I Call This Mustache The Peacekeeper

Though my ridin' and ropin' days are done, I can still work the ranch as good as any other cowboy who ever lived. I grew a mustache as a young man and wore it proudly until it greyed and faded, just like the memories of my life have over the years. I ain't much of the man I was but the spark of life that fueled many a barroom battle has yet to extinguish. I hope that flame burns just a little longer so I can tell one last tale that needs to be told, if I can remember it all that is. The whole things started back when I was a handsome buck of about nineteen years of age, riding the circuit out in Montana and Wyoming, living the carefree life. Those were the days when a strong back and a pair of hard working hands were all you needed to make an honest living, not like the backstabbing faggotry that men are required to perform nowadays. I was riding an Appaloosa gelding at the time by the name of Fancypants, and boy oh boy did I love that horse. We spent more days than I could count wandering the clover valleys and lion's back ridges of those backwoods states and it was a sad day in my life when the horse up and collapsed one day and died. I whipped all hell out of Fancypants trying to scare away the demons come to take her to hell but she stayed dead and I stayed without a ride for some time. Anyways that was years after the story I'm telling happened, and that one starts with Fancypants and I pushing our way through a snowdrift up in Saddlestring Pass. It was too late in the year to be up that high but a fifth of sour mash had put enough fire in my shortleg to convince me that I might be able to make one last trip up to Sally McRatchet's alpine cabin for a roll in the hay. Old Sally was the type of woman who chose to live off the land as opposed to the fat sows in town who sucked off the teat of mankind, but being alone as she was, she was prone to getting what we used to call the 'carnal hunger.' It'd get so bad that her female parts would actually eat clean through her drawers. That might frighten some men but the more experienced one's will tell you that a crevasse with that level of eagerness is nothing to turn your nose at. Anyhow, Fancypants and I were in the snowdrift halfway through the pass when the temperature took a big drop, at least twenty degrees in an hour, and we found ourselves suddenly encased in a block of ice. It was mid-March before we thawed enough to bust loose of our nature-made encasement and by that point heading back to town sounded a little more appetizing than a romp with some old mountain woman. It was a good thing I felt that way too because when Fancypants and I finally hobbled our way into the saloon in Jackson Hole we learned that old Sally had skewered herself on some type of spindle apparatus and was dead as a doornail. I was mighty glad I didn't waste any time going all the way to her cabin because the bears had eaten most of her face, chest, breasts, neck and head before she was found on her homemade lovemaking contraption. 'Impaled' was the word those that found her had used but I found it a tad indelicate in reference to a lady. These days I think back about what might have been if I hadn't been frozen for all those months, Sally would be alive and I'd probably still have some feeling in my fingers and maybe I'd even have a son to take care of me in my old age. But it happened that way because that is how fate decided it should be and I ain't one to thumb my nose at fate.