Contention and Other Frontier Stories by Hazel Rumney

Author:Hazel Rumney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Published: 2019-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

W. Michael Farmer has published short stories in anthologies, and award-winning essays. His novels include: Killer of Witches, 2016 Will Rogers Medallion Award winner; Mariana’s Knight, 2017 New Mexico–Arizona Book Award winner for Historical Fiction; and Blood of the Devil, 2017 New Mexico–Arizona Book Award finalist for Adventure–Drama and Historical Fiction.

ACES AND EIGHTS

BY MICHAEL R. RITT

No one had struck it rich in Nuggettown for some time now. I always figured that the name must have been somebody’s idea of a joke. Nuggets weren’t exactly jumping out of the ground, and any resemblance between this place and something as civilized as an actual town was purely accidental.

The Lady Belle Mine was the only one in town that had produced any significant quantities of gold. The rest of the outfits were small claims, like the one belonging to me and Pete, using rockers and sluice boxes that barely showed enough color to keep the owner of the claim in grub and liquor money on a day-to-day basis.

To be fair, I guess that the town wasn’t all that bad. It was young and it was rough, but it had a future. There was talk of the Colorado Central Railroad building a spur line up the mountain to haul the ore from the Lady Belle. We had four saloons, a blacksmith, the assay office, a general store, and three eating houses. We also had a hotel being built, which, when finished, would be the biggest building in Nuggettown. We even had a Methodist circuit rider come through once a month to preach a sermon to the miners and sing hymns.

The street that ran through the center of town wasn’t anything more than a mud-filled, rutted path that the freight wagons used to haul ore down the side of the mountain to Denver, and haul supplies back up. An overnight soaker had left about six inches of mud that sucked at my boots as I waded from one side of the street to the other. I had checked out most of his usual hangouts, but I hadn’t found my buddy, Pete, anywhere.

Sloshing through the mud, I made my way across the street to Otto’s Saloon. Being constructed of rough-hewn lumber, Otto’s was one of a dozen buildings in Nuggettown. The rest of the town’s dwellings were old Army tents sold as surplus to prospectors after the war. Otto’s was currently the largest building in town, having a second story of rooms that were mostly rented out for an hour at a time. It was a nice day out, being early June, and someone had propped open the door with an old wooden beer crate with “Schueler & Coors” painted on the side.

There is a particular aroma that is characteristic of anyplace that men congregate to socialize. A strangely inviting mixture of beer, smoke, unwashed bodies, and horses hung in the air. A saloon was a damned fine place and I took a deep breath as I stood in the doorway for a few seconds to let my eyes adjust to the dim light inside.

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