The Rustlers of Rattlesnake Ridge

It had been a bad year for Silver Vein. For one thing, silver was next to worthless. For another thing, Silver Vein had been misnamed right from the get-go and never did have, and never would have, any silver. One guy who lived in a cave a few years earlier had claimed to have found some silver, and eve-ryone went nuts and built a town on top of what was probably a lie.

The thing about something like the idea of silver is—which is totally different than the knowledge of its actual existence—there was always someone willing to buy someone’s worthless claim and fruitless-ly dig in the dirt for a while, and then sell that worthless hole in the earth to some other hopeful fool. Silver Vein existed largely on the stupidity of the misled. But now, because the government got off the silver standard, the entire dream of striking it rich by finding silver no longer made any sense.

For my part, I was doing all right. People came into my saloon (Curly’s Saloon) to drink during both good times and bad. Those that drank in my saloon were a far surlier sort these days. Instead of a room full of happy, jabbering drunks, more often the miners would get angry and turn to fighting each other. Many of the miners would slowly sip on a toot of bourbon that only a year earlier they would have slugged down with gusto and asked for more. I’d had to whomp a lot more people on account of this new surliness. So much so that my whomping arm would sometimes be sore when I went to bed at night. I’m a right-handed whomper, and my right arm was noticeably bigger than my left. Some nights I’d whomp up to a dozen surly miners and march four or five to jail.

It was a Friday night, which meant nothing because weekends hadn’t been invented yet, and I looked down at the end of the bar of my saloon at two of my least favorite people whispering in each other’s ear about something. One of them was all but deaf, so the whispering probably had no effect at all, de-spite all the head nodding going on. Ely Turner, who basically owned the town, had a lot to lose if the miners and everyone else figured out once and for all that Silver Vein was basically a sham. And Pap Kickins, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Silver Vein—a scurrilous rag full of innuendo, malarkey, and political ineptitude, especially when it came to anything to do with some of my exploits as sheriff—were up to something. Luckily, the newspaper only ever came out when old Pap remembered to publish something, which was hardly ever. He was on in years now, so his days of stirring up trouble, which he had in the past excelled at, were mostly over.

Or so I thought. But seeing the two of them talking to each other got me to thinking they were up to no good. Ely Turner was not one to do anything but look down on others and rarely spoke to anyone at all unless he wanted to sell something overpriced to somebody. But there they were, the two of them, in my saloon, nodding and laughing and carrying on like the best of friends.