Owen only signed on to play a homesteader husband in Wild Will’s Wild West Show because developing his recipe for Lander’s Bourbon Whiskey proved more expensive than he anticipated. Since he stowed away on a steamboat out of Natchez, Mississippi, when he was fourteen, he had become a man used to carrying just what his horse could. Yet, somehow, in the last two months, he had acquired not just one but two, two! covered wagons. Now, he found women looking at him a certain sort of way that made his clothing feel hot and scratchy.
Marianne was one such woman, which surprised him, because if ever there was a woman who could look out for herself, it was Marianne Halloway. She was just about as good as he was at shooting game and skinning them, and she sure as heck was better at talking herself out of a situation. He had met her in a saloon in Kentucky, where she apparently needed to get out of town on account of owing the saloon-keep some money. Next thing Owen knew, he was headed out on a buckboard with Marianne for Wild Will's Wild West Show.
"When he sees the way you shoot, Wild Will will hire you on for sure," Marianne had said. "But since I'm helping you, you got to say you can't do without me. Wild Will thinks I'm trouble."
Owen was realizing that Wild Will might be on to something there. He didn't shoot dead any of the men that came after Marianne when she left Kentucky, but he did wing a few to show what he could do if he wanted. That seemed to be enough warning for them to forgive the debt. But the showmanship he demonstrated in delivering the message was something Owen had always suspected in himself, which explained how he came to be playing Homesteader Husband to Marianne’s Homesteader Wife in Wild Will’s Wild West Show.
He was the shootist. So here he was, as he was at six every evening on the weekdays and half-past-two on Saturdays and Sundays, standing on the buckboard as Marianne whipped the horses around the corral encircled by an excited audience of men, women, on children on stacked wooden benches.
In a sudden rumble of flapping wings, a covey of ten bobwhite quail rushed up from the sea of yellow wood-sorrel flowers blanketing the bank of the Cimarron River. Owen turned in the seat of the covered wagon, aimed the shotgun, and fired. As one fat bird twirled to the ground, the announcer on the wooden platform in front of the seated crowd boomed out. “Often the pioneers were skilled in hunting, and feasted on roasted quail, prairie chicken, jackrabbit, or even catfish.”
The children hidden in the wood sorrel released another covey, and again Owen aimed and brought one down.
Marianne squealed. “Oh, honey. You’re a sharpshooter, that’s for sure! Don’t he make a fine husband, ladies and gentlemen? Shot himself right into my heart!”
The women in the audience cheered, and the leer Marianne threw Owen’s way made his blood run cold. Lately, Marianne had been talking about how his wagons and whiskey were a good start for a real homesteader.
Made Owen nervous, for there were none that would call Owen Lander a man of the family kind. He had left family behind when he left a mean, drunkard father and the long-suffering woman who longed only for widowhood. He had looked back just once.
Those wagons meant freedom.
Owen was only doing the show to make up the money he needed to buy the supplies for his whiskey operation. Two years ago, he had been tired of cowpunching but had no idea what to do next. Owen had been many things in his twenty-nine years, and he was good with a gun. He had briefly considered a career in the law, but the law paid less than cowpunching and most of the law he had come across were crooks, anyway. As much as had been on the move for fifteen years, Owen did not like being chased. He had felt then the need to move on again, but with no idea where to go, he had taken to drinking.
That’s what he was doing in that saloon in Lexington when he met Marianne. The saloon’s whiskey was rotgut, but it bore the saloon owner’s name. Owen was impressed. Here was a man who put his name on something. What Owen tasted was something he could make himself, though better. The idea of having his name on something his own stirred something in his chest he had not known existed.
So, Owen needed the wagons for his new copper pot still and the three oak barrels that would make Lander’s Bourbon Whiskey the talk of the west. Well, the talk of Oklahoma Territory, maybe. Well, the talk of Destry, Oklahoma Territory, anyway.
Because that where he now found himself staring down two-thousand-odd pounds of angry bull buffalo.