Someone to Live For by Steven McCann

The Long Branch Drink-Off was Henry Palmer’s idea. The faro dealer and parttime pimp made sure everyone who came through the tables recognized his genius for planning the event, even though all he did was slip the idea to Chalkey Beeson after five too many rounds of sour mash. The Drink-Off would be an ironic celebration of the new temperance law Kansas passed banning the sale and consumption of liquor, which everyone knew was unenforceable outside of Topeka. The Drink-Off would encourage boozers across the county to swarm the saloon for a night, and the proceeds would go toward the future monthly $100 fine Beeson would pay the state for breaking the law.

Palmer treated it as a de facto bachelor party. He scandalized few and surprised none with his engagement to Ms. Dora Vail, a marriage he boasted would save her from her life of whoring. Left unsaid was that he had been her procurer and chose to marry her out of a murderous jealousy that nearly killed a customer when he grew too familiar. Dora was a young woman of twenty-two to Palmer’s thirty-eight, though she acted ten years his senior. She was aloof by the standards of sporting women, never initiating contact with her johns. She never turned down a client, but she never said more than two words to them and usually made them feel lonelier than they had been before they met her.

They felt the loneliness she felt. Even after two years, she still longed for Nate Hardin. The cowboy was her age, inexperienced with women, and over-experienced with life. She expected him to take her from her brutal pimp in Austin. He left with the rest of his company for Wyoming instead. She saved herself from Texas and landed in Kansas, hardly an improvement.

Palmer provided for her. Palmer cared for her. But marriage to Palmer would be a life condemned to lying about her feelings for him in order to have a roof over her head where she would bear his children and likely be left to raise them alone. She questioned whether the cost was worth it.

Nate Hardin raced sixteen-year-old Oliver Allen to the Arkansas River alongside Dodge City and realized he was losing his touch with horses. Oliver’s widower father was a former Jayhawker who transitioned to small-time ranching after the war and purchased cattle from Nate’s company. Old Man Allen let him lodge there on his way south to Texas. Old Man had known enough desperate men on the run in his life to not question why Nate chose to leave Wyoming so close to Winter.

The increasingly icy weather postponed the remainder of Nate’s southward ride. The coming Drink-Off was the one benefit to being marooned in Ford County. Nate was a consummate drinker, but he kept the worst of his habit out of sight of young Oliver. He admired Nate more than he had any right to. Oliver hadn’t seen much outside of Kansas, and Nate was a window to a wild life which he revealed to Oliver through stories of cattle raids along the Rio Grande that he himself had heard from old-timers at Oliver’s age.

Oliver reached the river first. Nate envied his youth, and concealing his low spirits with an arrogant grin, he caught up to the kid.

“You know, we did bet on that race,” Nate said.

“I’ll take your earnings from the Drink-Off,” Oliver said.

“So sure I’d win, huh?”

The Drink-Off was a week away. Neighborhood drunks had signed their names in the ledger. Heavy drinkers from nearby Caldwell braved the cold to set up in town. Those who weren’t participating in the Drink-Off were making wagers on the winners of the contest.

Nate pointed to a few boozers he knew from saloons in Abilene. “Half those men are gonna be rolling in the mud come Friday.”

“That’d be something to see,” Oliver said.

“It wouldn’t be nothing more than it is,” Nate said. Oliver’s father was dry but tolerated Nate’s tendencies so long as he kept it in the barn. His father’s extreme temperance fueled Oliver’s bizarre interest in the vices of other men.

“I’ll be in the Long Branch when you’re done with that order,” Nate said.

“I’ll meet you in there.”

“Like Hell. Your old man will hang me the first chance he gets.”

“I’m no boy.”

“But you’re his boy. You wait a while, then I’ll take you in next time we’re in town. Hell, you can watch me at the Drink-Off.”

That was enough for Oliver to agree to wait around while Nate stepped into the Long Branch. The saloon was nothing special. A few pictures hung from otherwise bare walls, and an unpolished mirror hung behind the bar. Nate leaned over and asked to register for the Drink-Off. The bartender told him he’d be in a line of twenty other men still waiting for Chalkey to sign them up. He received his first drink on the house for the inconvenience.

He stared at the dirty mirror and lamented the lines on a face overexposed to the sun and soil. When a door opened behind him, he watched his past walk out of the room.

She floated across the floor like a ghost. His gaze followed her auburn curls, and she politely nodded to a few leathery men. Her strained smile dissipated when she noticed the cowhand at the bar approach her.

Nate’s words lodged themselves in his throat, and he swallowed them back into his heart. He never said a proper goodbye to Dora Vail before leaving Texas. He wasn’t sure he could say a proper hello. She lifted that burden for him.

“I thought you’d be in Wyoming.”

“I was.”

“Not anymore?”

“It was a little cold there,” he said.

“It’s cold here, too.”

“It just got a little warmer.”

Heads turned toward the two. No one had ever seen Ms. Vail say more than a few words to a man in public, even to her fiancé.

“Buy you the usual?”

Dora’s attention flew to the leering men against the wall. They quickly looked toward the saloon doors. “You’re two years too late.”

“Wyoming wasn’t no place for you.”

“Neither was Austin.”

“This ain’t no place for you, neither.”

“I’ve made it work.”

She stepped away.

He took her hand. “See you tonight?”

She pulled her hand away. “Good day, sir.”

He watched her walk toward the door and into the arms of a thin man with greased hair and a silver watch chain. The man whispered to her. He watched Nate with the flaming eyes of an angry bull before pulling her away.

Nate lingered around the saloon until Oliver called for him. He stayed quiet on the ride back to the Allen Ranch. Dora had been the only woman he desired the past two years despite leaving her for the north. He wouldn’t leave her behind this time. They arrived home, and Nate told Oliver he forgot something in town.

“You said you’d take me to the Long Branch next time,” Oliver said.

“It ain’t nothing you need to be a part of.”

“It’s a girl, isn’t it?”

“That obvious?”

Oliver had almost no experience with women beyond the few he saw in his sporadic trips to town. He had never been in proper love. But he recognized that it wasn’t the whiskey that made Nate’s cheeks rosy.

Nate returned to the Long Branch by sundown. He couldn’t see Dora among the crowd of patrons, but he saw the fiery-eyed man Dora left with dealing faro at the far tables. He caught Nate staring, and Nate averted his gaze for the mirror where he saw two men standing behind him.

“Problem?”

The smaller of the two men had a thick mustache and hangdog eyes. “My name’s Chalkey Beeson. I’m the owner of this establishment.”

Dora had pushed the Drink-Off to the fringe of Nate’s mind. Beeson pulled it back.

“I was hoping to sign up for your contest.”

“I’ll have to dash your hopes then,” Chalkey said. “We’re full.”

“I’ll pay double the fee.”

“Actually, we’re full tonight, as well, so I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“There’s standing room.”

“Not for you,” the doorman said.

“I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

Chalkey waved toward the faro dealer. “I know cowboying is lonely work. I’ve been there. But that doesn’t give you a reason to start chasing after a man’s fiancé.”

Nate stared at the faro dealer and put the puzzle together. He scoffed. “Is that what pimps call sporting women around here?”

“See, that’s the kind of remark that makes you unwelcome here,” Chalkey said. “I’m asking nicely. Mister Palmer there? He won’t ask.”

Nate didn’t respond before the doorman shoved him from the bar and towards the door. He pushed his weight into the last shove and tripped Nate over the steps. Nate ignored the jeers of the drunks and removed himself from the mud.

He lingered at a neighboring saloon until sunrise, watching the doors of the Long Branch. When the faro dealer left, he immediately waved him down.

“What the hell do you want, cowboy?”

He pulled out the standard rate for a girl.

Palmer glared at the cash in Nate’s hand. “She ain’t available.”

“When she is, here’s my offer.”

“Why don’t you quit while you still got your pretty little teeth?”

Nate opened his satchel further. He revealed its full contents, the reason for fleeing Wyoming.

“That’s to buy her off of you.”

Palmer struck him with enough force to knock him backward. Nate charged, but Palmer’s wide reach held him back.

He grabbed the cowboy, slammed him against a nearby wall, then pushed his elbow against his throat. “I’ll say it only once. You come near me or her again, you step foot in this saloon, and I’ll kill you dead.”

Palmer stepped away with the eyes of Dodge City’s night owls and early risers fixated on the two men.

DORA SWORE THAT he was only an old customer. Palmer didn’t believe her. He told her to stay away from the Long Branch from then on and warned her that men reentering a whore’s life couldn’t be trusted. He knew that there had been love between the two.

She wished she had been less brusque with Nate. She expected a happier reunion. She found reality unromantic compared to dreams.

Palmer returned at dawn in a foul mood. He moaned that Chalkey treated him like some card cutter when he was proving the brains of the Long Branch, moaned that he missed Dodge’s glory days when he could have set up his own establishment. He moaned about everything except Nate, but Dora knew him well enough to understand the real source of his anger. He whined himself to sleep while she reassured him she wouldn’t leave, but she had never felt more distant from him than that moment. Her ambitions to leave Kansas behind reignited, ambitions left dormant from the security they provided her.

The cowboy wasn’t hard to find. He never wandered far from saloons in town, and the Saratoga wasn’t a far walk. When she entered, he was well soaked but far from the worst she had seen him.

He snorted when he saw her. “Will I get a wedding invite?”

“It would be a little awkward.” She pulled the next shot away and ordered him some coffee.

“I’d make a fine minister. Hell, even a flower girl.”

“I’d have preferred you at the altar,” she said.

“Still could have me there.”

“Be serious.”

“I am. You ran off once. You could do it again.”

“I can’t leave him.”

“Do you love him?”

“That ain’t got nothing to do with it,” she said. “I ain’t losing a roof over my head for love.”

“Do you love me?”

“Don’t do this right now.”

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Like we wanted to.”

“I ain’t going back to Texas.”

“I never said Texas.”

“Where then?”

He shrugged. “There’s work down in Arizona.”

“What else is down there?”

“Why don’t we find out?”

THEY MADE PLANS to hop a train during the Drink-Off, when most of the town’s wandering eyes would look toward the Long Branch. Nate avoided the Long Branch but couldn’t avoid Dora’s window in the late evening hours when Palmer was away at the tables. He tucked his gun between his belt and hid it under his jacket in the event of a confrontation, in defiance of the firearms ordinance.

He explained the situation to Oliver, who had been foolish enough to explain it to his father. Old Man Allen didn’t enjoy the talk of men running off with whores and despised the influence it would have on Oliver. He said as much to Nate, who brushed his concerns off.

“He ain’t a boy. He’s gotta know something of the world other than your few acres.”

But he still restrained his words around the kid. One morning Oliver saw him hiding his loot in his pillow. He didn’t ask the source. Nate shoved it back into his purse without a word. The revelation didn’t shatter Oliver’s image of Nate, but he learned there was another side to him that the joking and drinking didn’t reveal.

Oliver knew that Nate would leave soon and wished he could join him. His and the Old Man’s relationship strained against the weight of Nate’s presence. The Old Man realized he was losing his son and prayed that as his son came into manhood the lessons of hard work and temperance he had tried imparting on the boy from an early age wouldn’t be dashed under the influence of ramblers like Nate Hardin.

SHE WATCHED NATE slip away into the rainy sunrise. It had been the longest he stayed with her that week, and that time, he took the risk of entering the house. With the contest set for the following night, Palmer would be up to his neck in preparations and wouldn’t arrive early to interrupt.

Palmer walked in soon after he left. He was tired and agitated as usual. He grumbled and ignored her questions. His eyes focused on the unlatched window and on the mud left behind from Romeo’s entrance.

“Smells like horse in here,” he said.

Dora revealed nothing despite the relentless strikes she endured from Palmer’s hands. Her cries for help were unanswered. The neighbors who heard knew better than to interfere with Palmer. His anger refocused from her toward that damned drifter, and he grabbed his Derringer from his dresser and left Dora inside to mourn her future.

NATE RETURNED IN time to watch Oliver storm away. Oliver mounted his horse without a word and threw her into a lope for Dodge City while Old Man Allen followed out the door. The Old Man had found a half-drunk bottle in Oliver’s room. He confronted his son and threatened to send him away. Oliver yelled at the Old Man for still treating him like a child and fled.

“I’ll go grab him,” Nate said.

“You’ve done enough,” the Old Man said.

“He ain’t gonna listen to you,” Nate said. “You going after him’s the worst thing you could do right now. He needs time away and a short breath, and I’ll bring him back.”

The Old Man glared at him. “You know I can’t keep you around here anymore.”

“Don’t worry,” Nate said. “I won’t be around here much longer.”

Oliver outraced Nate to Dodge City and ended up in the Long Branch. Nate saw the kid hunched over an untouched shot. He remembered Palmer’s warning and tried waving Oliver out. He decided it was worth the risk and stepped inside. Oliver stared into the shot glass like it was a mirror. Nate grabbed it from his spot.

“Finish it for you?”

“Take me with you and the girl?” Oliver asked.

“You already got a home. A nice one. Your pa’s tough, but that’s because he cares about you.”

“I wish he cared less. I can’t be stuck here.”

“You won’t be. You’ll get your chance to live. But don’t do it by following me. I ain’t no one to take after, being alone and on the run. You gotta live for someone else, someone to take care of and look after. They’re the ones that make all this worth it.”

He swallowed the bourbon and Oliver followed him from the bar. He noticed the large doorman enter, and he spun Oliver around the back to avoid him. He knew word would reach Palmer that he had been in the Long Branch. His feet moved fast toward the livery stable.

“Some guy’s following us.”

Nate didn’t look back. “Tall man? Skinny with a thick mustache and slick hair?”

“Yeah. He’s getting faster.”

Nate choked back air. “Go ahead of me.”

“What?”

“Get to your horse.”

He nudged Oliver forward. He spun around to face the faro dealer and reached for his belt. Palmer’s arm stretched towards him, and he saw a silver gleam in the faro dealer’s sleeve. He grabbed his gun, and he heard a small pop. Smoke billowed from Palmer’s sleeve, and Nate felt a searing burn between his ribs. He drew his gun and cocked it. He heard another pop and felt a fire erupt in his stomach.

Nate dropped his gun and stumbled towards Oliver. The kid stood frozen as Nate bled from his stomach and lost his footing in the mud. He told Oliver to go home, and he looked up at the gray sky while clutching his wound. He cried that he was shot, and a crowd surrounded him. He watched the rain clouds above him and wished he could have died on a clear day.

THE OLD MAN found Oliver loading his old coach gun. He recognized the pain in the boy’s eyes. He experienced the same pain during the war and watched the bloody paths it took men down.

“They killed Nate,” Oliver said.

“And how is that gonna fix it?”

Oliver continued loading the weapons Old Man once made his trade from. He stood in the doorway to block Oliver from leaving.

“Let the law handle it.”

“You know they won’t.”

“So, you kill the man. Then what? You’re gonna kill the marshal when he tries to arrest you? Am I gonna watch my eldest boy get hung because of this?”

“I’m not a boy.”

“You’re my boy,” Old Man said. “And I’m not gonna lose you. Put the guns down.”

Oliver obeyed his father and embraced him. He set the guns aside and wept, again a young boy in his father’s arms.

They released Palmer quickly. The county attorney didn’t press charges since Nate pulled the gun first, and Palmer’s hand slipped gratuities to the city marshal and the attorney. A fine for a concealed weapon was the heaviest punishment he received.

The news reached Oliver before it reached Old Man. Old Man said goodnight to Oliver with no response that night. The boy had slipped away with his horse and guns. Old Man Allen, who once lived for fighting, prayed forgiveness for his son’s sins.

Crowds flocked outside the Long Branch for the contest. He asked directions to Palmer’s house and found it at the north edge of town. He snuck along the perimeter with the shotgun and awaited his arrival, hand trembling over the hammer. He heard a noise inside the house and checked the window. He found a young woman inside who stared down the edge of a knife held close to her chest. He pounded the glass on the window. She looked at him but kept the knife close. He walked to the entrance, found the door unlocked, and invited himself in. He set the gun aside and approached her. She pulled away.

He offered his hand. He reached toward hers and held the knife. She slipped it into his hand, and he tossed it aside. She was pale, her eyes black, her mind in ribbons. He said her name and told her that he knew Nate. He helped her up and took her with him away from Dodge City.

They stopped at the ranch and left enough of Nate’s loot for Old Man, Oliver’s personal apology for fleeing. They had no time to reach the train and packed enough provisions to ride to Caldwell. They bonded over their shared love for Nate Hardin. He insisted on accompanying her until she was settled in a new place. He knew Nate wouldn’t have wanted her alone again. He would have someone to live for, someone to take care of and look after.

“I could at least try to take you where you two were headed,” he said.

“He mentioned Arizona.”

“What’s down in Arizona?”

She smiled at him while the sun rose and revealed the long and muddy trail ahead of them.

“Why don’t we don’t we find out?”

STEVEN MCFANN is a writer born and raised in California. His lifelong passion for the history of the American West was sparked by childhood visits to the Autry Museum, his teenage love for the work of Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, and the western-inspired art of his uncle Gary McFann, as well as the art of his grandfather’s cousin, celebrated western artist Don Crowley. He has written articles for the entertainment website ScreenRant and is the author of the Substack blog “Fool’s Gold,” which details the history of California from the Gold Rush to WWI. Counting the likes of James Ellroy, Hubert Selby Jr, and Larry McMurtry as his influences, he is currently working on a novel based on a real team of infamous train robbers in the San Joaquin Valley, an extended blog series on Gold Rush bandit Joaquin Murrieta, as well as a screenplay centered on Los Angeles in the violent days of the Gold Rush. When not writing or working as a stagehand, he loves reading, listening to music, and exploring the southwest’s majestic deserts. Find him on Twitter @SadCowboiVibes.