The Bitter Draw: From the Front Porch
October 14, 2025 Stories
The porch boards creaked as the morning stretched across the field. Brogo poured coffee slow, black as gun oil. “You ever tell ’em about the Draw?”
Thorne Wilder: “The Bitter Draw. Yeah. I remember it started when the sun was bleeding itself thin over the broken rim of the canyon when the shooting started again…”
The sun was bleeding itself thin over the broken rim of the canyon when the shooting started again. Dust hung in the air like a veil and the smell of burnt powder rode the wind. The Bitter Draw had that name before the cattle barons moved their war into it, but nobody said it out loud until men started dying there, then they said it only in whispers.
Thorne Wilder lay behind a dead bay gelding that some other poor soul had ridden to death and then to cover. Flies liked the horse more than the lead whickering past. His hat lay three feet away, punched through twice and holding a little pool of dust like a bowl. He had seven rounds left, two canteens down to a slosh and a half, and a long run of ground between him and any place that wasn’t a rifleman’s joke.
Across the draw, fifty yards, maybe fifty-five, a man crouched behind a fallen sycamore that had shed more bark than a snake in July. He was built broad from the shoulders down, like he could carry an anvil in each hand and not complain, and he moved with the careful economy of a man who didn’t waste motion or words. Thorne clocked him early because under all the noise and panic, that man wasn’t scared. He checked his angles, he reloaded in little shadows, he kept his hat back from the edge of wood. That told Thorne Wilder most of what he needed: he wasn’t Pike’s green Sporting boy, and he didn’t look like one of Vance’s drunk-on-pay hirelings either.
“Show me a badge,” Thorne muttered to the horse that wasn’t listening, “or a prayer.”
Lead slapped the sycamore with a sound like anger hitting a drum. The big man across the wash didn’t flinch. He waited for the rhythm of the fire to hiccup and sent a slow, mean answer toward a rock outcropping that had just spit at him one crack, nothing flashy, but honest. The outcropping spat no more.
Thorne slid his hand under the gelding’s belly, feeling the caked heat of death, and pulled his hat back with two fingers mindful of snakes. The brim showed daylight now. He put it on anyway. A man without a hat in this country looked wrong.
“Hold the line!” someone yelled, voice thin under the canyon’s belly. Pike men, Thorne guessed from the way the command sounded like a plea. “Hold, damn you”
Fire cut him off. Vance’s men shot more than they thought and hit less than they should. Pride harmed marksmanship. So did whiskey. Thorne had tried both and found them worse than wind.
Movement. Behind him. Not the happy shuffle of a lizard or the drag of his own boot. The kind of human carefulness that makes a dry leaf sound like a secret. The hairs along his forearms stood.
At the same moment same second, same breath across the wash, the big man turned his head like a dog catches a new scent. Thorne didn’t see his eyes exactly, but he felt them: a flick like gray iron.
Boot on shale behind Thorne. The kind of heel set for a quick thrust.
He didn’t spin so much as twist sideways, one hand catching the Winchester where it lay against the horse’s shoulder, the other already bringing his boot up. Ten feet behind, a face rose out of mesquite shadow, eyes flat, barrel steady, close enough for smell. Thorne threw his boot like a hammer, heel first into the man’s knee, and fired the Winchester in the same breath. The rifleman fell with a noise like a sack of wheat, throat opening once and then staying terrible and quiet.
Across the wash, another man lean, hungry-faced, brim pulled low came up behind the big man with a knife, mean as taxes. The big man didn’t stand or turn; he stepped back with a heel hook that caught the knife-man’s shin and kicked the ankle from the side, took the balance, and sent his own boot into the man’s calf. At the same instant a second shot cracked: Thorne’s round snapped across the wash and drilled the knife-man high in the chest. The big man’s gun jumped, too; Thorne felt a breath of heat by his jaw, then a dead silence where a third ambusher would have been.
Two shots. Two kicks. Two men who had been almost alive.
They looked at each other across hot air full of grit and flies and the metallic sing of bullets losing their arguments in rock.
“You fight for Pike or Vance?” Thorne called, voice low enough that it didn’t carry far and hard enough that it did the work.
“Neither” the big man said. He broke his rifle, thumbed a round into a hungry place, closed it like a promise. His voice had a push of mountains in it, and something slow that said he’d come far. “Just tryin’ not to get shot by both.”
“That makes two of us,” Thorne said. “Name’s Wilder.”
“Brogo Mann,” the big man said.
A ricochet screamed between them like a hawk that had been told a poor joke. They both ducked without thinking and without taking their eyes off each other long enough to misplace trust.
“Then I reckon,” Brogo Mann said, “we’re allies till one of us stops breathin’.”
“Seems fair,” Thorne said.
They did not shake on it. They did not smile. They both slid one berm to the left, found new angles that stole the teeth from the rifles barking at them, and in ten minutes there were fewer guns making noise in the Bitter Draw.
Brogo set his mug down, slow. “You left out the part about the whiskey.”
Thorne smiled. “Ain’t every truth worth tellin’ before noon.”
Brew what we brew on the porch
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