Tom Grant stood on the porch of the hotel, lit a cigar, and contemplated what he would do to entertain himself. Dusk had settled, and a sprinkling of lights were bringing life to the main street. He could hear the piano tinkling from Big Bessie’s Bar. For a moment he stood in the quiet of the hotel porch and puffed contentedly on his cigar. He was wondering if he should go on down to Bessie’s and take one of the girls to the rooms upstairs.

“Goddamn it, I must be getting old if I have to decide to have a whore or not,” he mused.

Time was Tom would have spruced himself up, sashayed down to the nearest saloon, had a few drinks, and finished up the night with a woman.

He never told his wife, Dorothy, about these adventures.

“Usually I have a few quiet drinks and mebby a game of cards, nothing too heavy,” he told her once. “And then amble on back to the hotel and bed. There ain’t much else to do in a cow town ’less you wanna go down the whorehouse, and that ain’t for me.”

Unbeknownst to him, she could smell the cheap perfume that still lingered on his clothes even after the trek back home, but she never told him that.

He stepped out onto the sidewalk and ambled towards the saloon, the piano drawing him irresistibly with its seductive siren song. Tuba’s nightlife was beginning to stir.

Tuba was a largish cow town on the margin of the trail drives that pointed north to the cattle yards that held beef for the big cities. It owed its prosperity to this very fact. Trail drivers needed a stopover to replenish their reserves. Tuba had plenty of good grass in the vicinity and an abundant supply of water from the Scoop, a long, shallow, lazy river that coiled around the town like a lariat. The trail herds could stop to graze and put on a little weight before the final push north.

On top of these facilities was another benefit. The area abounded with enterprising cattlemen willing to do a deal with the herd bosses, thus saving on the time and energy to drive the cattle the final leg north. The money might be less than the expected sale price in the stockyards, but weighed against everything else sometimes it seemed right to take the money and get back to the ranches and let someone else take responsibility for the herd. Tom Grant had just completed such a deal.

Tom was a slim man nudging towards his sixtieth year. Beneath his Stetson his hair was white, and a large, white moustache drooped from beneath his nostrils. His face was lean and his skin bronzed from spending long hours outdoors riding herd on the prime steers he raised back home. Right now he reckoned he deserved an evening of relaxation after hard days of trail herding.

Later that night Tom Grant rolled off his five-dollar whore and lay back contentedly. All the time he had sweated on top of the plump woman she had groaned and writhed beneath him, reassuring him he was the best thing that had happened to her in a long time. When he made no effort to leave, she turned to him.

“Are you finished, cowboy?”

He blinked at her foolishly. “Why, sure I’m finished.”

“Okay, granddad. Thanks for the good time. I gotta git some more business in while the night is still young.”

It was a few moments before he realised what she meant.

“Huh? Yeah, sure, I guess,” he muttered, feeling a mite foolish.

Granddad? He rolled from the bed as she turned up the lamp. Grandad? As he struggled into his clothes, he kept glancing surreptitiously at the woman. Hell, she was no chicken herself. Hard to tell her age with all that paint and powder over her face. All his contentment was gone as he stumped down the stairs to the barroom.

Even at this late hour the room was still crowded with men talking loudly, as men do after an evening of drinking. Some of the card tables were busy.

Tom shouldered up to the bar and ordered whiskey. He liked beer to chase his whiskey, but as he grew older, he found his capacity to hold large quantities of liquid had diminished.

When he left Big Bessie’s, the place was still crowded with those men who had enough money to keep on drinking. There seemed a steady traffic in the rooms upstairs as the women worked the drunken crowd.

Trying to keep a steady walk back along the boardwalk towards the hotel, Tom was still sore at the woman.

“Granddad,” he muttered indignantly. “I can keep up with the best of them in a whorehouse. She weren’t no chicken herself. Well past fifty if she were a day.”

A shadowy figure was coming towards him on the sidewalk. As they drew level, the man held up a rolled cigarette.

“Howdy, friend. Got a light?”

“Light? Sure,” Tom answered as he fumbled in his vest pocket for a sulphur head. He heard a sound behind him on the boardwalk but took no notice as he grunted with satisfaction.

“Here ya are, friend.”

An arm surrounded his neck, and he was pulled backwards.

“What the hell…?”