The Reprobates: A Hundred-Proof Tale of the West

By Chuck Lewis

Get ready to ride the range of humor in one of the most entertaining westerns to come down the trail in quite a spell.

The year is 1888, and Johnny Hightree and his cousin Asa Maynard are two old ex-buffalo hunters and frontiersmen who have temporarily settled in the small town of Ralston, Kansas, not far from Dodge City. They are both serious elbow-benders and seem to be in a constant state of semi-inebriation. Johnny, however, has endeared himself to the town's residents with his far-fetched windies and good nature, thereby getting himself elected mayor.

When a fatal shooting occurs in town with several witnesses including Johnny, the town council curiously reduces Johnny's position from mayor to town marshal. Johnny then chooses his half-pickled cousin Asa to be his deputy, and that's when the future of Ralston, Kansas gets changed forever.

With an amusing, rambling style, Johnny Hightree relates the progress of solving a murder that is not as simple as it seemed in the beginning. The outlandish stories he tosses in along the way are funny, earthy, and downright priceless, told at a pace that ends just in time!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 18, 2005
• ISBN: 9780595796656

Chuck Lewis

Chuck Lewis is a member of the Western Writers of America, is the author of When Good Men Ride, Two From the West, and others, and is a literary reviewer for True West magazine. He obviously is also drawn to western movies. He and his wife Pat reside in Wickenburg, Arizona.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THE DAY we all saw Tommy Granger kill Wilt Spanner was when the whole future of Ralston, Kansas took a turn in a different direction. Tommy just walked into Wally Clark’s Tall Grass Saloon with a shotgun and without saying a word he just up and blew away the better part of Wilt’s head and then turned around and walked out again.

We’re not very far from Dodge, so we’ve had a few shootings around here before, but this one was something to see. See it I did, too, because I was standing at the bar having a beer with old Bill Chase when I spotted Tommy coming in with that double-barrel. When that thing went off Bill and I collected a spray of blood and brains on our shirts, and then when Wilt flopped around on the floor he spread all that curdled stuff all over the place. It was messy.

I guess Tommy must have just kept on walking when he got outside, because nobody seemed to stop him. A few minutes later Pelly Knudson came running in acting like he was going to do something about it.

Pelly! What the hell kind of name is that? It didn’t seem to be any kind of shortcut to a regular name, but nobody really cared. After all, he did a fair job as our town marshal, but if we ever had real trouble we’d send word to the sheriff over in Dodge.

Anyway, Pelly came running in and right away slipped in all that gore from Wilt’s head and fell flat on his back onto that wooden floor. I could hear his own head sound out a pretty good thump when he landed, and it put his eyes into a glassy state as he lay there not moving and looking as dead as Wilt was.

I can tell you right now that Pelly didn’t wake up for two days, and when he did he couldn’t quite figure out how to talk. He shook a lot and rolled his eyes and made out like he was gagging on something, so Doc Elliott tied him up in a bed sheet and had Lester Crawford drive him off to Dodge City in a wagon, figuring somebody there might know what to do with him. We heard some time later that poor old Pelly ended up being put on the railroad train and sent off to some big asylum for crazy folks back east somewhere.

After I saw to it that the mess in Wally Clark’s saloon was all cleaned up and all the girls were calmed down—well, not in that order—I figured we needed a new town marshal right quick to officially get some help from the sheriff over in Dodge. See, I could do that because I was the mayor of the town of Ralston.

I didn’t really want the job, but the place only had about three hundred people in it and I figured, what the hell, I had given up buffalo shooting and the folks in these parts knew I could shoot good with a rifle and a revolver, and I was old and wise-looking at fifty-two years old. I took over the job from the last mayor, who was found out to have three wives scattered around the country, so he was embarrassed out of town by the fourteen members of the Ralston Women’s Purity League. So, there I was, ol’ Johnny Hightree, mayor.

I called a meeting of the town council and things only got worse. They all insisted that maybe I should be the new town marshal instead of being the mayor. Well, I couldn’t understand that, so I told them to make up their minds and give me one job or the other, because I didn’t want both.

Well, you should have seen them. You’d have thought I asked them whether they wanted to go to hell today or tomorrow morning.

Well, you’ve been getting sort of restless lately, Johnny, suggested Bart Oakley, so maybe being the marshal might be more exciting for you, what do you think? He sure sounded like he wanted me to agree with him.

Before I could answer, Dan DuFour got going with his ideas. You’d be good at it, Johnny, he crooned at me. You were right there on the scene at Wilt Spanner’s shooting, saw it all, saw the shooter, and then took care of the crowd there at the Tall Grass Saloon, so—

That’s because I was already in there having a drink, you damn fool! I sounded off. There were twenty other people in there, too. Why don’t you make one of them the marshal?

Then came another voice. Can I get serious for a minute, Johnny? asked Hank Potter, then he just kept on talking so I couldn’t say anything. You’re still hard and tough, Johnny, Hank went on, like he was telling a confidence of some kind, and there aren’t many like you in Ralston anymore. You’re more for marshaling than for being mayor, because you’re—you’re—

Save all that wind for election time, I smirked. Who you-all got in mind for mayor, boys?

They all knew I always wanted everything said right out plain and to the point, so Bart nodded across the table and said, We were thinking maybe Dan over there.

Hmm, I grunted, making them think I was trying to unravel their thinking, which I was. Let me see. Dan’s got a lot of money, owns y’all’s favorite whorehouse, although you-all think nobody knows that, and he’s younger than I am, and if I’m marshal maybe I’m so damn old or drunk I’ll manage to topple over and bust my head like poor ol’ Pelly did, or get shot easy, or something like that. Is that it?

They all nodded. Yeah, pretty much, they all said.

I had to laugh at them, so I did. Can I be a real marshal, or do I have to just play at it?

You’re one of the fairest men we know, Johnny, said the next mayor, Dan DuFour. You do your job any way you see fit.

Well, I was already getting excited about it and pretty much ready to shoot somebody right then. I want Asa Maynard for a deputy, I said.

Their eyebrows went up like levitating caterpillars. Tin Cup Maynard?

Him and me was shooting Indians and other folks before most of you-all even came out here, I let them know. They already did know that, and most of the men on the council weren’t much younger than I was, and Joe Rafter was even a few years older. But I wanted to sound like the old experienced frontiersman I really was, so I got dramatic about it.

Can you keep him sober? Dan wanted to know.

I nodded and grinned. He shoots just as good when he’s drunk.

Suddenly none of us could keep from chuckling together, because we were all thinking about his name of Tin Cup and how he got it.

Asa was actually a cousin of mine, and as soon as we had shucked out of those gray britches right after the war ended we headed west to get rich killing buffalo. There wasn’t much worth staying for on our family farms back there in Tennessee, what with them growing mostly rocks and trying to feed too many mouths, so we came west. We did good, too, made a lot of money, wandered around for a few years, and had a few Indian fights.

We retired as frontiersmen and got caught up in the cattle buying-and-selling business, but I didn’t like that at all. Asa didn’t much, either, so we just hung around all the saloons and whorehouses we could find, did a lot of drinking and gambling, and were generally just plain loafers. We found Ralston just in time to slow down and save our souls and we sometimes sobered up and wore cleaner clothes. Some of the other men around town liked the adventurous

windies I always told, and damned if it didn’t get me elected mayor. Asa just sort of hung around drinking a lot.

One night when he was especially full of whiskey, Asa came out with the oddest thing I ever heard a man say, and the cowboys sitting nearby ended up losing control of themselves.

Asa was staring directly down at the top of the brown glass bottle of whiskey in front of him, and I could see he was deep in thought for a minute before he spoke. I can’t drink out of a bottle no more, he then said in a shaky voice, Looking at it like this, it looks just like somebody’s asshole!

Well, the cowboys started hooting and getting sick from laughing so much, and I was stunned almost sober. I was afraid to ask who that somebody might be that Asa had mentioned, but think about that for a minute: If a man grows up poor in a house with no mirrors, goes to war, shoots buffalo and Indians, and generally leads a regular wooly man’s life, how does he get to know what a human asshole looks like? I’ve never seen my own, have you? I can’t imagine bending around far enough so’s I could get a look at it.

Poor Asa. He blubbered a lot that night while everybody else laughed, but he never did drink out of a bottle again. He said he couldn’t get that picture out of his mind, and the thought of raising that little, round, brown opening to his mouth set him to shivering, so he just started drinking that dark whiskey out of small shot-glasses. That worked until one night some cowboy stood over Asa’s shoulder and looked down into his shot-glass full of whiskey.

You know something, Asa? said the cowboy. That only looks like a bigger asshole!

Well, Asa saw the truth of that in a hurry, then jumped up and let loose with a string of the most vile curse words I ever heard him put together at one time. He swore for a full minute and never repeated himself. It was a masterpiece of profanity. Lord, I was so proud of him!

Asa’s final solution was to start carrying around his own big tin cup to drink out of, and that put an end to it all because nobody could ever remember seeing a big, tin-rimmed asshole on anybody or anything, so Asa was able to enjoy his drinking in peace afterwards. But the boys all called him Tin Cup afterwards. They had tried to make up something out of his name, like Asa Hole or suchlike, but they had to settle for just plain Tin Cup. He thought it added to the color of his reputation as a heroic frontiersman. Me, I just called him Asa, or maybe once in awhile just Tin, but Tin Cup sounded too silly for a real frontiersman.

I found him in the third saloon I looked into—we only had three—and when I told him I was the new town marshal and that he was my deputy, you should have seen his face. It was as if I had made him eat a persimmon that wasn’t ripe yet, he carried on so. He coughed and smacked his face and shivered like one of those falling-down sinners at a tent meeting. Then he took a big swallow from his tin cup and clunked it down on the table.

I’m right behind you, partner, he shouted, although I don’t think he knew how loud he was sometimes when he was drinking. Who do we shoot first?

And that was when the whole future of Ralston, Kansas took a turn in a different direction.

CHAPTER 2

SOME MIGHT say that being only a town marshal I had no official authority to follow up on Wilt Spanner’s shooting. Since the shooter, Tommy Granger, lived outside the town limits, it seemed obvious the whole matter should be the sheriff’s job.

Well, I wasn’t about to go all the way to Dodge City so I could tell the sheriff about a killing that I didn’t know anything about, other than the fact that I had witnessed the deed. There was no doubt that Tommy had shot and killed Wilt, and that it wasn’t much of a fight or anything, and it’s a sure bet that Wilt hadn’t seen it coming. Or had he?

First off, I went to see Wilt’s widow. The family lived on the edge of town in a large house that had the looks of belonging to a prosperous business man. Well, it had, once. The previous resident was a man named Homer Woodlawn, who made a lot of money back in New York someplace making pearl buttons and other pearly doodads. I never knew there was so much money to be made in such a calling, or Asa and I would have gone over to California to mine for pearls out of the Pacific Ocean. I don’t know how they make buttons out of those round pearls, though, and it seems they’d be tough to sew on a shirt.

We had a tailor in Ralston who might have known about pearl buttons, although I never was sure that he always kept his mind on his work. Pete Jodl, his name was. He pronounced it Yodel, so I always thought he might be from Switzerland—they like to yodel over there—but he didn’t have a funny accent, so I guess he wasn’t. Well, he had a sweet young woman working for him in his shop, and near as I can remember, her name was Rose, or some kind of a flower name. It wasn’t Hyacinth, or Petunia, or a long one like that. It only had one sound to it, so I think it was Rose. I can’t think of any other flower with just one sound to it. Now that I say that, you’ll think of one right off, I suppose.

Anyway, Rose had been in a house fire once and one whole side of her face was pruned up with a big scar, but the other half was real pretty. If you walked into the shop and saw her from the good side, you’d gulp at the sight of such a beauty. If you ever saw the other side first, though, you’d feel sorry for her and set about tearing up both your shirts so she could mend them for you. Beyond that, her figure was as well put together as those gals in the little pictures you get in a can of tobacco sometimes. Of course I never saw Rose wearing any of that gauzy cloth you could see through, but I was sure Pete the tailor did. I went into his shop one time and didn’t see either him or Rose there, but I heard a lot of grunting in the back room, with high voices moaning and rising up and down an octave or two. I figured Pete was trying to teach Rose how to yodel, so I left without disturbing them.

Wilt Spanner bought that pearl-button man’s big house so he could have room for his family. His wife had borne him twenty-one children, can you imagine? Three of them had died as babies, but that left eighteen kids, meaning twenty people were living in that house. All those kids evened out, though, at nine boys and nine girls. I hate to think of all the necessary things that had to be done in that house, or maybe out behind it, but it’s a scary thought to think of that many folks squatting and standing in one place for very long, but they seemed to make out alright.

When I first met Wilt and he told me he had a wife and eighteen surviving children still living at home, I was waiting for him to apologize for a few of them being a little bit addle-brained or having crookedy bodies, or something, but he never did. For good reason, I guess, because I eventually got around to seeing all of them at some time or other, and they all seemed normal. One of the youngest girls had pure white hair and white eyebrows and one blue eye and one brown eye, but by golly, she was as normal as the rest of them. I thought she might be an albino, but when Doc Elliott and I were getting drunk together one night he told me she wasn’t an albino, it’s just that when Wilt made her as a baby he was probably thinking about all that winter snow outside and Missus Spanner was praying for spring to get here, so their love juices got all mixed up and didn’t know what to do. Doc was pretty drunk when he told me that, but I didn’t know a better answer and he was a doctor, so I just had another drink. I sure wish I knew as much as Doc about things like that.

Wilt was a cattle buyer and made a lot of money. He was well-known around