The Bitter Draw: From the Front Porch - Chapter 3
October 14, 2025 Stories
Brogo leaned back, steam curling from his cup. “You remember that night after the Draw?”
Thorne Wilder: “Hard to forget. That’s when the world started getting quiet again…”
Night in that country is not black. It’s the blue of old bruises and the silver of a knife rubbed clean. They moved quiet, not because they knew men behind them were hoarding anger which they did but because both of them were made to move quiet. The land said hush, and they listened.
They hit the pinon stand in twenty minutes and the trail in thirty. The trail wasn’t a trail until you knew it; then it was a series of choices that a deer would make, and a drunk wouldn’t. They took it in single file, Thorne in front for the first half because he knew the first half and Brogo in front for the second half because he knew the shape of distance just by how the air sat in the hollows and the way the ground argued beneath his boots.
They stopped when the horizon said one more breath and all the heat the rocks had soaked up during the day exhaled into their hands.
“Cold camp,” Thorne said.
Brogo nodded. He squatted and put his palm flat on stone like he was listening with skin. “Game runs down there. Coyote. Jack. Might be cat. If men come, they’ll flare at the first rise pride makes a silhouette.”
“You put poetry under your tongue for emergencies?” Thorne said.
“Just words,” Brogo said. “They do better when you spend them careful.”
Thorne rolled into his blanket, boots on. He didn’t bother with a joke about trusting strangers; he was too tired for lies. He half-slept the way a man near death always sleeps: one ear for owls, one for feet.
He woke to feet.
Brogo already had his hand on his rifle and his eyes open. He didn’t make a shh sound; he didn’t need to. Thorne was up with the quiet that only comes when a man is a little in love with living.
The sound of feet that weren’t careful. They were the stomp of stupid courage. Two men, maybe three, walking like the night was their friend, which it wasn’t. Their talking came before their faces, and the talk was mean.
“Spread wide,” Thorne whispered.
Brogo shook his head once. “Closer’s safer. Ugly, but safer.”
Thorne moved two steps, then one back, so they wouldn’t both be where someone’s guess would put them. He set his rifle on his knee and let his breath fall slow. Across the open, a shape glowed gray against darker gray. It had a hat on top and shoulders underneath and the hat moved like it didn’t know how to stay still. The other shape had the cat-hunger of a man who likes to hurt more than he likes to live.
“Wilder?” Brogo said low, like a name was a password.
“Here,” Thorne said.
Brogo didn’t say count of three or now. They didn’t need a drumbeat. They fired the first two shots, three heartbeats apart and the third a second later like an echo.
Silence. Silence is never what you expect. It’s thicker. It has weight.
“Move,” Brogo said, and they moved, fast and angled downslope, not because fear said go but because experience said distance and terrain are better friends than luck.
By dawn, they were two miles from the place where men had decided once more that pride and barbed wire were worth more than blood. They found a seam in the hills where water still remembered how to be water and let it wash their faces until both could remember their own names.
“I thought you were with Pike,” Thorne said, voice muffled by his hands full of cold.
“I ain’t with anybody,” Brogo said. “I was hired to move fence. Didn’t ask whose land it was. I just moved what they paid me to move. Then they asked me to move men. That’s a different thing. I said no. One of them said I’d change my mind. I didn’t. He did.”
Thorne looked at him over the water. There was no pride in Brogo’s voice and no apology either. Just a ledger with new numbers.
“Where you from?” Thorne said.
“Mountains,” Brogo said.
“Which ones?”
“The ones that don’t care if you name ’em.”
Thorne grinned despite the ache that had baked behind his eyes. “Fair.”
“You?” Brogo said.
“Everywhere,” Thorne said. “Some places longer than others. But a man can’t say he’s from everywhere and still tell the truth. I was born in a place that wasn’t much and then the world got bigger than it should have. I been tryin’ to make it small again since.”
Brogo nodded like that tracked on his inner compass. “You any good at it?”
“Most days I pick the right small,” Thorne said.
They rested a little. Rest is a poor word for two men who keep one eye open and their hands near their tools. But they breathed in the kind of air they hadn’t breathed since the bullets started, and the land came back into focus the way a woman’s face does when she decides to forgive you.
“Next town?” Brogo said.
“Three Forks,” Thorne said. “It’s less a town and more a collection of mistakes that learned how to sell whiskey to each other. But there’s a smith who won’t ask the wrong questions and a widow who’ll sell you bread without selling you your own shame.”
“Bread sounds right,” Brogo said.
“Shame never did much for me,” Thorne said. “Let’s go.”
Three Forks was two streets and a prayer, the buildings facing each other across a main drag that turned to gumbo with one storm and dust with another. They came in from the north because people always expect trouble from the south and west and if you’ve been shot at enough, you’ll take any thumb on any scale you can.
The smith looked at their guns the way a lucky man looks at another lucky man, suspicious and interested. He hammered out a sight blade for Thorne’s Winchester without asking where the last one had gone. He filed a burr off Brogo’s hammer face and didn’t charge for it, and Thorne took that as a sign that someone in town had needed scaring recently.
The widow at the bakery, her name was Liza, it said so on the sign and in the way she stood like she didn’t want pity, wrapped two loaves and put in a third. “For luck,” she said. “Or kindness if you find some on the trail that ain’t eat yet.”
“We’ll pay for all three,” Thorne said.
“You can try,” she said, and took the money, hard-eyed but soft around the edges, like a woman who had lived enough to hate lies but not enough to hate men.
They ate bread in the alley and watched the main drag move. Three men in Pike colors stood outside the saloon pretending they weren’t looking for something. Two men in Vance colors pretended they weren’t pretending. Thorne and Brogo finished the first loaf slow and the second loaf slower.
“You plan to stay out of this?” Thorne said.
Brogo chewed, swallowed, put a pause on the next bite. “I plan to stay out of it until it remembers me,” he said. “Nothing on this earth forgets long.”
Thorne felt the prickle under his ribs that came when a thing turned right because it had been turned wrong enough times. “You could ride with me,” he said, and it sounded too easy in his own mouth. He tried again. “I get hired for work that doesn’t ask me to choose the wrong side. Wagons. Timber. Once a bridge, paid with beans and a song. Sometimes I get hired to keep men honest while they do a job that could go dishonest. I’m better at that than I want to be. It’d go easier with two.”
Brogo wiped his hands clean in the air like he didn’t want bread on his pants more than he didn’t want blood. “I can do wagons,” he said. “I can do honest. Never been paid in song before. Might be I won’t like it.”
“You’ll like the beans more,” Thorne said. “But only just.”
Brogo’s eyes, which were some color between river and iron met Thorne’s for the length of a shared habit. “All right,” he said.
They shook then. Not because they had to, but because a handshake is a kind of map: it tells a man how much a man means to keep.
“Wilder,” a voice said.
They turned. The voice belonged to a man with a face that had loved fighting too long and had been paid in small coins of scar tissue. He wore Pike colors but also wore a grin, which meant he thought he held cards enough to tilt the table.
“Don’t know you,” Thorne said.
“You will,” the man said. “Harlan Pike will, too. He pays for certain news. Your friend there”—he tipped his chin toward Brogo—“he’s got himself a little price on his head. Says he was hired to lift fence and then he lifted the wrong kind. Says he lifted a foreman right off his horse and set him down where God could see him better.”
“Prices go up and down,” Thorne said. “Like weather and whiskey.”
“Price on this one ain’t weather,” the man said. “It’s a storm.” He took a half-step nearer, which was a mistake. “You two can walk out now if you leave him and the rifles. You do that and we’ll tell Pike you were smart.”
Brogo stood like a barn built by a careful man. “You talk a lot,” he said to the other.
“All the best men do,” the other said. “Ever hear a dead man talk?”
“Once,” Brogo said, and the lie was true enough in the way truths need.
The man’s grin tightened. “We’ll take the guns and the big one,” he said to the two behind him who hadn’t figured like he had, and then he made the second mistake: he reached for a pistol in a town that had learned to smell trouble and pull shutters faster than prayer.
It lasted six breaths. It was ugly. Then it was done.
Thorne looked at Brogo. Brogo looked at the three men on the ground and the two men further down the drag who had decided their colors didn’t match the weather anymore. He nodded once, to no one but the day, like a carpenter pleased that the cut went true.
“We’re linked now,” Thorne said.
“We were linked in the draw,” Brogo said.
They left by the back way because a man who knows how to leave is worth two men who know how to arrive. Outside of town, the country took them back without comment, and the horizon did the thing good horizons do, it promised nothing and offered everything.
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