Tag: wild west

All Stories, General Fiction, Historical

Buffalo Bill’s Day Out by Michael Bloor

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On July 3rd, 1903, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show gave a performance in Abergavenny, a market town in the Black Mountains of South Wales. The town sits surrounded by seven hills, but the most prominent is The Sugar Loaf (it’s Welsh name is Pen-y-fâl), which looms over the town. At the close of his show, Buffalo Bill annouced to the crowd his intention to climb The Sugar Loaf the next morning. It was said that, the next day, Bill was accompanied up the mountain by half the adults and all the children of the town.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Lonely Line Rider by Tom Sheehan

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Dutch Malick was lonely; for a deck of cards, a friendly voice cracking with warm humor or saddle gibes, for something that would tell him he was not the last person about in the world. For most all his life he was a line rider, low man on the totem pole, singular but almost invisible, a dot on the prairie or up a strange draw or wadie, a ghost of a person… him and his horse. His hands, in addition, were scarred from the very first day of line work years past, brutal scars from a brutal wire caught in the horns of a steer prodded wild by some unknown force. He’d never be able to draw a weapon with speed, even if his life depended on that quick draw. He tittered when he thought he was not in such good hands. Even a small laugh was worth the effort, self-inflicting humor went a hell of a long way when you were alone on the line, in a box canyon, out alone on prairie dog territory, “long as I don’t laugh at myself too seriously, poke too much fun.”

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All Stories, General Fiction

Karaoke Cowboy by Domonique

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Seated at a table in a karaoke bar was a blend of characters, men who had all worn a couple hats, in a couple colors.

Seated naturally in a thinking man’s posture, a man with a countenance expressing he owned masculine intellect, and, to be fair, a man well-liked for his intelligent conversation, was Think Too Much Tony.

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All Stories, General Fiction, Historical

The Broomstick Cowboy by Tom Sheehan

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In the heart of Chicago’s new butchering center, in a ramshackle apartment in a ramshackle house, a truly destined cowboy was born to a hard-working Scots-born butcher and his wife. The year was 1864 and the Scotsman had just got a job with the newly formed Union Stock Yards. Ralston Condor was a meat cutter, one of many that came with the swelling herds in the yards. Eventually, after 7 years on the job, he’d come home at night and tell his wife and son all the stories he heard during the day, at work, at the tavern on the way home, from friends on the corner … all about the great herds of the west, the cowboys and drovers and ramrods and trail bosses and the Indians along the way as cattle headed for Chicago and the stockyards and the butcher plants. For all those years he longed for the open country again, like the land he had known on the moors of Scotland with Angus cattle, a distinguished and hardy breed.

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

A Saddle in the Desert by Tom Sheehan

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He was in the sparse land between shifting sands of the great desert and the last tree bearing green when he saw the vultures descending from their high flight. Breward Chandler, “Brew” to friends back in the mountains where breathing was much easier than here in the midst of little life, sat bareback on an Indian pony he had freed from a natural corral behind a blow-down. Chandler had learned that the horse would obey pulls on his mane and in this manner he had escaped from sure capture by heading into the desert, with his pistols loaded and a lariat and a canteen he had grabbed on the run. He was not sure who was after him, either renegade Indians or renegade whites out for the kill, looking for guns, clothes, saddles, anything for free. He was hoping that they’d measure the little he might have against the rigors of a chase in the desert. Perhaps, he also hoped, they were smarter than he thought they were.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Madame by Matthew Senn

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She’d tell the newcomers she was from California, the blond haired Madame of the Diamondback Saloon. She’d tell ’em the same jokes she’d told a thousand nights: she’d say she got the name of the place after her man got bit by a diamondback. And if they had enough fun, she’d point to three crosses in the back and say that’s where lie the last people who had too much fun.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Hobie’s Sugar Still by Tom Sheehan

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Hobart Bridgewater, Hobie to most folks, was a freighter who promised delivery of whiskey to several saloons along the Snake River. “I go get it for you and bring it back, and then you pay me. If you don’t pay me, you don’t get the load and I don’t bring you no more. That’s all easy for you gents and tough for me. Some days out there on the trail I have to keep my rifle leveled and ready, that’s why I have the best shot in all the territory riding up there with me. Burke Molton ain’t never missed a target he took aim at, and that includes those three scallywags who tried us on for size on the river road just last week and he knocked two of them right off their mounts with two shots and them riding hard at us all the while and trying to get the best whiskey in the west from us at the point of their guns.”

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All Stories, Crime/Mystery/Thriller

Scrawleg and the Turban Man by Tom Sheehan

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He tossed a noose of thin wire over the head of the jailer when the jailer leaned too close to the bars of the cell. Moments earlier he’d unwound the wire from the heel of his boot, pulled it taught at the jailer’s throat, demanded the key to the cell, got it, unlocked the door and brought the jailer into the cell. Pulling the wire tighter until the jailer was dead, he walked off into the night taking his own weapons with him.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Lone Dog amid Apple Seeding by Tom Sheehan

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The wind shifted slightly to the northwest, and Bill “Lone Dog” Bevans smelled horse traces in the air. He supposed that the horse smell came first on the air (there were other signs) because he hadn’t ridden a horse in a year, since about mid 1840 he thought at a guess. But he caught awed aromas riding on those same air waves … and a variety of sounds placing him on alert.

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All Stories, General Fiction

No Edge to Glory by Tom Sheehan

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Everso, Nevada must have seen McKenzie Dodds, newly quit of the Great War, coming all the way, all the time, sitting as it did on a rise with a splendid view of the river and the grass running for miles beside it dotted with cattle. It could have been termed a welcome in some quarters the way the town hummed, had bustle in the streets, doors opened and closed, hellos and good mornings and halleluiahs blending in Dodds’s hearing. It was all saluted by a group of boys in an old game of tossing slender sticks at the side of the livery where leaners were yelped up to victory; “Huzzah. Magnificent! Numere uno!.” Or “Attaboy, Vinnie! Attaboy!” Or “Do it again, Carlo!” coming as “Lo hace otra vez, Carlo!”

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