Tom Sheehan

It began right in front of Chester Hills Saloon in Assumption, when Millie Alcott, walking on the boardwalk, was spun around by a drunk and she fell against the door off the saloon and another man, drunk as he could be and thinking she had just come out of the saloon, grabbed her and tried to pull her back into the saloon with him.

All hell broke loose in the saloon.

Tom Sheehan

Two old line freighters were sitting at the bar in The Horse Collared Saloon in Shiloh West, Nevada. Taubert Wilkins and Josh Willoughby were partners in the W&W Wagon Freight Company since they had come west from Pennsylvania in 1858 and started a freight line between Shiloh West and several mining towns all within 50 or 60 miles, and there had been a good demand for such work from miners.

Tom Sheehan

Elvie Vandergaard was full of spirit, and the Viking blood was in her, “All the way back to kingdom come, in Rafn’s world,” as her father used to say, and all that spirit and all the generations were working on her as the new world of the Americas called on her as they had called on the Vikings of yore. She believed adventure had no equal other than discovery, and the Great Dane, fellow Scandinavian, Carl Christian Rafn, had fed them curiosity with the lethal punch of his Viking travel study, a curiosity that dug deep into Elvie.

Tom Sheehan

Lonnie Belknap, part-time trapper, part-time miner, all-time loner around the Teton Range, sat at a table in Clyde Cassidy’s Saloon, enjoying his first social drink in more than a month. He did not pay any attention to the man and woman arguing on the balcony above him. The small talk of people around him, a bit of bustle in the saloon, some color splashed on the walls and a decent patch of September sun falling in through the window beside him, offered a sense of comfort and fellowship.

Tom Sheehan

From a hidden spot uphill from a pool fed by the River of the Nations, Jobie Trask watched the Indian maiden as she swam in the cool-looking water, all the while perspiration cloaking him where he hunched down between two large rocks. He suspected her to be Cherokee, believed her to be beautiful, and had no idea at all that she was nude.

Tom Sheehan

Knobby Newton stood in admiration as he saw the last nail driven in his new hotel, which he had named Knobby’s Nook and the sign over the front entrance had been put up the night before, in darkness, so that he could surprise the folks of Carson Divide, Wyoming. The sign read “Nestle Here at Knobby’s Nook” and painted pillows adorned each end of the sign. Newton loved that special touch.

Tom Sheehan

In a night of sporadic shooting and civil madness, it was apparent, a most innocent person, Lon Ashbury, was killed by a stray bullet, and his family wanted revenge on the shooter, supposedly a local young man by the name of Ambling Porter. The arrest had been made, witnesses named and summoned, and the judge had been sat before the principles, in the Red Eye Saloon. One of the Ashburys had said, “It sure looked like Ambling Porter who shot Lon, and he was standing there between the bank and the barber shop with a gun in his hand.”

Tom Sheehan

The water trough had been poisoned, his son Ben’s pony the first tell-tale sign where he fell to the ground right beside the trough. Sam Tannwood saw tracks, which were not the pony’s tracks, leading away from the well and cutting into the trees behind the barn. Tannwood thought he might be able to track them later, but it was early morning and he had to get the carcass out of sight before his son Ben woke up.

Tom Sheehan

It happened overnight in Bola City, and Jehrico Taxico, local junk man and businessman, was right there in the middle of things again. The whole town never figured Jehrico to fall in love, be more attracted to a woman than to his love of junk and making things work again, those which had lost the chance or the token push to gain the new chance. Junk searching, junk collecting, junk re-use were Jehrico’s main dishes in life. No mere woman was going to displace such talents.

This is not a story of a mere woman.

Tom Sheehan

The faintest odor, one that was strange to him, came on a breeze as if it was riding on the very edge of that breeze. Job Tribune, new wanderer, most recently the sheriff in the lower territory, deposed of his badge by a nervous Town Council tired of his name constantly in newspaper headlines, saw little of anything in front of him as he topped a slow rise in the trail.