Excerpt & Giveaway: NORTH TO ALASKA

Excerpt from North to Alaska by Preston Lewis 

            Shooting a man in the back was frowned upon in the old days, though sometimes you lacked a more honorable option to survive a vendetta. Over the years, I was blamed for one back-shooting I didn’t commit and never got credit for dispatching the one crook I did shoot from behind. Now I’m not complaining, and I’m not saying I’m proud of all the choices I made with a gun, but I never marched around boasting about my killings or defacing my pistol with notches on the grips or scratches on the barrel to represent the men I’d put in a grave.  Some fellows bragged so much about all their enemies they had dispatched that if they’d carved or scratched notches in their weapons for every fellow they claimed to have killed, all they’d been left with was a pile of splinters or metal shavings instead of a revolver. 

            No, sir, I never bragged about those things because you seldom knew when a lawman might be eavesdropping on such arrogance, intending to avenge the death of some hombre that likely needed an express ticket to hell to begin with.  Nor did I claim to be a shootist as I didn’t want a reputation that would dishonor my momma and her teachings, as she was a Godly woman who believed in the Good Book. Even if I was her prodigal son, she’d have been humiliated by me breaking the Fifth Commandment and shooting another human being in the back. The odd thing about the two times I was involved in back-shooting incidents, though, is that they were both related, despite coming some two decades and twenty-five hundred miles apart. 

            And making matters worse, both instances happened because of an insect bite.  Yep, I’d gotten severely bitten by the gold bug twice on the frontier, winding up first in Colorado and later in Alaska, which was colder than a suffragist’s heart. I should know because during my Leadville, Colorado, stint I encountered Susan B. Anthony, who opened my eyes to how mean a woman could be.  I much preferred the sugar and vice of Mattie Silks and her soiled doves in Denver to Anthony’s dire and brimstone over the plight of women in the newest state and the other thirty-seven.  Those were raucous days when Colorado had first joined the Union, and the suffragists attacked the God-given rights of the male citizens of the new state. 

            As misguided as Susan B. Anthony might have been, she was halfway honest, unlike the most despicable fellow that ever trod upon the plains or mountains of Colorado—Jefferson Randolph Smith the Second.  Known as Jeff when I first met him, but later as “Soapy,” he was crookeder than a barrel full of rattlesnakes and twice as mean.  What he lacked in integrity, he more than made up for in cleverness as he could’ve swindled Satan out of his horns, tail and pitchfork without the devil ever knowing what had transpired. He possessed enough charm that shills and hooligans attached to him like metal shavings to a magnet so you always had to be careful in any town that Soapy worked because his ruffians were on the lookout for anyone they might defraud or scam.  Such tricks played out best in mining towns where everyone was looking for a quick buck and sudden riches.