Contention and Other Frontier Stories Read online

  CONTENTION AND OTHER FRONTIER STORIES

  CONTENTION AND OTHER FRONTIER STORIES

  A FIVE STAR ANTHOLOGY

  * * *

  EDITED BY HAZEL RUMNEY

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, a Cengage Company

  Contention and Other Frontier Stories: Copyright © 2019 by Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company.

  Contention © 2019 by Johnny D. Boggs

  Eddie and the Stranger © 2019 by Vonn McKee

  The Deserter © 2019 by Loren D. Estleman

  A Full Moon at Noon © 2019 by Marcia Gaye

  The Medicine Robe © 2019 by Michael Zimmer

  Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary © 2019 by Kathleen Morris

  Darlings of the Dust © 2019 by John D. Nesbitt

  Pimple © 2019 by John Neely Davis

  Bullwhacker © 2019 by Rod Miller

  Ih-tedda’s Son © 2019 by W. Michael Farmer

  Aces and Eights © 2019 by Michael R. Ritt

  Jericho Springs © 2019 by Max McCoy

  Buryin’ Ruby © 2019 by Greg Hunt

  A Grave Too Many © 2019 by Preston Lewis

  Frank & Jesse © 2019 by Bill Brooks

  Barquette of the XP © 2019 by Tim Champlin

  Running Iron © 2019 by Robert D. McKee

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Rumney, Hazel, editor.

  Title: Contention and other frontier stories : a Five Star anthology / edited by Hazel Rumney.

  Description: First edition. | Farmington Hills, Mich. : Five Star, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018039845 (print) | LCCN 2018058525 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432854683 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432854676 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432854669 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-5468-3

  Subjects: LCSH: Western stories. | American fiction—21st century. | Short stories, American. | Frontier and pioneer life—West (U.S.)—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS648.W4 (ebook) | LCC PS648.W4 C63 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.0874608—dc 3

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039845

  First Edition. First Printing: May 2019

  This title is available as an e-book.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4328-5468-3

  Find us on Facebook—https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCengage

  Visit our website—http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star Publishing at [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 23 22 21 20 19

  Dedicated to Richard S. Wheeler

  1935−2019

  Writer extraordinaire and a dear friend to many.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CONTENTION

  Johnny D. Boggs

  EDDIE AND THE STRANGER

  Vonn McKee

  THE DESERTER

  Loren D. Estleman

  A FULL MOON AT NOON

  Marcia Gaye

  THE MEDICINE ROBE

  Michael Zimmer

  MARY, MARY, QUITE CONTRARY

  Kathleen Morris

  DARLINGS OF THE DUST

  John D. Nesbitt

  PIMPLE

  John Neely Davis

  BULLWHACKER

  Rod Miller

  IH-TEDDA’S SON

  W. Michael Farmer

  ACES AND EIGHTS

  Michael R. Ritt

  JERICHO SPRINGS

  Max McCoy

  BURYIN’ RUBY

  Greg Hunt

  A GRAVE TOO MANY

  Preston Lewis

  FRANK & JESSE

  Bill Brooks

  BARQUETTE OF THE XP

  Tim Champlin

  RUNNING IRON

  Robert D. McKee

  CONTENTION

  BY JOHNNY D. BOGGS

  I didn’t know the Widow Kieberger from Adam’s off ox, but she came up to me inside a Yuma grog shop, sat down, introduced herself, and told me her hardships, which were plentiful. Though she wasn’t hard to look at, I had pretty much stopped listening and started cogitating a polite way to get away from her, maybe suggest that she find a deputy U.S. marshal, contact the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, or perhaps I’d mention a couple of buckets of blood where she could find men who killed cheap. Having just gotten out of the Hellhole, I had little desire to go back behind those walls. Or hang. That’s when I happened to catch a few words she whispered.

  Setting my glass on the table, I cleared my throat, and she stopped talking.

  “Did you say . . . baseball bats?”

  Her face paled, and she stared at squashed scorpions on the floor. “Yes.” I barely heard her.

  I killed my bourbon. “Let me get this straight. This major, he breaks into your house, with eight other ballists, and they proceed to beat your husband to death?”

  She didn’t look up.

  “With baseball bats?” I added.

  “Forty inches,” she whispered. “White ash. One was flat.”

  I nodded. “For bunting.”

  “Or pounding a sleeping man’s head to mush.”

  “Baseball bats.” I waved at the barkeep, who sent a strumpet over with more Chicken Cock and another glass. Once the barmaid left, the widow added, without looking up, “Then he ran me out of Contention City as a . . .” Her eyes lifted toward me. I understood.

  “Baseball bats,” I repeated, then killed half of my fresh bourbon and felt that heat rising, turning my ears red, like they were prone to color when some umpire made a bad call or Hank Fuller swung at a pitch a mile over his head.

  “That ain’t right,” I said.

  She had to tell me the story again, but this time I listened. When she finished, I asked, “Isn’t there any law in Contention?”

  “The town marshal is the right fielder. He came with them that night.”

  My head shook, trying to comprehend this outrage. “Folks in town let this go on?”

  “When’s the last time you’ve been to Contention City?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Haven’t been anywhere, ma’am, for three and a half years.”

  “They love their baseball,” she explained. “And Major Perry has never lost a game.”

  I pondered. This Major Perry fielded one of the best baseball clubs in Arizona Territory. Undefeated in six years. Throttled teams from Tombstone and Tucson. Even beat the boys from Bisbee, which had some mighty fine ballists. But when they weren’t dominating a baseball diamond, Contention’s First Nine kept the workers under control. So, when some revolutionary like Mr. Kieberger started talking about improving conditions at the stamp mills, Major Perry and his ballists, including the town’s law dog, would bust into a darkened bedroom and bludgeon the man to death for being an anarchist—with forty-inch bat-sticks.

  Gives ballists like me a bad name.

  “So . . .” I hesitated. “Wh
at do you want of me?”

  When she told me, I sighed. “I haven’t played in years, ma’am.”

  “You played with the prison guards,” she said. “I saw you in a couple of games. I found out about you. That’s what gave me the idea.”

  My head shook. “The guards needed a catcher. It got me out of shoveling caliche or getting tossed into the Snake Den. And we lost plenty of games, even to those velocipede riders on that train to California.”

  Her green eyes hardened. “I said, I found out about you. You could get a team. You could beat Major Perry’s murderers.”

  That gave me pause. I squinted. “What exactly is it you want me to do?”

  She told me.

  “And . . .” I put this kind of delicate. “What’s in it for me?”

  She told me that, too.

  The next eastbound Southern Pacific took me to Lordsburg, New Mexico Territory, where I caught a stage to Silver City and met Hank Fuller in the Copper Tarnish Saloon. Last time I saw Hank, he was a hundred and seventy-seven pounds of baseball prime and on his way to sign with the Louisville Colonels. Now, he topped two-fifty and played for the Fat Fellows. The bib front of his uniform pictured a foaming mug of beer. His meaty right hand held an empty mug, which was getting refilled, again. The Fat Fellows were celebrating their 20-to-6 victory over the Slim Jims. That’s how far Hank Fuller had fallen. He’d gone from playing professional ball to playing for kegs of beer.

  Since the Fat Fellows had won, the Slim Jims bought the beers—and all were drunk—I didn’t have to spend any of the Widow Kieberger’s greenbacks. After the crowd thinned out, or passed out, Hank asked what I wanted. I told him. He asked how much it paid. I told him that, too, which sobered him up right quick.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  “To lay off any pitches a mile over your head,” I said.

  We traveled to Tombstone and sat high up in the grandstands, watching the Contention Millers wallop the home Tigers.

  “Who’s the big guy?” Hank asked.

  I swallowed my peanut. A first baseman who tops two hundred and fifty pounds was asking about a “big guy.” That ought to tell you something about Contention’s baseball team. Only none of Contention’s First Nine carried his weight in his belly. Those boys packed solid muscle, and every time their bat-stick crushed a ball, I envisioned the Widow Kieberger’s unfortunate late husband.

  “That’s Major Perry,” I answered. I knew him because the Widow Kieberger said he played center field. He played it pretty good, too.

  “The third baseman is Caleb Cartwright,” Hank said.

  “You know him?”

  “I played against him when he was with the Pittsburgh Alleghenys. He played last season for that Kansas City club in the National League.”

  “The team the National League kicked out?”

  “Yep. For hooliganism.”

  The Contention Millers didn’t need to resort to hooliganism or beating men to death on this Saturday. Tombstone was awful. The Tigers lost, 35-to-1, but this Major Perry wasn’t the nicest fellow I’d ever seen on a diamond. I mean, the jackass berated his fellow ballists when the third baseman made an error in the eighth inning, allowing Tombstone to score its only run.

  They taunted the poor Tombstone ballists. Major Perry screamed insults at his opponents. His teammates laughed when the Tigers made poor plays. Considering how bruised and bloodied Tombstone’s players looked after the game, you would’ve thought Contention’s First Nine used brass knuckles or billy clubs on the players in the field—which they might have.

  After the slaughter mercifully ended, the Millers tore apart the visiting team’s bench, laughed, and headed for the depot. The Tigers of Tombstone just stared. Nobody protested. Hank drained his beer. “We’ve got to beat this team?”

  Me? I sat there fuming at what I had just witnessed, and I had taken part in some inappropriate behavior on baseball fields. I told Hank, “The Contention Millers have forgotten A.G. Spalding’s prime rule for our sport: ‘To make baseball playing respectable and honorable.’ ”

  Hank shook his head. “They forgot another rule, too, Skip: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

  Rounding up ballists in the Southwest isn’t hard. It’s not even tough to find baseball players who lack ethics. But finding exceptional ballists willing to risk a stay in prison or having their faces pounded to jelly by forty-inch timbers of white ash proved about as taxing as trying to tag out King Kelly when he’s sliding into home. I had to meet up with the Widow Kieberger in Tucson to get more money, but she didn’t put up any fuss. Her husband had been dead for pushing two years now, and she was eager to exact her revenge on Major Perry and his murdering thugs.

  I didn’t ask where she came by such money.

  Finding a Spalding’s Base Ball Guide proved a mite difficult, but that only set me back ten cents in Phoenix, and I needed to bone up on the rules since I had been out of circulation for three and a half years. Prison guards, you see, made up rules they thought appropriate, and didn’t give a fig how the National League or American Association played the game.

  Once I had hired all my accessories—I mean ballists—we practiced just across the border, away from prying eyes. We probably could have swept a three-game series against the territorial prison’s guards, and maybe even whipped those California velocipede riders. But we certainly were not undefeated after four barnstorming seasons.

  Yet that’s what the Tucson Enterprise reported, of course, since I paid the inkslinger one of the Widow Kieberger’s double eagles to print exactly that: that we were undefeated. It’s also what the posters the Widow Kieberger paid to have printed announced, too. I made sure Contention City got some of those posters.

  Sure enough, when the American Zephyrs—Hank came up with that handle for us—played the Tucson Base Ball Team (there’s an original name for a club) on a Friday afternoon, Major Perry arrived by train to see us play.

  “Congratulations,” the major said after our 20-to-nothing victory. He held out his massive right hand.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t accept your hand, sir.” I kept shaking to get the feeling back into my stinging hands. “Masterson wasn’t at his best today, but even his worst hurts like blazes after nine innings.” (Kent Masterson wasn’t at his worst, either, but nigh his best, and my hands remained swollen and numb after catching him.)

  “You don’t wear a mitt, sir?”

  Some catchers did—so did infielders and outfielders who could take the heckling—even in the professional leagues. But you try wearing a mitt playing for and against prison guards. They’d have thrown me in the Snake Den. I shook my head.

  Major Perry praised our pitcher, and lauded Hank’s hitting—Hank hadn’t swung at one bad pitch the whole game—and then the major got down to business. Why, his team down in Contention City was undefeated, too, and he thought a game against us would bring in quite the crowd.

  “We don’t play for beer, sir,” I told him. “We get half the gate and an appearance fee.”

  “What’s the fee?” the major asked.

  I told him.

  He wasn’t smiling, but he said that could be arranged. Had I known that a baseball team could charge that kind of money to play a game, I might’ve avoided forty-two months in the Hellhole.

  Then I got greedy. “And it’s customary for a little wager between the teams.”

  “What do you propose?” he said.

  I grinned. “How about your bat-sticks and all your equipment? We put up the same.”

  He paled, but nodded. A man like him, with an undefeated team, can’t back down from a wager. I was pleased. After we clobbered his team, the major wouldn’t have any bat-sticks to make another anarchist’s wife a widow.

  “How about next Friday?” Major Perry asked.

  My head shook. “Sir, we have to be in Los Angeles in a few days.” I excused myself, found my grip on the bench, opened it, and pulled out a book, which I opened and stared at a
blank page. “I’m sorry to say that we’re booked for all this month,” I lied. “Let’s see. We’re playing the White Stockings on Saturday the twenty-third before going to Detroit the next Monday.”

  Major Perry’s eyes widened. “The White Stockings?” His words come out like a gasp. “In Chicago?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Cap Anson’s a real nice man. And a fine ballist.” The last sentence was the only truthful one I spoke.

  “And Detroit?” Perry asked.

  “The Wolverines,” I said.

  “You . . . play . . . ?”

  My chuckle silenced him. “Sir,” I said, “those are just exhibition games. The National League, you must be aware, doesn’t start its season till later that week. We Zephyrs are just a traveling team of ballists—like the Red Stockings of ’69.” I smiled. “They went undefeated, too, you know.”

  “And you’ve beaten the White Stockings . . .”

  Closing my book, I waved my hand. “Oh, I’m sure if we played Cap’s boys in a full series, we wouldn’t still be undefeated. In fact, Detroit played us close last year. If Hank had not homered in the last inning, well, our record might be a hundred twenty-three and one.”

  I opened the book to another empty page. “I guess, though, if you really want to risk your perfect season, we could squeeze you in . . . would Friday the thirteenth of May work?”

  “Sure,” Major Perry said weakly.

  I closed the book. “We do require half of our appearance fee in advance, sir.”

  He paid that, too—by check, but the bank cashed it without argument—and walked, a mite unsteady, out of the baseball park.

  Inside the nearest saloon, Hank said, “Maybe we should just take that money and skedaddle while we’re ahead.”

  “What about the Widow Kieberger?” I asked, and when Hank just sipped his beer, I added: “Is that what you want to do?”

  “No,” he said. “I’d like to beat those Contention killers.”

  “So would I,” said Masterson, who had pitched for the Boston Beaneaters till the National League found out about his relationship with gamblers.