Kolsch for Outlaws Questionable Company

Story by Sumit Vohra.

Everybody in this book drank at my bar once. Most of them paid.

The Hideout sat at the end of the trail, where the trail gave up. Four walls, one stove, a long bar I built myself and a back room nobody asked about. I poured for whoever came through the door. I didn't ask names. Names were how men got hanged.

A lone timber saloon at the end of a muddy trail in sideways rain, lamplight in the windows

The night I'm thinking of, the rain came sideways and the lamps shook on their hooks. There were five of them.

The bartender's hands setting out clean glasses on a long wooden bar

A woman with brown eyes sat near the stove with a briefcase on her knees that didn't match her gloves. A man in a long coat stood with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door, the way he always did. A gambler in a peach vest dealt himself solitaire and lost cheerfully. A big man with a scar across his face asked where the sheriff's office was, and when I told him there wasn't one, he didn't care for the answer.

The room: a woman with a briefcase by the stove, a man in a long coat against the wall, a gambler in a peach vest dealing cards

And there was the gentleman.

He came in out of the storm dry, which should have told me something. Gray suit, clean collar, soft voice. He asked for a beer and said please. He said thank you when I set it down. Nobody in the Hideout had said please since I put in the stove.

A neat gentleman in a gray suit accepts a glass of golden beer at the bar

Under my bar sat a strongbox with the payroll for the Calloway mine. Four hundred dollars. The company trusted me with it because nobody would think to rob a man who poured for outlaws. That was the joke, anyway.

Lightning hit close enough to taste. Every lamp went out at once.

Lightning through the windows turns the whole saloon to silhouettes

I counted ten in the dark. A chair scraped. The rain roared. When I got the first lamp lit again, the strongbox was gone.

An empty space under the bar, wet marks leading away across the floorboards

Well. You can imagine.

The scarred man said the gambler did it, because gamblers always do. The gambler said the woman did it, because her case wasn't hers. The woman said the man in the coat did it, because he hadn't moved, and men who don't move are thinking. The man in the coat said nothing at all. His hand rested easy near his belt, and everybody remembered they had somewhere else to look.

Outlaws on their feet pointing at one another across the saloon

The gentleman said it was dreadful and offered to ride for the county marshal.

I kept polishing. Polishing is how a bartender thinks.

His beer was still full to the line. Not a sip gone. A man who orders a beer and doesn't touch it didn't come in for a beer. He came in for the dark.

And he had walked in dry, but the cuffs of his fine gray coat were soaked to the wrist. Like a man who had just had his arms in the rain barrel by the back door, setting something heavy down at the bottom.

The gentleman's beer untouched beside his soaked gray cuff

I didn't say any of that. I put down the rag, slid his glass back across the bar until it touched his fingers, and said, "You'll want to finish that, sir. It's a long walk to the county line."

The bartender slides the full glass back until it touches the gentleman's fingers

He looked at the glass. He looked at me. He looked at four outlaws who had all, quite suddenly, stopped arguing.

He went out the back. I heard the barrel lid, then the thump of the strongbox on the step, then nothing but rain.

Nobody spoke for a while. Then the gambler laughed, and the woman laughed, and the scarred man bought a round for the room and paid for it, which I will remember until the day I die.

Polite beer. Questionable company. In my experience, it's the polite ones you count the spoons after.

Last call.

The rain quit a little before dawn.

They went out one at a time, the way outlaws do, back into their own stories. The woman with the briefcase caught the early train. The gambler went looking for a river. The man in the long coat left a coin on the bar and was gone before I heard the door. The scarred man asked one more time about the sheriff, and I told him one more time, and he rode off faster than he came.

The gentleman's beer was still on the bar, full to the line.

I poured it out. Some things you don't drink to.