Bad Times At Big Rock

by John M. Floyd

About the Author: John M. Floyd's short stories have appeared in AHMM, EQMM, Strand Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, three editions of Best American Mystery Stories, and many other publications. A former Air Force captain and IBM systems engineer, John is also an Edgar nominee, a Shamus Award winner, a four-time Derringer Award winner, and the author of seven collections of short mystery fiction.

Excerpt

I didn’t want to be, and I sure wasn’t qualified, but the two-dozen people who’d ended up here with me in the middle of nowhere were determined to make it a proper settlement, and they figured a town needed a sheriff. What I figured a town needed was a saloon, which I had already built, in the form of a tent, a few tables and chairs, two spittoons, and the twenty cases of liquor I’d been hauling when the last of our wagons fell apart and most of our horses died and we decided to end our journey to California a thousand miles early. Since then we’d fended pretty well for ourselves. Among our group were farmers, hunters, seamstresses, cooks, a carpenter, etc., and we’d already dug a well, planted some crops, and built a windmill and several shacks using new wood from a nearby stand of trees and old wood from the useless wagons and some abandoned buildings half a mile east. The settlement—we named it Big Rock—was nothing fancy, but at least the windmill allowed us to charge passersby for water, a stagecoach began stopping by once a month, the hunters and our remaining supplies kept us fed, and the whiskey in my saloon kept us from worrying too much about it all.

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