It’s time for our quarterly short stories. This time, our plots come from the Old West. The West has inspired many writers, from Max Brand and Louis L’Amour, to Larry McMurtry, Richard Wheeler and Johnny Boggs. Don’t forget movies and TV shows—how many of us can hum the theme to Bonanza?
In “Wanted,” D. Z. takes us back to Kansas in the 1870s, as a determined man searches for those responsible for a family tragedy. Janet’s story, “Cowboy Wannabe,” is contemporary, as a young wannabe dons gun and cowboy hat, yearning for the Old West.
Using his black derby, Broussard slapped the dust off his double-stitched riding breeches reinforced where his body met his worn cavalry saddle and watched the man he had been tracking for days, Cyrus Bell, enter a saloon in Salina, Kansas.
Tall and lithe, he leaned on a hitching post hidden behind his rangy buckskin stallion, his derby tipped over his eyes to shadow his face. Hammering from new buildings going up a few blocks down the road filled the air near the new stockyards along the Kansas Pacific Railway lines east of the burgeoning city. Mooing and lowing dominated the breeze when the wind and dust died down. Broussard lingered across from a three-story hotel with a balcony and sitting chairs, listening to the town grow. Waiting for Bell to emerge.
The sheriff had tacked Pinkerton posters next to the town rules on a board outside his office. Broussard stepped onto the boardwalk for a read. Guns were to be checked with the barkeep, defense against the rowdy men, gamblers and cowboys who rode in with the cattle. Bored, Broussard thumbed through the posters. When he came to one of a dark-haired, light-eyed boy of fourteen, he yanked it free, folded it four times and jammed it into the crown of his derby.
In the five years since the War, he’d set out at the slightest rumor of his twin sister. When he last saw her, she screamed as Yankee raiders slung her over a horse and tied her down.
Those men, filthy and high on War, tied him to a tree and ran him through with a sword. He remembered their faces. All of them. And the cries of his mother and brother dying in the barn those pigs set ablaze. The moment Broussard saw Cyrus Bell’s face on a Pinkerton poster, it registered. That day, Bell had slapped Broussard’s sister, ripped her bodice, top to bottom, and exposing her unformed breasts.
The bar doors clattered as Bell stumbled out and across the street. Charles Rayne, owner of Rayne’s Hardware, untied his apron and joined Bell at the double doors of the hotel. Back then, Rayne slunk in the shadows of a massive oak, rubbing his hands on his blue pants, panicked.
Broussard waited a heartbeat before entering. Bell took a room and gestured for Rayne to join him. As a door on the second-floor mid-hall closed, Broussard crept up the fading runner to the second floor, stopping to listen until he heard their voices.
He didn’t knock, he turned the knob and entered, his right hand on his hip gun, his head down, and his derby shading his eyes. Both men’s faces rose with a start. He nodded, “Bell, Rayne. Broussard Mills. Where’s the girl? She alive?”
Rayne stared at his hands. Bell said, “She was a good one, that one. As to bein’ alive, last time I saw her was somewhere’s in Missouri. Ran into some Texans and handed her on over. They claimed they was on their way home, and she weren’t quite used up.”
“I left the unit in Shawnee for home,” Rayne said, warping his hands into shapes they were never meant to form. “Couldn’t face myself elsewise.”
Broussard raised his chin. The shadow of his hat evaporated, revealing his startling blue eyes, black brows and youth.
“Hey, you’re that little pissant Broussard. Thought we killed you!” Bell reached for his weapon.
With a glance at Rayne, Broussard drew his hip gun and fired. Bell clutched his chest, falling to his side on the bed, his breath rattling in his chest.
“Now,” Broussard said, “Tell me straight, Rayne.”
“I was a boy myself, and she wasn’t in long skirts. I swear I never touched her. Bell wasn’t lyin’ ‘bout the Texans, though. We were in Bolivar in Greene County. For certain.”
“Bell is wanted, dead or alive. Take the reward. It isn’t much, but it’s some.”
“I don’t truck with what was done that day. For your sake, I hope you find her. I do.”
Broussard tipped his hat. At his horse, he withdrew a black leather folio from his saddlebag resting on his painted canvas saddle skirt and crossed off two more names.
Hand on the holstered Colt Peacemaker, Cass stepped off the boardwalk and crossed the dusty street, heading into the saloon.
It was really a soda fountain, dating to Salt Creek’s Old West days in the 1870s, when it had been a drugstore, with a pressed tin ceiling and various antique fixtures, including the cash register. Now it served ice cream, cookies, sandwiches, cold drinks and coffee.
The guy behind the counter grinned. “Hey, Cassandra.”
She scowled. “Don’t call me that. Just Cass.” She saw herself in the mirror on one wall, hair unruly under the cowboy hat, slight and skinny at fifteen, younger than the two guys she’d followed into the soda fountain. They were eighteen or nineteen maybe, dressed as gunslingers, loud and rowdy as they slouched at a nearby table, drinking Cokes.
“Okay, just Cass. What’ll it be?”
“Sarsaparilla,” she said in a terse voice.
He rolled his eyes. “Root beer, coming right up.” He pulled a brown bottle from the cooler and handed it to her.
She reached into her pocket, pulling out a handful of bills, tossing several onto the counter. “Keep the change.”
“Sure thing.” He took the money and rang up the sale, then turned to the next customers.
Cass drank from the brown bottle as she watched the two cowboy wannabes at the corner table. When they left, she followed, hand on the butt of the Colt. The gun was an antique. It didn’t work. Her dad locked it in a box. But Cass jimmied the lock and took it. Dad hadn’t missed it yet. She kept the gun hidden in her bedroom, thrilled it was there as she read old Western novels and watched Western movies on her computer. When she prowled the streets of Salt Fork, gun in the holster, she felt like a gunslinger.
She’d spotted the two guys earlier, in the crowd near the mayor, who was getting a lot of screeching feedback from the microphone as he boomed, “Welcome to Salt Fork’s Annual Old West Days.” This replica of the old town had been constructed on a lot at the end of Main Street. The nearby building that looked like an old bank held a museum and store, as well as the Chamber of Commerce office.
That’s where the safe was. The two guys were supposed to be robbers who were pretending to rob the make-believe bank, just for show. But she’d overheard them talking. They really were planning a robbery. There was a portable safe in the Chamber office, full of cash, according to the robbers. They were going to take it while everyone was distracted by three other guys who were playing the roles of lawmen.
Cass planned to stop the robbers. But she wasn’t sure how.
The pretend bank robbery started, with lots of shouting and noise from fake guns. She slipped inside the building by a side door. She scrambled up the staircase to the mezzanine and looked down on the old-timey teller cages. One robber was hiding behind the counter, supposedly firing at the fake lawmen who were in the vestibule. The second robber disappeared into the Chamber office. A moment later, he reappeared, dragging the safe, the size of a plastic tub and heavy, from the way he struggled. His accomplice left the counter and joined him. Together they hauled the safe toward the side door.
Cass looked down and spotted the old flat irons, the kind old-timey people used to heat on stoves to iron clothes. Small but heavy, being used as door stops. Small but deadly. She hauled them up, using both hands as she balanced them on the railing.
As the robbers moved directly below her, she let fly. The irons smashed onto the robbers. One of them fell, dropping the safe. The other yelled, hand to head, fingers coming away bloody.
The fake lawmen ran into the bank. One said, “Hey, what’re you doing with that safe? That’s not in the script.”
With the robbers foiled, Cass slipped down the stairs and through the side door, back to the dusty street. With a secret smile, she stroked the butt of the Peacemaker. “Small but deadly,” she said.