A Municipal Feud

A Municipal Feud by Ernest Haycox

"A Municipal Feud" follows Joe Breedlove, a tall, silver-haired drifter with an easygoing philosophy and a gift for charming strangers, and his volatile new partner Indigo Bowers, a small, quarrelsome man who cannot avoid a fight even when he tries. Riding south together with no fixed destination, they part ways when Indigo refuses to enter Big Elk, a town where he's caused trouble before; Joe has unfinished business there, so they agree to reunite in two days. Indigo instead wanders into Jingle Bell, Big Elk's bitter rival, where suspicious locals accost him as a suspected Big Elk spy. When they learn he once wrecked a Big Elk saloon, he's welcomed as a hero just as a raiding party from Big Elk attacks the town, smashing up the Geyser saloon and capturing a prisoner. Indigo throws himself into the defense, directing sniper fire from a rooftop and helping drive off the raiders. Learning that this cross-town violence has simmered for thirty years ever since Big Elk stole the county seat from Jingle Bell, and irritated that Jingle Bell always absorbs the punishment without retaliating, Indigo talks the town into mounting a counter-raid, personally organizing fifteen riders under blustering local tough Gabe Wales. The expedition rides out to intercept Big Elk's men at a prairie ambush point Indigo selects. A running gunfight follows, with both sides trading harmless long-range fire until Indigo, chasing a flanking rifleman, discovers his target is actually Joe Breedlove, who has come along with the Big Elk contingent to rescue their captured man and talk peace. The reunited partners share a smoke while Joe explains the real cause of the feud: two rustlers, Sweeny in Big Elk and Gabe Wales in Jingle Bell, have been deliberately stoking the town rivalry for years because it gives their gang a safe haven from the Big Elk sheriff's jurisdiction. That very morning Sweeny was captured and killed in a neighboring county, but not before confessing and naming Wales. Indigo, satisfied that the feud's true instigators are exposed, wants to call it finished. Joe, however, insists on a grander gesture: a formal banquet to reconcile the two towns permanently. Indigo predicts disaster, but goes along skeptically. Word reaches Jingle Bell that Wales has been jailed for rustling, and the town's mood shifts rapidly toward reconciliation and civic generosity toward its old enemy. Delegations from both towns negotiate the banquet's terms with elaborate, comic suspicion, haggling over neutral ground, matched numbers of quarrelsome tried men, checked firearms, and a designated pistol-guard — each side certain the other is plotting some trick. The dinner convenes at the Three Pines ranch-house, but an extra place setting on each side of the table immediately reveals that both towns smuggled in an unauthorized man, souring the fragile trust. Joe's silver-tongued toast to civic harmony briefly smooths things over, and he calls on Jingle Bell's Phil Layton to second the sentiment — but a jeering aside from the Big Elk side reignites old grievances. Layton and a Big Elk partisan trade escalating insults about the stolen county seat, the argument spreads instantly through both delegations, and the peace banquet collapses into a chaotic table-overturning, lamp-smashing gunfight, revealing that each side had also stationed hidden reinforcements outside in the corrals and poplars. The two parties battle out the door and gallop off in opposite directions, guns blazing into the dark. In the wrecked ranch-house afterward, Joe and Indigo pick themselves up from behind overturned furniture. Joe notices Indigo produced a pocket pistol despite the banquet's official no-weapons rule; Indigo shrugs that he wouldn't have needed it if the affair had actually stayed peaceful. Neither man regrets the outcome much. Concluding that their business in the district is done and that "human nature is plumb immutable," the two partners saddle up and ride on south together, leaving the two towns' ancient feud exactly where it started — unresolved, and likely to flare again. The story is a comic western tall tale built on the incongruity between Joe's genuine faith in reconciliation and Indigo's clear-eyed cynicism about mob psychology: the rustlers who engineered the feud are dealt with almost incidentally, while the feud itself, rooted in decades of civic pride and grudge rather than any single villain's manipulation, proves too deeply ingrained in both towns to be talked away by a single dinner. Indigo, despite his professed wish to avoid trouble, is repeatedly the one who stirs it up or profits from it, and his running nickname-battle with blustering Gabe Wales — whom he needles as "Albert" throughout — underscores his instinct for sizing up blowhards. Haycox frames the entire escapade with wry affection for frontier absurdity: elaborate parliamentary negotiations over banquet etiquette dissolve in seconds into gunfire, and the closing image of the two drifters riding off, amused rather than alarmed by the chaos they helped cause, captures the story's genial, unsentimental tone.

By Ernest Haycox · First published 1928 · Genre: Western, Action/Adventure, Humor · 8,999 words

First lines

Joe Breedlove and his newly-found partner, Indigo Bowers, halted on the ridge to survey the country below and beyond them. The chariot of dawn thundered out of the east and every peak and bluff stood in clear outline, flaming with the careless interweaving of the raw primary colors; silver sparkled along the creek bottoms, scarlet and chrome ran side by side on the butte faces. Away in the remote distance a bright blue sky fused with the earth's dun margin. It was like a bird's-eye map splashed with pigment and Joe's eyes kindled at the sight of so much prodigal beauty.

"Providence rises, and the earth is filled with light," he murmured, rolling a brown paper cigarette.

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A Municipal Feud is listed on Textopian as a short story by Ernest Haycox, dated 1928 CE.

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Western · Short story · Frontier fiction · Desert setting · Small-town politics · Organized crime · Rustling · Social conflict · Male friendship · Betrayal · Mistrust · Peace-building

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