair back,” I said, running my hands through it and enjoying the fact that it wasn’t slippery.

“I’m very happy about it,” Sally said.

“I suppose I better get back to being the sheriff,” I said. “Baxter and Merle’s criticism had me feeling low. I don’t feel low no more.”

“Good.”

“All I have to do to raise my spirits is come home and look at you,” I said.

“Oh, please,” Sally said, rolling her eyes.

“It’s true,” I said, because it was. “I like coming home to you and Bart. I can walk up the stairs and through the door, and I feel good almost immediately.”

“It is pretty special,” Sally said. “I never would have imagined it even a year ago.”

So we hugged some more, and did some other things you don’t need to know about, and then I made my way to the jail.

3

Our first jail was destroyed when Torp and his hired assassins from the Triple R ranch came in one night and broke their fellow outlaws out, burning the jail to the ground in the process. The new jail was larger, with more cells, and I took great pride in its existence. It was a symbol of the triumph of good over evil, and a continuing of the peaceful legacy of the great Jim Shepland.

On the wall above my desk, among all the WANTED! and REWARD! posters, was the dried-out scalp of old Torp Mayfair. It was nailed up there like a trophy, another symbol—one of seeing justice served. I put it there as a reminder, but also as a threat. This is what happens to people who break the law, it told people. This could be your dried-out, scraggly old scalp. Of course, I have to admit it was also a little on the creepy side. Sometimes, I would look at the scalp and feel like it was watching me back, like there was some leftover evil in it from the man who had once owned it. And I would reach under my shirt and rub on the eagle feathers there to protect me from any radiating bad intentions left in that son of a bitch’s rotten scalp.

I didn’t do a lot when I sat in the jail, aside from sitting in it. The town would sometimes go days and even a week without me having to do much of anything at all. But when something happened, it was usually bad, and then me and Baxter and Merle would have to jump to. So I had to be patient as a long afternoon of nothing would slow to a crawl, and I would get ants in my pants, and start craving a belt of whisky. But I couldn’t do that because if something actually did happen, I would need my wits about me.

I’d had a lot more practice at being the sheriff since I’d first got started as a deputy, and I’d become a great fan of the sudden pre-emptive whomp. What I would do is, when someone was getting to feeling like a scrap, I would just turn my Colt around and hammer them over the head with it. The great thing about being a sheriff is you get a license to whomp on people when they deserve it.

It’s harder than it looks, to whomp someone. The first person I whomped in the head, he just turned and looked at me, and I looked at the bottom of my Colt Navy to see what was wrong with it, and if Baxter hadn’t been there, I might have gotten whomped myself. The next time I whomped someone, I made sure to give them a good solid whack—and it worked. The person slumped to the ground and took to snoring. Now, I considered myself quite the whomper. Right up there with the best of them.

The only thing that happened on this particular day, a Wednesday, was that Deedee Yonder stopped by to ask me if I was planning on voting for Pap Kickins for mayor. Deedee Yonder was a schoolteacher, but given to violent tendencies, and she carried all manner of weapons on her person, including a knife she’d lashed to her leg that was so long, it made her limp. I was always a little unnerved by her presence. She gave the impression that she was holding on to reality by a thread, and the wrong word or gesture could render her insane. She wasn’t very tall, and she was quite skinny, but a tameless ferocity oozed out of her all the same.

“We don’t even have an old mayor, or any mayor of any kind, and we never have,” I pointed out. "So why do we need any mayor at all?"

“Pap thinks we need a mayor and he’s written an editorial on why it should be him.”

I shook my head. “I’m not voting for any mayor. All they do is make speeches and smile all the time. Maybe kiss a baby now and then. Mayors are dumb.”

“I ain’t voting for no Pap Kickins, not for nothing, but if I had to vote for a mayor, if the idea of needing a mayor doesn’t go away, I was thinking Frank could serve.”

Frank Yonder was Deedee’s husband and the town’s minister, and nobody but the very desperate ever went to listen to his fiery words as he had a tendency to yell at people and slam his Bible and point at people while frothing at the mouth. He would do it for hours on end if you let him. The best thing he did came at the very end of his unhinged sermons, when his eyes would roll up into the back of his head and he would start jabbering in some unknown language before flopping to the ground like he’d been struck by lightning. But it came so late in his sermons, that usually there was nobody left to see it. Deedee liked to whomp on Frank whenever she felt he got out of line, which was quite often, judging by his bruises. Frank also had a bit of a temper and a chip on his shoulder, and thought just about everyone he ever met was at least on some small level possessed by the devil. Not the right temperament for a mayor. Even a needless mayor, in my opinion.

“Well…” I said, thinking desperately of a way out of answering, hoping someone would come barging in with news of an argument at Eli Turner’s Mercantile, maybe a fight between a couple of miners arguing over a pick-axe. I would have even been okay with a stabbing, so long as it wasn’t deadly.

“I suppose it would all depend on whether or not it was truly necessary and also what words were said by various parties as to their intentions for the town.”

“My God, Sheriff, maybe you should run for mayor, as slippery as that tongue of yours is. That was spoken like a life-long member of the legislature if ever anything was! Just you think about it! Frank is a good man! He just needs something to do.”

“I will,” I said, praying for her to leave, then up and asking her a question anyway. “How is little Tommy getting along?”

Tommy Yonder had been quite a handful when he was rescued from a deadly raid on his original parents’ homestead. The Johnsons were killed by Torp Mayfair and his minions, who tried to make it look like they were attacked by the Comanches. The Yonders had been kind enough to adopt little Tommy Johnson and raise him as their own.

“Little Tommy isn’t quite the hellion he was, but he’s got a short fuse and can fly off the handle at the slightest provocation.” A description, I noted to myself, that could be said for the Yonders themselves.

“Well, he’s a damn sight less of a nuisance than he used to be,” I said. “The next time I go visit Scout, maybe he can tag along.”

Scout was a teenage Comanche boy I'd taken into my home, which didn't work out at all, but he and Tommy Yonder had become fond of each other.

“I expect he’d like that, Sheriff.”

“Well, I've got to get on,” I said.

“Think on what I said now,” Deedee said before limping off.

As she hobbled down Main Street, I could see miners and ranchers, and even some of the horses, scrambling to give her a wide berth.

That night, I was working my main job as saloonkeeper at my saloon. I caught Micah Poom red-handed sneaking a belt of the good stuff, which I kept hidden under the bar behind several decoy bottles. When I came downstairs, he fumbled about and knocked two of the bottles to the floor, where they rolled about.

“Why, Curly,” Micah said, “I was just cleaning some of these bottles under the bar that don’t never get no attention.”

“That’s very nice of you, Micah,” I said. “They don’t get much attention because they’re under the bar, where people can’t see them because I have hidden them there quite on purpose.”

“Still ought to be shiny,” Micah said, letting loose with a hiccup.

“Your job is over there on the piano, unless I say otherwise.”

You had to be hard on old Micah. And you had to watch him like a hawk unless you wanted all your whisky to make its way into his belly.

Micah tottered over to the piano and had to grasp at it to keep from falling over.

“How long you been cleaning the bottles?” I asked.

“Oh…not long.”

I was about to respond, maybe throw something at him, but then Doc Watson came through the flapping doors. The only time Spack Watson was sober was never. He dosed himself with his own medication throughout the day, often spending entire hours staring into complete oblivion, drool snaking out of his mouth and off his chin like a cascade. But then, when it comes to doctors, beggars can’t be choosers, and to his credit, he did sober up whenever confronted with a grievous wound.

“I would, thanks,” the doctor said. I hadn’t asked him anything, but the doctor probably hadn’t been addressing me anyway, and so I put a belt of whisky in front of him. Regardless of what he said, that’s what he wanted.

He quickly swallowed it down, so I gave him another one, which he also sloshed down.

“Is that you, Curly?” The doctor was coming around.

Baxter and Merle came in and went to the billiard table so they could get on each other’s nerves and maybe take to whomping each other. Then Bernie Waco and Tack Randle wandered in. Bernie was one of the biggest ranchers in the area, now that Torp was gone. He'd swooped up some of Torp's cows, those that weren’t claimed by their original owners. Torp didn’t go in for fair play and had gotten most of his land and cattle by stealing it. Tack Randle used to work for Bernie, but now, he had a spread of his own, part of what had been auctioned off from the old Triple R. They were friends and rivals, and sometimes Bernie would have a few too many and talk about how grieved he was by Tack abandoning him for his own spread.

“Curly, do us a favor and make it rain,” Bernie said.

“I might be able to make it snow,” I said. “Reckon it’s too cold for rain. But snow is just another form of water.”

“Snow is no good. Rain is what’s going to get the grass to growing,” Bernie said as if he were talking to a toddler. The land had been drying up for some time, and rain was always precious. My snow remark didn’t cheer them up any.

“I’ll pass your request on to management,” I said. I gave them both toots of whisky and took one for myself as well.

"It's quiet," Bernie said, looking around the bar. “Not like before.”

He was talking about Eli Turner’s Meteor Hole. It was a giant hole in the ground created when one of the town’s old coots, one with a fondness for dynamite, accidentally blew himself up when he stepped on one of his own booby traps. But Ely Turner was clever, and along with Pap Kickins, they marketed the hole as being created by a meteor. People came from as far away as Amarillo and beyond to pay their two bits to look down into a pit full of dirt. And they got thirsty. And for a while, the bar was packed day and night. The novelty had worn off, however, as word got out that a hole in the ground is just what it sounds like, and the weather had turned cold, and now the town was back to its pre-meteor normalcy.

“Tuesdays are usually quiet,” I said, perhaps a tad defensively.

“I suppose,” Bernie said cautiously.

“I like it slow myself,” Tack Randle said. “Not as much smoke to contend with. Don’t have to wait as long for a drink. Can hear Micah tickling them keys over there. Fewer arguments and fights. Less puke.”

I liked Tack. He was big as a bull, with a huge bald head and a scar that ran down his face along the left side. Looks aside, he was a very happy guy, and he was going out of his way to put a good face on what I knew was a problem.

The truth was, for the first time since I’d moved to Silver Vein, I had competition in the whisky department. There was a new tented bordello and saloon outside of town, and it was proving to be quite an attraction for the miners and ranchers and cow-boys looking to let off steam. Also, a lot of people had come into the saloon on any given night to gawk at Sally, being as she was very pretty. But now that we were married, she spent her time upstairs with Bart, which meant she was no longer around to be gawked at. With her gone, a lot of the local drunks and perverts had taken up with either not coming in at all or coming in far less frequently.

Much as I hated to admit it, Bernie was right: the saloon was less lively than it had been, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me grumpy.

“You could make us part owners of your saloon,” Tack suggested.

“I could do what?” I asked, not sure I’d heard correctly.

“The way Fenton does it, he takes in investors, which allows him to sell his whisky at a lower price than you do,” Tack said, not knowing he was steering his boat into dangerous waters.

“Hold on a minute. Fenton makes people invest in the whisky? How the hell does that work?”

“Well, he doles out samples, you see, and, um, then, when you sample something you like, you give him a down payment—"

“—a down payment—"

"—and then he orders the whisky you want at a rate that, frankly Curly, might be why it's so slow in here."

I've been around saloons most of my life, and this whole investor business made no sense to me.

"So, Tack, let's see if I've got this straight. Fenton gives out samples of whisky, and then people give him money in advance for the whisky they want?"

"That's about it, Curly," Tack nodded. "Only reason I'm here is on account of I've used up all my free samples. You're only allowed two, you see, and—"

"Tack, I appreciate your honesty. To think, in all the long years we've known each other, that I never got around to giving you a toot on the house, why, it's a shame!" I slammed down a shot of whisky in front of Tack loud enough to make Micah jump.

"Say now—" Tack said, suddenly wary, no doubt not used to seeing me when I've got my Irish up.

Then it hit me. "Tack, what is to prevent Fenton from taking the investments for everyone's whisky and just up and leaving town? You ever think of that? Cheers!" I took a shot of whisky and belted it down, then filled my glass back up again.

I turned away from them, chewing over Fenton and his foul whisky scheme, when I saw there was some new cow-boy at the end of the bar tapping his foot to Micah on the piano. I walked over and asked him what he was about.

“Rye whisky, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure thing, friend. Two bits.” When he reached into his pocket for his money, I noticed his gun belt.

“I’ll have to take them guns,” I said pointing at the large sign behind the bar that read: “Please Surrender Guns On Arrival. You Can Have Them Back When You Leave.”

“Fuck that,” the man said. “Don’t nobody take my guns.”

“I will,” I said.

“The hell you will. What’s to say I don’t—"

One thing I learned from the great Jim Shepland, as well as from my friend the Texas Ranger Hap Morgan, is you don’t spend a lot of time arguing with an asshole. I walked around the bar and took the gun belt off the man, who was now on the floor, flopping about like a fish and howling to wake the moon.

“You can have these back when you leave,” I said.

“Ow!” he said.

“Aw, you’ll be okay. I only half-whomped you.”

“I’d say that’s assault, mister! Damned if it isn’t.”

“It ain’t,” I said.

“Who are you to say?”

So I opened my coat up to let him see the sheriff's badge, which took what fight was left right out of him. His shoulders sagged, and he looked around, thought it all over, and then settled down and leaned against the bar, set to sipping on his whisky. That’s the magic of whisky. People like it so much, they can even forget getting whomped on.

I walked back over to Tack and Bernie.

“Curly, I can’t hardly believe this new version of yourself,” Bernie said. “You ain’t the same Curly of two years ago. That one would have gone and hid under the bar.” Bernie had no idea how right he was. In fact, I had built a secret compartment behind the bar specifically to hide in should there be any bouts of gunplay. But I never used it because when there was gunplay, I was too terrified to remember I had a hiding place. All of that was before I became the sheriff because a sheriff can’t go hiding himself when trouble pops up.

“The old me wouldn’t have even asked about the guns or I would have asked, and if the fella refused to surrender them, I’d have let him be. But I wasn’t the sheriff then.”

What I didn’t say was that when the old sheriff was killed, and I had to live up to the responsibility he’d entrusted me with, it did indeed change me. I wasn’t quite so happy-go-lucky, but I also wasn’t the coward I had been, either. Which is not to say I didn’t still get scared.

The new me was also less willing to put up with foolishness. I’d say I dished out maybe six or seven whomps a week. I didn’t hit people so hard their brains turned to mush, but just enough to distract a fella long enough to either disarm them or shove them out the doors into the street or walk them to the jail.

Aside from taking the cow-boy’s guns, the night proceeded like usual, slow and steady, but dammit, never busy. And then, old Ely Turner showed up. Ely didn’t come in too often because whisky costs money, and old Ely didn’t believe in spending money, only in making it. He also didn't recognize other people as human beings. He only saw them as opportunities to make money.

Ely owned the Mercantile and the hotel and the meteor hole that wasn’t a meteor hole and the new bank. He had even tried to buy me out a time or two, though the prices he’d offered were insultingly low. Sally worked at his hotel serving up hot water for customers that wanted baths. I know for a fact he paid her hardly anything.

“You want your usual?” I asked. His usual was a belt of moonshine of such questionable character, it had made some men piss themselves. I know for a fact it had gunpowder as one of its ingredients, and tobacco, and who knows what all else. I kept it because it was extremely cheap, and cheap people needed to drink, too.

“No. Curly, I’m here to talk to you about this whole mayor nonsense Pap’s got stirred up.”

“I heard,” I said. “Deedee visited me earlier talking her husband up.”

“I don’t see why we even need a mayor,” Ely said. “Seems to me things are just fine the way they are.”

“I agree,” I said. “I expect it’s because old Pap didn’t get elected sheriff.”

“Of course he didn’t get elected sheriff! He’s a doddering old coot! He’s always misplacing his ear trumpets, you know. Can’t hardly keep them in stock and he's the only one that buys them. He bought so many ear trumpets, only to lose them, I couldn’t find any more to order, and so he had to go to making his own. Even if we did need a mayor—and I sincerely don’t think we do—the last person it should be is someone who can’t keep up with his own ear trumpet!”

“I can’t argue with that logic,” I said. Though I would have liked to. Ely Turner was not my favorite person. I sometimes argued with him just because his very presence riled me up.

“New York has a mayor, and that doesn’t stop people there from behaving like absolute devils. Have you ever been to New York City, Curly?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure,” I said.

“You’re not missing anything. They’re all a bunch of sodomites. If they aren’t sodomizing one another, they’re sodomizing their livestock. Heathens, the lot of them!”

“Is it true about how tall the buildings are?” I asked.