The Marauders Of Pitchfork Pass
“The author has a way of taking the reader back in time - I felt like I was rubbing elbows with dusty good guys and ornery bad guys 150 years ago... really enjoyed this Old Western story”
“I grew up reading and watching westerns, and this book captures a genre of a bygone era... Highly recommend this to any western fan”
“This book was a thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable read from beginning to end with a cast of memorable characters”
The Marauders Of Pitchfork Pass
Book excerpt
Chapter 1
I was behind the bar of my saloon (Curly’s Saloon) pouring belts of whisky to the miners and ranchers and various other thirsty folks that made up the residents of Silver Vein. Micah Poom was tickling the keys on the piano and Sally was wandering around looking for noodles to tug. Potter Ding was dealing Faro in the corner. Dexter Purdue was losing to Baxter at the poker table. And in the back, also as usual, were a couple of lowlife swine I didn’t care for at all. Black Pete and Johnny Twin Shoes sat at a table, slouched in their seats like they owned the joint. I’m a businessman, and pouring people drinks is my business. I try to be cordial to one and all, whether they deserve it or not. I might think you copulate with badgers, but I would still serve you drinks and still listen to your gripes and pissings and moanings and do it all with a smile. Besides, if I didn’t pour them vermin drinks they’d just hit me over the head and do it themselves.
I was thinking about how much I hated those two sons of bitches when a tall shadow appeared in the saloon’s doorway. It was hard to make out who it was, what with the saloon’s outside lanterns shining behind him. All I could see from back of the bar was the shadow cast against the far wall. I could see a hat. And I could see a shotgun. Whoever it was, he now had the saloon’s rapt attention. I hoped it wasn’t some drunk cowboy about to shoot up the place—a common occurrence despite my cheerful demeanor.
“I ain’t dead no more.”
There was no mistaking that voice.
The saloon doors opened slowly, its hinges creaking loudly in the tense quiet. Then I heard the sheriff’s spurs. He was thought to be dead, but clearly he wasn’t. Not anymore an-yway. My mouth was hanging open in shock. For all I know, everyone in the saloon had their mouth hanging open.
Nobody was thinking straight in that moment. If you were to ask me to pour you a belt of whisky, I would have looked at you like you were from outer space. I was as slack-jawed as a confused barn cat. I was looking at a ghost. A dead man had just shown up and walked through the door.
I suppose I should explain some things. Right now some of you are thinking What the Hell Is This Guy Talking About? Well, here it is. Our sheriff, Jim Shepland, got the holy hell beaten out of him, got shot and stabbed and beaten up some more, dragged behind his own horse—which was set on fire—and finally run out of town. He was last seen hanging from the end of a rope. We’d been nine months thinking he was dead. And nine months living un-der the foot of the man we thought had killed him.
But now here he was, back from the dead. Johnny Twin Shoes and Black Pete were no longer looking so casual. In fact, Johnny Twin Shoes looked like he’d just swallowed his chaw. Lean Bean Tom, the third asshole in their group, was at the bar trying to shove his head into a jug of some home-made moonshine I buy from some old timer that makes it out behind his house. Most people who drink it go half crazy. Lean Bean Tom, already being out of his tree to begin with, handled the stuff better than most. But it was no shocker to see him lurch upright and suddenly scream, “Holy creeping shit!” when he saw the sheriff. He made a play for his gun—but he’d given it to me, and I had it stowed behind the bar. As I write down these words, a long time has passed since that moment. But in that moment, as I hope to make clear, I was as dumb as a mule that had just lobotomized itself.
The shotgun the sheriff held in the crook of his arm was as loud as a herd of bison in that enclosed space when he slowly pulled the hammers back and leveled it at the back table. People scattered, leaving Johnny Twin Shoes and Black Pete to fend for themselves.
“What’s the matter Johnny? Cat got your tongue?”
“We killed you,” Johnny stammered. His eyes looked hollow, the pupils were the size of quarters.
“Apparently not,” the sheriff said. “I suppose you know you’re under arrest. Among other crimes, all these people witnessed you setting my horse on fire. That and you just con-fessed to attempted murder.”
Black Pete, who got his name because his name was Pete and he was a black fella, said, “You ain’t the sheriff. You must be his twin. I saw the sheriff hanging myself. I tied the damn noose!” Black Pete was clearly in denial. Because the man with the shotgun was cer-tainly the sheriff. Tall and solidly built, and fully capable of wrenching Black Pete’s head off with his bare hands were he to set his mind to it.
“I appreciate your confession, Black Pete. But what happened after you tied the noose?” the sheriff asked.
“Then you died,” Black Pete said.
“You put your hand over my nose and checked to make sure I had stopped breathing? You checked for my pulse and I didn’t have one?”
“No, we…”
“You left me swinging. You watched me piss myself and saw my tongue hanging out of my mouth and you came back to town to celebrate and get drunk.”
“How—”
“You didn’t kill me. You left me for dead. And son, there’s a big difference.”
“You was dead!” Lean Bean Tom said, coming into the conversation a bit late. When he spoke, he accidentally raised his arms off the bar, and so fell over on his face and writhed around on the floor for a spell before finally pulling himself upright again.
“No, I wasn’t dead. Not then and not now. What I am, is angry.” He took two quick steps and lashed out with the shotgun and caught Johnny Twin Shoes in the face, which twisted up on itself, and his head smacked down on the table.
“Drag your friend on out of here,” the sheriff said to Black Pete, “and be quick about it.”
“You’re letting us go?” Black Pete asked, his voice breaking.
“I’m letting you go to jail.”
Chapter 2
Black Pete was no fool. He did what the sheriff asked, and he took Johnny by the boots and dragged him out of the saloon, leaving a red swipe across the wooden floor.
Lean Bean Tom probably would have gotten his head bashed in too if he didn’t beat the sheriff to it. He took a hugely irresponsible swig of that fiery moonshine, which I know for a fact had gunpowder as one of its ingredients, then he got this shocked look on his face, and like he had on so many occasions, fell on his face and set to snoring.
The sheriff turned to me and said, “Curly, take that scattergun out from behind the bar and keep a sharp eye on Tom here. If he so much as twitches wrong, shoot his goddam head off. And I’ll have my boots back, so grab them off his feet and meet me at the jail.”
I’m pretty sure I’ve been clear on the utter uselessness of my brain at the time, so it didn’t even occur to me to tell Sheriff Shepland what had befallen his jail—and the town it-self—while he was off being dead. I didn’t respond to the sheriff at all, but just stared at the man stupidly. He waited a polite period of time to see if I would gather my wits, then gave up on waiting, tipped his hat at all the dumbstruck barflies, and backed out of the saloon doors and was gone.
“Well, that was certainly dramatic,” Baxter said. Baxter and Merle were brothers. Tall and lean and violent, but decent violent, if that makes sense. When they weren’t beating up on each other, they mostly beat up people who had it coming. They had matching mustaches and matching boots and walked and talked with the same Tennessee accent and inflections.
“The sheriff comes back to life and gets right back to arresting people. Me, I’d have taken a bit of a breather. Maybe gone to San Francisco and moved into a bordello for a while,” Merle said.
“I half thought he was going to shoot those fellas right out of their chairs,” Baxter said.
“It would have served them right if he did,” Merle said.
When Lean Bean Tom woke up I was sitting in a chair in front of him with the she-riff’s stolen boots slung over my shoulder and a shotgun full of buck staring down at him. The room stunk something fierce with those boots off, and that’s really saying something considering the saloon was full of miners who bathed about as often as a comet flew over-head. My eyes started watering and the back of my throat started to close up. It was a smell that could make a bird flying overhead fall to its death.
“Okay, Lean Bean, you and me are going to take a little walk. On your feet. Hope they work better than they smell. Micah, you’ve got the bar.” Micah Poom was on much fir-mer ground playing the piano than he was serving out drinks. He tended to drink two for every one he doled out, and talked a mile a minute while doing it. He often forgot altogether about charging the customers, and as a result, the patrons loved him and considered it a great event every time he was given barkeep duty. If I wasn’t back soon to relieve him I’d be broke.
Lean Bean, hungover and confused, looked down at his holey socks, shook his head, and stood up. He seemed to know the jig was up; there was no fight in him at all. Which was too bad, as I very much wanted to whomp him over the head. Having the sheriff back was good for my courage. We’d been through nine months of terror because of Lean Bean and Black Pete and Johnny Twin Shoes and their cronies and it was all I could do not to cause some pain in return.
The moon was bright that night as we made our way out of the saloon and down the Main Street boardwalk. The city was all hubbub. News had traveled fast. I’m guessing stoves were busy being lit so that welcoming pies could be cooked up. If ever there was cause for celebration, a resurrected sheriff in a lawless mining town was it.
As we walked down the street a dirty boy appeared on top of the courthouse and threw a rock down at us, clonking Lean Bean on the shoulder.
“You gonna hang,” the boy said.
“Fuck you, runt. I’ll see to you later,” Lean Bean hissed.
“No!” the boy screamed, then he started crying and for a good second there it looked like he might fall off the roof.
It was Tommy Yonder, the orphan boy Frank and Deedee Yonder were trying to raise. He was a like a wild dog, that one. His parents, Cyrus and May Johnson, had been killed out at their farm. (It was the raid on their farm that started this whole business, and I’ll come to that shortly.) The sheriff had found the boy hiding in a chicken coop and brought him to town. After everyone in town thought up some reason why they shouldn’t raise the boy, it came down to Frank and Deedee Yonder. Tommy Yonder was on the road to growing up to stretch a rope. He was always pelting rocks at people and calling them names and falling to pieces whenever he got his ear twisted. At first people sympathized, because of his past, and what happened to his parents, but more and more they just thought he was a little asshole.
As we marched by the bank, all blackened timbers and charred ruin, I pointed to it and said, “The sheriff ain’t going to like that none,” and pushed old Lean Bean in the back.
“Hell, you can’t hang that on me,” Lean Bean said. “I helped destroy the jail, not the bank.”
“You can clarify that with the sheriff.”
“Well, now that I think about it, I don’t know that I destroyed anything.”
I pushed him in the back again. I wanted to push him into a vat of soap; the man smelled like vulture puke.
We passed the restaurant, with its boarded up window from the time Johnny Twin Shoes rode his horse through it in a drunken midnight rage. On just about every corner of our little mining town there was some evidence of the lawlessness that had taken over the town during the sheriff’s absence.
When we got to the blown-up timber and bent bars that had once been the jail, I saw Johnny Twin Shoes and Black Pete trussed up like hogs and tied to the hitching post.
“Well, Curly, it looks like the fellas from the Triple R have been busy.” The sheriff looked unhappy not to have a jail. And I didn’t blame him. He spent more time in the jail than he ever did at home. If he wasn’t sitting outside with his feet on the rail, he was sitting inside with his feet on the desk.
“Sheriff, if my tongue worked back at the saloon, I would have told you they blew up the jail. But I was struck dumb in there. Not every day I see a ghost.”
“I ain’t a ghost, Curly.”
“I know that,” I said. Then I went and pinched his arm just to make sure.
“What are you going to do with me, Sheriff?” Lean Bean asked. “Since you don’t have no jail, I am of the opinion that you might just have to let me go.”
“You know what I think I should do?” the sheriff asked.
“What?”
The sheriff walked up and walloped Lean Bean a good one on the head and he went down like a heart-shot buffalo.
“That,” the sheriff said.
“That’s assault, right there,” Black Pete said. So the sheriff walked over and walloped him too.
Chapter 3
As we stood there with those fellas all tied up, sure enough, here came Deedee Yond-er with a pie in her hand. She had that same limp she always did, on account of the long knife she kept lashed to her leg.
“Sheriff! What a relief to have you back. It’s surely a miracle!”
“Not really. Just healed up is all.”
“This was the work of the Lord. You were hung, and you were dead, and yet here you are, chosen like Jesus was, chosen to protect us from that scum up at the Triple R. I imagine you’ll go up there and rain hellfire on them sons of bitches, and burn Torp Mayfair and his ranch into a pile of ashes and see to it that he spends the rest of his miserable days in hell.”
“Well now, Deedee, I just come back to town. And I don’t have no jail no more. So if you don’t mind I’ll handle this the way I see fit.”
I could tell by her sour look that she wasn’t enjoying the turn in the conversation.
“You know that boy’s family wasn’t killed by no Indians,” Deedee said.
“I know it, Deedee. You know I know it.”
“I get so frustrated taking care of that little shit that I can’t hardly keep it together. Someone should pay me for raising that rascal.”
“I aim to round up every damn one of them, Deedee. They’ll pay.”
“You’ve been blessed by the Lord and I would like to invite you to dinner. Frank is very excited about your resurrection and he would love to talk to you and maybe even have you give a speech at church on Sunday.”
“I’ll think about it,” the sheriff said. Then Deedee turned on her heel and walked away, pie and all.
“Dang,” I said. “I figured that pie was for you.”
“I figure it was right up until Deedee didn’t get the answers she wanted.” The sheriff pulled out a cigar and struck a match against his boot and lighted up.
“How come you wanted your boots back if you got boots on your feet?” I asked. “I don’t think I could put my feet in anything Lean Bean was wearing. He smells like three-week-old mule piss.”
“They’re my boots, Curly. It’s the principle of the matter.”
Chapter 4
I remember when Sheriff Shepland first came to town. We asked for a replacement sheriff after Sheriff Gantry got himself killed taking a piss out behind the livery, and here comes this wiry fella mounted on a Comanche pony. Somewhere outside of Amarillo, Texas, he’d been set upon by Indians in the night and had his horse swiped. Most people would just be relieved they didn’t get their hair lifted. Not the sheriff. He tracked down the Indians, and, in the night, snuck up and stole one of their horses.
To hear the sheriff tell it, the Comanches were so impressed with his brazenness that they decided not to pursue him. So even from the very first moment we encountered our new sheriff, there was something almost mythic about him. Anyone who could steal a horse from Indians we figured was more or less invincible. Which is why it was such a shock for him to have been caught unawares and beaten and stabbed and shot and dragged and hanged from a tree like he was.
When Sheriff Gantry died the town started falling to pieces almost immediately. Fights broke out and people took to stabbing and shooting one another in the middle of the street. Claims were jumped. Horses and cows were stolen. Not having an obvious law pres-ence in the town caused people to behave in ways they never would have otherwise. My sa-loon kept getting shot up, and it wasn’t just the cowhands doing it, but regular old drunk people with guns. Pico Stanton, the town’s only lawyer, who should know better, even took his derringer out of his boot one night and poked a hole in my ceiling. So did I, though I don’t have any memory of it. When I built the saloon, I specifically made it so that there was nothing above the saloon’s ceiling. I built my apartment upstairs, but away from any stray bullets.
The new sheriff set the town to rights. He expanded the jail and started up a group of volunteers to patrol the town at night, so Indians couldn’t sneak up on nobody while they were taking a piss. Deedee Yonder was the most enthusiastic of the volunteers, and even tried to arrest her own husband for laziness. She was short and lean as a piece of jerky, but if you saw Deedee walking the boardwalk at night, you’d find some other way to navigate the town. One miner, new in town, got fresh with her in the street one night. When he came tottering into the saloon, half his mustache was missing and one of his eyes was swollen about twice its normal size and the color of a cherry. When he sat down at the bar he was in tears.
Aside from volunteers patrolling the streets, the sheriff also passed a firearms ordin-ance, so the saloon and restaurant would stop getting all shot up. The cowboys and ranch hands didn’t like this at all, as they seemed to think drinking and shooting guns went hand in hand—but every time the sheriff asked for someone’s guns he got them. At first he had to whomp people over the head, but eventually word spread not to buck the new sheriff and people gave up their guns before getting whomped.
Word soon spread there was a safe town called Silver Vein in the middle of lawless Texas, with a decent sheriff, and the town started to grow. It’s amazing what one man with a badge and some sand can do for a town.
The west was a lawless place. And a safe town in a lawless place is a beacon to those who seek a new life for themselves but don’t cotton to danger. A lot of people who moved to Silver Vein had been witness to violence of one sort or another. When the Civil War ended, a whole bunch of disenfranchised soldiers turned to using their guns for lawless reasons, and their evil ways became more and more apparent, and innocent people had to work hard to find security. As a result of the town’s reputation, Silver Vein was made up of people with haunted pasts and jumpy temperaments. People like Deedee If she hadn’t come west and ex-perienced violence like she did, she probably wouldn’t have felt the need to carry so many knives. So it was a true gift to have a sheriff like Jim Shepland. Just seeing him sitting outside the jail with his feet up was enough for even the most cowed of men to feel safe walking down the street.
I myself moved to Silver Vein, figuring it to be a safe place for a saloonkeeper. Sa-loonkeepers in the lawless west typically didn’t last long Miners were a pretty stressed out bunch, and they tended to let off steam in saloons, and more often as not it was the saloon-keeper that got caught in the crossfire. A saloonkeeper getting stabbed in the belly was so common the newspapers wouldn’t even make mention of it. I wanted to be a saloonkeeper that didn’t get stabbed in the belly. I was so against getting either stabbed or shot I had a spe-cial compartment built behind the bar I could hide in. The plan was, when trouble showed its head, I would just duck down behind the bar and disappear until the chaos was over. The other thing I did is I only pissed outside in daylight. I’m a healthy and loud pisser and it would be easy to sneak up on me in the night. The cemetery was full of people getting killed while pissing in the night and I didn’t mean to be one of them.
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