The Savagers of Cutthroat Canyon

By Clay Houston Shivers

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Mar 19, 2022

Book preview

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