Black Valley Riders

When Shear and his men rode in to the dusty, all but abandoned, mining town, two old-timers stood up from rickety wooden chairs and stood staring at them. On a battered empty crate between the two chairs lay a worn and faded checkerboard, its pieces evenly distributed.

“It’s time we called it a night,” one of the men said, judging the dim evening light.

The street of Alto Meca lay strewn with tumbleweed and patches of pale wild grass standing at the corners of empty boarded-up buildings. A broken freight wagon, sandbanked up on its spokes, lay just off the middle of the street. Beneath a high porch, a lean bitch hound stood up with pups hanging and whining and dropping from her sagging teats. She barked once halfheartedly, then coiled back down as the men rode past at a walk.

Dave Pickens spat sidelong and said as he looked at the bitch and her liter, “I hope we haven’t just witnessed the whole of entertainment this town has to offer.” He ran the back of his hand across his lips.

“No,” said Duckwald, his head raised to the dry dusty air, “there’s whores around here. I’m sniffing two right now.”

“One’s yellow,” said Duckwald, still sniffing. “The other—hell, I don’t know. She could be bald as an egg top and bottom. I don’t care.”

The two old men continued to stare in silence until Shear touched his hat brim and said, “Good evening to you, gentlemen.”

“Likewise,” said one of the old men. He pointed a finger along the empty street. “The saloon is open if you’re looking for a drink. There’s only two fellers drinking there, pilgrims like yourselves.”

Tobias Barnes said quietly to Ballard Swean riding beside him, “What the hell else would a man be looking for in this pig-wallow?”

At a burning oil pot out in front of a clapboard building that stood badly tilted to one side, the men reined their horses over to an iron hitch rail and stepped down from their saddles. Shear ran a hand over the rump of one of two horses already standing at the hitch rail. The horse’s flesh was dry. The animal looked rested.

A face looked out from a dusty saloon window, then disappeared as the eight gunmen stepped onto a weathered boardwalk and walked inside and across a squeaking bare plank floor.

“Is this place getting ready to fall over?” Shear asked the short, stocky man standing behind the bar. The gunmen spread along the bar. At a corner table two men sat bowed over shots of whiskey. A half-full bottle stood on the table between them. They watched the gunmen out of the corner of their eyes.

“No, sir-iee, she’s safe as your mama’s arms,” said the bartender. “Just built crooked from the start, is all.” He grinned widely and tugged at his white-turned-yellow collar. “What’ll yas have, gentlemen?”

“Whiskey, for openers,” said Shear. “Beer, mescal, anything else you’ve got that’s not poison.” He laid a plain-faced twenty-dollar gold coin on the bar top.

“Say, mister, unstamped coins are a rare sight around here,” the bartender remarked. “Am I being too nosy asking where you acquired them?” His hands adeptly snatched up three fresh bottles of rye from beneath the bar top as he spoke. He pulled the corks and slid the bottles along the bar, shot glasses right behind them.

“Damn right, you are,” Duckwald cut in, catching a bottle and a glass for himself. He leered menacingly at the man. At the corner table the two men tossed back their shots of whiskey, grabbed the bottle and eased quietly out the front door.

“Easy does it, Rudy,” said Shear, defusing the wild-eyed gunman. “Not too nosy at all,” he said to the bartender. He raised another gold coin and turned it between his thumb and fingertip. “This is railroad gold. We robbed a train and took it from them.”

Shear looked at the bartender, then at the faces along the bar. After a second he threw his head back in a hearty laugh. “Damn, fellows, I’m joking!”

The men laughed in relief. So did the bartender. His knees had gone a little weak. “Mister, you sure had me going there . . . ,” he said. Still laughing, he pulled up empty beer mugs, three in either hand, knocked back a tall wooden tap handle and stuck the mugs under its spigot, filling them one at a time.

Duckwald leaned forward onto his elbows and said to the bartender, “On the way in here, I scented up some whores. Where are they?”

“All the whores left here over a year ago,” said the bartender, “but it just happens that two young doves walked into Alto Meca a week ago. Apparently the gentlemen they were traveling with were no gentlemen at all. They left them stranded—put them out along the trail and left them seven miles from town.”

“Oh my God,” Longley said quietly. He gazed Duckwald up and down as if in awe. “What color is their hair?” he asked the bartender.

“One’s a flaxen-haired little honey,” said the bartender. “The other . . . well, I can’t say. You’ll have to judge for yourself.”

“Oh, they’re coming down, fellows, soon as they get powdered up,” said the bartender. “They were excited to see yas ride in. They need to raise money for stage fare.”

No sooner had the bartender spoken than a door at the top of a leaning stairs opened and two young women walked out onto the landing wearing short, scanty dance hall dresses and carrying feathered fans.

“Did I hear someone say they’re looking for female companionship of an informal nature?” said a blonde with a suggestive expression, her feathered fan cocked beneath her right ear.

“My God, Rudy,” Ben Longley asked, without taking his eyes off the two women, “how long have you been able to do this?”

“All my damned life, Ben,” Duckwald said. He pushed himself back from the bar and hurried over to the tilted stairs, catching the sassy blonde in his arms as she threw herself forward from the bottom stair.

Watching, Shear took out a cigar and stuck it into his mouth, hearing the woman squeal with delight. He grinned and raised a fresh shot glass of whiskey in his hand.

“Ah,” he said, “these are the moments to enjoy. If only we had some music now, I’d call this a perfect celebration.”

“Say, mister,” said the bartender, “I just happen to have a Missouri squeeze box in the back room.”

“Do you indeed?” said Shear. He tossed two more gold coins on the bar top. Along the bar, some of the men did the same, until a sizable amount of gold lay glittering in the lamplight.

Late in the night, after the men had taken their turns walking up and down the tilted stairs, Shear stood at the corner of the bar, whiskey bottle in hand. His shirt blared open down the front. His string tie hung loose; his gun belt hung over his shoulder where he’d forgotten and left it hanging after his earlier trip upstairs.

Above the bartender’s accordion music, the blonde, an Illinois girl named Emma Fay Wheatley, said in Shear’s ear, “Cleary and I are only six dollars shy of bypassing Denver and going on to San Francisco.”

“Bless both your hearts,” Shear said. He tipped his shot glass toward them. “I’m only happy we could help in some small way.”

“Girls, I’m good as a man can get,” Shear said. He threw an arm around each of them and pulled him to his sides.

“Anything you’d like to watch us do?” the other girl, Cleary Jones, asked in his other ear.

Before Shear could answer, the bartender’s accordion playing abruptly ceased. The drunken outlaws along the bar turned. The two men who had left so quickly earlier in the evening now stood in the middle of the plank floor, each wearing a tied-down holster on his hip. The butt of a Colt revolver stood near each gun hand.

“Brayton Shear?” said one of the men, a slim young fellow with a drooping mustache and a scar across the bridge of his nose.

“I’m Patton Clark,” said the young gunman. “This is my brother, Noland. “You’ve probably heard of us—the Clark brothers, out of Nogales?”

“I can’t say that I have,” said Shear. “But then I don’t get around to the cattle spreads or the sheep ranches.”

“We’re neither cowhands nor sheep men,” said the other man, stepping up beside his brother. “We do gun work, and we do it well.” He stared at Shear. “Want to see some right now?”

The half-drunken gunmen stiffened along the bar. Their hands went to their gun butts. Shear stood firm, but ready to set them into action.

“Whoa there,” said Patton Clark, “that ain’t what he meant!” He held a hand up in a show of peace. He gave his brother a tense, angry look.

“No,” said Noland Clark, “I meant I’d show you some friendly, but slick, gun handling—maybe shoot a mug or two off the bartender’s head.”

Shear grinned and perked up and said in a mock but friendlier tone of voice, “There you go. That might be fun. What say you, bartender?”

“Good Lord, no!” said the bartender, the accordion squeezed tightly shut between his hands on a sour note. He gave the young gunmen a fiery stare. “Have you lost your damn mind, young fellow?”

“Well, there goes that idea,” Shear said to the Clark brothers. He shrugged. “Is there anything else we can do for you before you head back to the bunkhouse?”

Shear gestured toward the women hanging on his sides. “Do I look like I need any help here?”

Noland started to say something more, but his brother grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

“You finally got it, eh?” Duckwald chuckled. The other men joined in as the two young men turned back toward the front door.

Patton stopped and said to Shear, “We saw the moon and star on your vest earlier. We were told you Black Valley Riders are square shooters. But maybe we were told wrong about it.”

“Hang on, Clark brothers,” said Shear as the two started toward the open front door. “Don’t get your bark on with Black Valley Riders, unless you’re tired of living.”

Shear gave them a thin, flat smile. “Hell yes, I’ve heard of the Clark brothers, everybody has. I was just testing your iron.”

“You used to,” said Shear. “Mingo is dead. He took a bad fall over in the hills. He wasn’t the only one. I lost a few men there.”

Shear shrugged. “Too bad for them, but maybe a good thing for the Clark brothers.”

“Have a drink,” said Shear. He jiggled both young women under his arms and. “Either of you need a sweet young whore?”

“Right, business, eh?” said Shear, appraising the two. “I like that. Set them up, bartender,” he ordered, “then get back to the squeeze box while me and the Clarks have ourselves a little talk.”

Shear lowered his hands and gave both doves a friendly slap on their backsides. “Go perch on somebody else’s shoulder, gals,” he told them.

While the bartender once again started filling glasses and mugs and playing the accordion, Shear and the Clarks stood at the corner of the bar and discussed the two young gunmen riding with him and his men. By the time they slid an empty whiskey bottle back across the bar, the music had changed from playing high-spirited Irish reels to squeezing out slow, soulful Spanish ballads.

“This one’s for the trail,” said Shear. He took out more gold coins and spread them on the bar. “You sure know how to squeeze that thing, barkeep,” he said, nodding at the accordion.

Shear called out to his men along the bar, “Everybody get up some more gold for this wonderful man, show some appreciation before we leave.”

The men weaved and swayed drunkenly, their hands going into their pockets. But in a second, the sound of coins jingled in the air.

Seeing the glimmer of gold in the lamplight, Emma Fay said to Cleary, “We’d be dang fools to jump off this wagon.”

“I was just thinking that myself,” Cleary whispered back to her, the two sitting up on the bar edge, one on either side of George Epson.

Emma Fay eased down off the bar and walked toward Shear. “Hey, big fellow, if you’re leaving, can Cleary and I ride along with you a ways?”

Shear looked at his men and saw the eager look on their whiskey-lit faces. He grinned. “Well, what the hell? You gals grab what you’re taking. Let’s ride up out of here.”

Emma held up a hand and said, “Easy, fellows. Cleary and I will sort of switch from one of you to the other and make do.”

The bartender shook his head and hurried along the bar raking gold coins into his palm. Somewhere on the empty outskirts of Alto Meca, a thin rooster crowed in the blue darkness.