Blind-Sided
"The Kid."
His reputation preceded him. Nefarious train robberies, bank heists, and gunslinger shootouts put him on posters throughout the West in the summer of 1822.
That's why he drank alone at the Blindspot Saloon in Brown's Hole, Wyoming, a dustbowl town perched atop nothing but hot dirt. The place was emptied of its cowards, yellow-bellies, backstabbers, and reprobates an hour after the Kid's sighting at the pass. Only the bartender, "Ol' Jim," remained.
The kid was parched when he burst through the swinging doors of the barroom.
"What'll it be?" the bartender barked.
"Whiskey!" the Kid barked back. "Your finest." The bartender slid over a full glass.
"Our finest--and our only," he said. The Kid looked at him and thought something about him strange; he gulped it down and winced. "Gets better by the fifth one," the bartender added.
"Where's everybody?" the Kid asked.
"You're the Kid," Ol' Jim replied. "Killers and liquor don't mix for folks lookin' to stay livin'.
"What about you?"
"Me? Been dyin' for years."
Ol' Jim was right. The sixth one was toothsome. By the ninth, the Kid, blind drunk, stumbled upstairs to a brothel room to sleep it off.
Twenty-two hours later, the Kid stumbled back down. Ol' Jim was there to greet him: "Hey, Kid!"
"What!"
"There's a posse outside waitin' for ya. Good reward money, y'know." Now the Kid knew what was wrong with Ol' Jim. Ol' Jim couldn't look him in the eye.
"Look at me! Don't trust a man who can't look me in the eye."
Jim laughed. "I'm blind, kid." The Kid reassessed and understood. "In fact, the whole town's blind. Here, have another shot."
The Kid wolfed it down.
"A whole town gone blind ? That's peculiar. Well, time to kill me a whole posse," he said. "Oughta be easy, everybody'd bein' blind."
Twenty-seven men, each with a pistol in one hand and a cane in the other, stood a hundred feet from the Kid in the main road of Brown's Hole. All blind, they had other skills honed all these years.
They had no trouble putting 27 bullets into the Kid, himself newly blind from the methanol, the finest--and only--drink in town, a town full of drinkers.