Coyote Cal--Tales from the Weird West by Milo James Fowler

Author:Milo James Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: weird western, western, horror collection, humor, action adventure
Publisher: Effervescent Press
Published: 2017-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Boom Town

1. From the Wild

The town of Arroyo Seco was a rowdy, crowded place filled to overflowing with miners, gamblers, whores, and drunks. There were no laws to be kept—besides the Code of the West, and it was more a set of unwritten guidelines that only those with an ounce of integrity actually followed. There were no lawmen, and few feared God, let alone man. Not many parsons had ever dared set foot in town for fear of their lives. The men and women of Arroyo Seco cared for only one thing besides their unguilty pleasures, and that was striking it rich. Anything or anyone that stood in their way? Quickly removed without a second thought.

So it goes without saying that Arroyo Seco was no place to bring up a child. These folks knew it full well, and that's why there were no children in town.

Except for one.

His name was Calvin.

Twelve years old, smart, strong, and tall for his age, Calvin wore his sandy hair pulled back in a stubby pigtail and kept a sharp hunting knife sheathed at his belt. Trotting along faithfully beside him was a wild coyote, his best friend in the whole world. He looked out for himself. So did the coyote.

Once upon a time, his mother had worked at the town's most popular saloon—the Mother Lode. Her unexpected pregnancy scared off his father, the coward. She'd been left all alone, working to raise her son the only way she could. There was no charity in Arroyo Seco, and she'd been bound by contract to the saloon owner, a vicious drunk by the name of Jake Salas. He was a dangerous man, and she would have risked her own life and that of her unborn child by attempting any sort of escape.

You'd think she would have been ashamed of her profession, and many a time she was, but the heaviest burden she bore was the memory of giving birth to her newborn son out in the wilderness and leaving him there to die.

She'd come to realize there was no way she could possibly raise a child in this town—not in her line of work anyways, and not around the men she serviced. She'd drunk herself to sleep that night after staggering back into town bloody and miserable.

But when she'd woken up the next day, she couldn't believe what she had done. She went out to where she'd left her baby only to find a mess of tracks from a pack of coyotes. There'd been no blood. Believing she'd left her son to be devoured by wild animals, she returned to her room above the saloon and wept until she could do so no more.

But that's not where this story ends, of course. In some ways, that's right where it begins.

For you see, a few years later, a young boy walked into the middle of Arroyo Seco buck naked. The poor woman recognized him straightaway with some magical power only a mother could possess. Five-year-old Calvin couldn't understand human speech at the time, but she took him in and cared for him, her long-lost son.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.