Last Chance Saloon

by Cole Shelton

  ‘I’m here to thank you,’ Brett said simply.

  Tom acknowledged Brett’s gratitude with a nod. ‘We’ve been in Jericho Creek for two weeks now, waiting to join the main wagon train when it finally arrives,’ he explained. ‘We’ve heard about and seen what the Procters have done to this town. My wife, Harmony, witnessed the one they call Wolf paw a decent woman in the general store and then kill a man who tried to help her. I don’t often use foul language, Mr Cassidy, but I’ll say it now – and may the Lord forgive me for this profanity – the Procters were bastards.’

  ‘Tom!’ Mrs McBeath gasped at his outburst.

  But Tom McBeath would not be restrained. ‘And when I saw one of the bastards on the roof ready to shoot you in the back, I knew what I had to do.’

  ‘You saved my life, Tom McBeath, and I owe you,’ Brett told him.

  ‘I did what was right.’

  Brett afforded them both one of his rare smiles and said, ‘Have a safe journey west and have a happy life. So long, my friends.’

  He turned away from them and strode back up Main Street where doors were being unlocked and curtains drawn open. He saw the town doctor with his black bag and bottle of whiskey waddle from an alley, making his way to where Dunn was writhing in pain alone on the street. The undertaker’s doors creaked open and the mortician rubbed his hands as he contemplated fresh business. The Town Committee would pay him to arrange two paupers’ burials. He wouldn’t earn much but it would help pay the loan on his shop. A few folks thanked Brett Cassidy as he made his way to the saloon. Once inside, some of the eager patrons offered to buy him drinks but one was enough for him.

  ‘Where you headed for?’ Mayor Whittaker asked conversationally.

  ‘I’ll start with Brown Bear Pass, then maybe winter in Buckskin.’

  ‘When you get to Buckskin, look up John and Grace Walters, old friends of mine,’ the mayor suggested, ‘They run the post office there.’ He added, ‘Grace makes the best blueberry pies I’ve ever tasted.’

  Brett promised, ‘I’ll call on them for sure.’

  ‘Once again, Mr Cassidy, on behalf of the citizens of Jericho Creek, I thank you for what you’ve done for this town,’ Mayor Whittaker began a speech.

  But Brett didn’t need a speech. He simply wished Mayor Whittaker and his committee men well, walked outside the saloon and remounted his roan.

  Dusk closed over Jericho Creek as Brett Cassidy rode Main Street for the last time. He slowed his roan as he drew adjacent to the wagons. There were more homesteaders standing around cooking fires now, but he managed to distinguish the McBeaths. Tom was conversing earnestly with another pioneer, an older man wearing a Confederate cap with a long, straggly white beard flowing down over his old army tunic.

  Harmony McBeath was stirring soup with a long wooden spoon.

  Just as Brett rode by, she happened to look up.

  Harmony’s eyes followed the gunfighter’s shadowy figure and in turn Brett saw her plainly because the firelight danced on her long honey-coloured hair and pretty face. She was truly a beautiful woman and Tom McBeath was a lucky man. Harmony stopped stirring the soup and he caught her fleeting smile.

  Moments later Brett Cassidy was gone, swallowed by the deepening dusk.

  He rode right out of town.

  The distant starlit peaks beckoned him north.

  That night Brett made camp in a sheltered hollow on the southern bank of the Red Stone River. He lit a small cooking fire, rubbed down his horse, then picked up his rifle. He made a lean shadow in the moonlight as he retraced his roan’s hoof marks to the edge of the forest he’d just ridden through. There he backed between two trees and waited in the darkness. He’d learned a lesson very soon after becoming a gunfighter. Hired by the Wichita Wells Town Committee, he’d earned a thousand dollars by gunning down triple-murderer Abe Harrison. With the cash in his saddle bag, he’d ridden out of town and lit a camp fire, just like he’d done tonight. Right on sundown, shadowy riders came out of the dusk. They were Harrison’s brother and two friends, bent on revenge and collecting Brett’s payment. In the ensuing gunfight, Judah Harrison, shot in the chest, crashed from his horse. Seeing Harrison dead in the cold dust, the sidekicks fled, but not before one of them turned in his saddle and emptied his gun. The last bullet ripped into Brett’s left thigh.

  Now, staked out in these trees, Brett recalled that night, how he’d bandaged his wound and made it to the doctor’s surgery in the next town. From that time on, he’d always checked his back-trail. If a man carried a lot of money, he could well be a target. And so tonight he waited, telling himself that this should be the last time he needed to do this. Very soon he would be in the mountains and he would no longer be Brett Cassidy, professional gunfighter, but just another westerner.

  And he would have no regrets.

  He waited till midnight, waited till the fire he’d lit burned low so all he could see were small flames licking a blackened log. He heard nothing except the hoot of an owl and the sound made by a snake slithering through pine needles. There was no pursuit. The Procters had no secret friends, neither were any Jericho Creek layabouts foolish enough to pursue him. Brett was relieved, not because he was afraid of a gunfight, but because he’d had enough of killing.

  Finally, he emerged from the pines and walked back to his camp.

  There, in the early hours of the morning, with the watery moon high in the starlit sky, he roasted a deer steak and heated his coffee pot in the glowing coals.

  For the first time in over a decade, Brett Cassidy felt free.

  Brett Cassidy was in no hurry so he took his time.

  Leaving behind his first night camp out of Jericho Creek, he forded the shallow Red Stone River and climbed the twisting mountain trails. Eagles flew overhead and he saw the white, furtive eyes of wolves in the darkness when he made night camps. He sheltered in a shallow cave when a wild storm drenched the mountains and made the peaks glisten with early snow. It was a lonely, silent world, but he felt at home already.

  His Colt Peacemakers no longer sat in twin holsters.

  They were packed away in his saddle-bag.

  His only visible weapon was a long rifle resting in its saddle scabbard. It was his hunting rifle and he used it once to kill a stag for food.

  He saw few people as he rode north. One cloudy morning he came across a couple of whiskery prospectors too busy to talk, intent instead on panning for elusive gold nuggets in a creek. Three days further into the mountains he met a lone hunter resting his horse in a forest clearing. The hunter gave him the name ‘Jones’ which Brett accepted without comment. He’d met quite a few men named ‘Smith’ or ‘Jones’ on this lonely frontier. Some, he’d learned later, were actually on the run. Nevertheless, he shared his camp fire coffee and a couple of cigarettes with him. One stormy late afternoon, a week later, an old timer leading two burros crossed his trail. He thought the old coot was crazy, gabbling on non-stop while knocking back a jug full of red-eye whiskey. Brett was glad to see the ancient mountain man move out next morning.

  He was the last living soul he saw for a month.

  Not that this mattered to Brett Cassidy.

  He didn’t mind being alone. Maybe he needed to be right now.

  Winter approaching, he set his face for the mining camp that hugged the creek in Brown Bear Pass. Brett knew that Big Sam Bush, an old friend from his army days, ran a trading post there that stocked everything from flour to frontier newspapers. He also had the agency for the Hudson Bay Trading Company.

  Brett looped his reins around the tie-rail and strolled into the trading post.

  ‘Doggone it! Trooper Cassidy!’

  ‘Howdy, Sam.’

  ‘Haven’t set eyes on you since we were both discharged from Fort Glory!’ Sam Bush exclaimed. He came around the counter and the two men shook hands. ‘But I’ve heard all about you, Brett. Yes, sir, I certainly have. You’re a legend all over the frontier.’ He thrust his pipe between his lips and asked in a serio
us tone, ‘Hey, where are those guns I’ve heard stories about?’

  ‘I’ll explain over a beer.’

  ‘Or two or three,’ Sam Bush raised his shaggy eyebrows, then roared with laughter. ‘I remember the time in the barracks when we both knocked back half a dozen and were still fit for duty.’

  ‘Long time ago, Sam,’ Brett reminded him.

  ‘Yeah, we were both kids, wet behind the ears.’

  They yarned long into the night, mostly about their exploits at Fort Glory, while Big Sam’s petite Arapaho woman, whom he called Nina, knitted a shawl by the glowing coals in the fireplace. She was half his age and half his size and her name meant ‘Singer’. Sam explained that drunken white prospectors had murdered her man in a midnight brawl and he’d found her wandering distraught and vulnerable in a wooded valley just beyond Brown Bear Pass. He’d brought her home to his trading post and she’d chosen to stay, proud now to be known as Big Sam’s woman.

  ‘Hanging up your guns was smart,’ Big Sam complimented him, downing his last beer. ‘You’ll live longer.’

  ‘That’s what I figure.’

  Seeing his Arapaho woman in the doorway beckoning him, Big Sam hauled himself out of his rocker chair and said, ‘Now you must excuse me. My woman wants me and I know what for!’

  ‘Go to it, Sam.’

  ‘Uh, Nina has a kid sister who can be pretty accommodating,’ Sam mentioned. ‘If you stay for a couple of nights I can arrange for her to be here for you.’ He grinned. ‘You won’t regret it. She can be mighty friendly to a man like you.’

  Brett stayed two nights in a room out at the back of Big Sam’s Trading Post, but he politely declined his old friend’s offer. He’d never had a woman arranged for him. He always chose his own. Early on the third day Brett bought some supplies and saddled his horse.

  ‘I’m heading north,’ Brett told him.

  ‘You’re welcome to stay if you like,’ his old army friend invited.

  ‘Thanks for the offer but I aim to winter in Buckskin.’

  ‘That’s a nice quiet town,’ Big Sam said.

  ‘My kinda place.’ Brett remarked.

  ‘Drop in anytime,’ Big Sam invited.

  Brett rode out of the mining camp and took the river trail that probed higher into the mountains. Clouds were gathering, billowing and laden with snow.

  Winter would come early this year.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was late in the Summer of ’69.

  Brett Cassidy was riding a well-worn forest trail after checking his traps. This was his weekly ritual and took most of the day as he normally set his traps down-river, past the falls, well out of town in the deep shadow of Tomahawk Mountain.

  Today he was returning with over a dozen beavers. Their pelts, when dried out, would join over fifty others hanging in his cabin. When they were all ready, he’d pack them in bags and pay Big Sam’s trading post one of his regular visits. There he’d spend time with his old army friend and the now very-pregnant Nina. Sam and the Arapaho woman had been pronounced man and wife by a visiting Methodist preacher who’d agreed to conduct the ceremony as long as there was no liquor in sight. Brett had attended the wedding and sold some pelts at the same time.

  Agency prices varied month by month, but mostly his pelts made him enough money to pay his bills and live comfortably in his single-roomed log cabin, just on the verge of the mountain town of Buckskin.

  Mind you, Brett sometimes thought, his income had taken a huge dive since leaving his gun-fighting days behind him and putting away his twin Colts, but not once had he regretted his decision.

  He was quite content being Brett Cassidy, trapper.

  It was close to sundown as he forded the river that flowed by Buckskin and joined the track that threaded through tall pines to three trappers’ cabins. His was the last one in the row, built with his own hands when he first arrived and decided to make a new life in Buckskin almost five years ago.

  He headed past the first cabin. Trapper Ben raised his hand in greeting. He was thin as a rake, heavily bearded, son of German emigrants. He’d been here as long as folks could remember. The second cabin belonged to Abraham. That was the name the wiry little man answered to and he’d never given a surname to anyone. Folks said confidentially to each other that he was once an outlaw specialising in stagecoach hold-ups, but he minded his own business so no one asked questions. Brett’s place was just down from Abraham’s. Once home, he would light his woodstove, cook a quick meal, brew some coffee and have an early night. Sometimes he’d play cards with Ben or ride down and have a drink in Buckskin’s quiet, often half-empty saloon, The Lucky Deuce, but tonight he’d stay home.

  Closing in on his cabin, Brett saw he had visitors.

  Buckskin’s postmaster, lanky, short-sighted John Walters, and his comely grey-haired wife, Grace, were waiting for him.

  He had a letter in his left hand and she had a blueberry pie in her right one.

  ‘Good evening, Brett,’ John Walters greeted. He peered through his horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘I see you have a full bag.’

  ‘Now I just have to skin them,’ Brett responded as he rode in and halted his snorting horse. He grinned as he emptied his saddle. ‘So what’s this? A welcome-home committee or are you still trying to persuade me to sing in your Sunday morning church choir?’

  ‘Not this time. It’s just a friendly visit,’ John assured him.

  ‘Reverend Pendleton reckons we’re wasting our breath trying to persuade a sinner like you to come to church,’ Grace said good-naturedly.

  ‘The preacher’s right,’ Brett agreed. ‘Mind you, if I could find myself a willing woman, he can marry us in his church.’

  ‘Well, there is Avis White,’ the postmaster suggested, grinning.

  Brett raised his eyebrows at the mention of the town’s most formidable spinster. Miss Avis White kept her six-roomed home so spotlessly clean that men were too scared to enter lest they soil her carpets. Besides that, saloon talk said she was so pure in heart that no man could get even close to her.

  ‘Forget Avis,’ Brett said.

  ‘Figured you’d say that,’ Walters said.

  ‘So what have I done to earn this friendly visit?’ Brett asked.

  John Walters explained, ‘We’re here for two reasons, Brett. First, a letter arrived for you. Actually, the person who sent it obviously didn’t know where you live because it’s addressed to Mr Brett Cassidy, care of Mayor Whittaker, Jericho Creek, with a note written right across the front saying ‘please forward on if you know where Mr Cassidy resides’. Fortunately, Mayor Whittaker must have recalled you said you were headed this way. He took a chance and forwarded it to Buckskin post office. Figured it might be important so Grace and me decided to deliver it in person on our evening walk.’

  He handed the letter to Brett.

  It was a brown crinkled envelope with a small tear across the top and the two stamps peeling off the paper, testimony to the fact it had been roughly manhandled on its journey. He turned the letter over. The sender’s name was in capital letters.

  MRS H. McBEATH.

  Instantly Brett recalled her, particularly that last smile as she’d looked up from the cooking fire while he rode past on his way out of Jericho Creek. And he remembered her husband especially, Tom McBeath, the homesteader whose timely shout had saved his life.

  ‘And here’s the second reason for our visit – a homemade blueberry pie,’ Grace Walters said.

  Blueberry pies made by the postmaster’s wife had almost legendary status in Buckskin and she was most generous handing them out to men who had no wives to cook for them.

  Brett said gratefully, ‘I’m obliged to both of you. Will you stay for coffee?’

  ‘Thanks for the offer, but we’ll leave you to your letter reading and pie,’ the postmaster spoke for them both.

  Brett thanked them again and went inside where he lit his oil lamp and cut the letter open with the sharp point of his hunting knife. There in the flickering
yellow light, he read the smudged, hand-written words. He read them twice, the second time very slowly. Then he folded the letter before going outside to tend his horse while his woodstove heated his coffee pot and warmed Grace’s blueberry pie.

  When he returned inside, he first drank the hot coffee.

  And his eyes strayed to the black metal box just visible under his bunk.

  It was where he kept his two Colt Peacemaker guns.

  An owl hooted ominously outside in the darkness.

  Brett Cassidy saw the smoke just before noon.

  It rose in small dark puffs from a long, sweeping ridge and floated slowly into the azure sky.

  Watching the smoke, he drew his roan into the shadows of a lone pine. He was now three weeks out of Jericho Creek where he’d first latched onto this westward trail. He was well aware he was on the edge of Cheyenne Territory and although he was riding along a wheel-rutted trail used by Wells Fargo stagecoaches and westbound wagon trains, he knew he wasn’t actually in Indian country.

  Nevertheless, Brett was wary.

  He wouldn’t be taking any chances.

  As far as he knew, there was relative peace between the white settlers and the Cheyenne Indians, but it would pay to be cautious, especially as in an hour’s time this trail would drop through two narrow passes, both perfect for an ambush. Hopefully, however, that wasn’t on their minds. He just kept riding.

  Deciding to rest his horse, still the same one he’d ridden for the last seven years, Brett dismounted and took a swig from his water canteen. He saw more smoke, this time rising from a bald rim the other side of the trail.

  He’d once wintered in a Cheyenne village, a welcome guest after he’d rescued one of their maidens from the unwelcome advances of two drunken traders who’d made up their minds to take advantage of her. A bullet in one man’s foot and a second slug shattering the other’s left forearm sent them on their way muttering threats they would never carry out. At the time, the Cheyenne elders, very impressed, wanted to marry him off to the young maiden concerned, but Brett had politely but firmly declined. They weren’t impressed by his decision, but they still let him stay as the snows set in. It was there Brett Cassidy learned the Cheyenne lingo. Not that it was any help right now. Cheyenne tribes were scattered for hundreds of miles across the Plains. He was a month’s ride from the village he’d wintered in. Any Cheyenne riders in these parts wouldn’t know him and, if they had a killing on their minds, he’d be fair game.