Waltzing With Tumbleweeds Read Online Free

this man used her.”
    “I will put that on report.” He drew his shoulders up square and looked very official.
    “I hope you do more than the last commander we had here. He did little about such bad things. There is more.”
    “More?” He frowned.
    “Yes, last month, the beef they sent us was too tough to eat. I saved this jaw bone from one of them.” She drew it from her pocket and shoved the polished bone at the man. “See he had even lost his teeth. So old and stringy you couldn’t even make shoes from his meat.”
    “I understand, Mrs. Macon. There have been many things wrong here and I will correct them.”
    “I am Alberta, wife of Nah-tice.”
    “Yes, Alberta,” he corrected himself. “I will see to these things at once.”
    She turned and shared a look at the knot of Apache men standing back at a respectable distance, listening to her complaining. She spoke to them in their tongue.
    “I know this man. He is an honorable man and will be fair to us. I have told him our worst troubles.”
    They nodded they heard her. Satisfied, they turned and went about their business. With that completed, she called to her children swinging on the hitch rail to go with her. Of course, he would see to them, she knew this man well.

Appeared in the March 1991 Darlington Times, Darlington, Md.

Heroes Were Never Born
     
    They were buffalo hunters. And they were out of work because the slaughter of the southern herd was over. A handful of grizzly, unbathed buckskinners that lounged around Rosarita’s cantina across the New Mexico line. Four men who lazed around, drinking bad whiskey, whiling away the money left from the final sales of hides and lamenting the end of a way of life.
    “All the buffaloes are gone,” Mulky Nelson said aloud with choking emotions rising in his normally tough voice. Earlier that morning, he had considered biting down on the .50-70 caliber Sharps hexagon muzzle and using his toe on the trigger to end his misery.
    Whatever would he do? For a decade, he had hunted the wooly devils. Flush from the sale of robes, he always spent his earnings on voluptuous doves, cards and good whiskey. He didn’t miss the overindulgence in pleasure as much as the exhilaration of squinting down his gun sights, squeezing off the trigger and seeing the shaggy beast fall dead.
    At the end of each day, his ears rang from the muzzle blasts, his shoulder was tender from the powerful recoil and both his arms ached from helping the skinners peel off the hides. The copper musk of butchering in his nose, his fingers stiff from drying blood, Mulky ate handfuls of raw liver to restore his manhood. Even the buzzards, too full to fly, appreciated him. Damn. Those days were gone forever.
    Mulky hated to see men like Measles Hankins, Big Dee Thompson and Ike Woolford sitting around in sullen depression. They deserved an ending better than that.
    For a moment, he considered going the fifty yards to see Estelle, the settlement’s only lully-tropping-woman, but the notion soon passed, having little appeal to him.
    “Tell me something,” he said, beckoning to Rosarita, the thick-bodied saloon owner.
    “Yes?” she asked. looking standoffish across the bar.
    “Are they all dead?” he asked, realizing the liquor was twisting his tongue.
    “Yes.”
    “Good, I didn’t want one of them left out there.”
    “When will you quit asking me?” she demanded. “Every last gawdamn buffalo is dead.”
    “I heard you,” he said growing angry. The least, the woman with the fine black hair on her upper lip could say, was , ‘Maybe there is one more left.’
    He turned and mildly studied a new customer coming in the door: a lanky cowboy with jingling spurs, a fresh kerchief around his throat and a washed, clean shaven face.
    Mulky heard him order a rye. Ha, he thought, that fat woman gets all her whisky from the same barrel of swill.
    “You guys are hunters, ain’t ye?” he asked them in his deep Texas drawl.
    No one bothered to answer