Mission Statement:
To endeavor to bring to all residents of the Five States the most current and important news from across the entire Five States region. Never yellow, the Five States Herald vows to serve only the people of the Five States, from New Austin to Lemoyne, free of charge now and forever.
Bagatelle Whirlwind Hits Five States!
By Sofia Kathleen Fairfax – Lead Correspondent
Walk into any bar or saloon across the Five States, just pick any of them. In the corner away from the poker players and the liar’s dice gamers, there will be a bunch of people sitting around a peculiar board. They have sticks like billiards, but it is certainly not billiards. The players use that stick to propel a ball onto the main board, where it bounces around before landing in a hole. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Bagatelle!
Bagatelle is a French game, mostly a time waster, though one can, of course, gamble money on it. It’s quite simple, you push the ball from the side of the board onto the main section, where it bounces off bumpers and other obstacles until it lands in a hole marked with a number. The longer the ball stays in the air, and which hole it lands on, leads to a number of points being given. The player with the most points after a certain number of ball tosses wins.
Youth and adults alike cannot seem to get enough of it; first, one table arrived from New York in Blackwater, then it spread to Saint-Denis, and soon enough anyone from Tumbleweed to Van Horn is playing around with this thing. The name, however, is not very popular, leading to some new nicknames, such as pin ball. Which one will stick, is anyone’s guess, but the game is here to stay.
A trade in teeth ends with powder and blood
By Jose Chavez
A trade meant to be settled with gold and handshakes instead came to an end in dust and gun smoke this week in New Austin. A hunter had set out to sell what he claimed were the teeth of dangerous predators, boasting that the lot came from cougars, bears, and wolves taken by his own hand. The prospective buyer, curious but cautious, examined the goods more closely and found reason for doubt. The teeth, while convincing at a glance, bore marks of heavy carving, their edges worked sharp by tool rather than by nature.
“I think they were real teeth,” the buyer later said, “but teeth of other animals, carved to look fierce.” The discovery soured the deal at once, though the seller stood firm, swearing he was offering the genuine article and nothing less. Words hardened, tempers flared, and the matter was carried to its grim frontier conclusion. A duel was agreed upon and swiftly fought. The buyer won, leaving the seller dead in the sand and the teeth scattered where they fell, unclaimed, unvalued, and no longer worth the argument they inspired.
A hunter’s closeness proves costly in the high country
By Delphia Atwood
A hunter returned to the fringes of civilization this week with breath still shaking in his chest and a story carved deep by fear. He told of stalking a great bull moose in Ambarino’s upper reaches, a beast broad of shoulder and slow of step, moving through the snow with a calm that tempted foolish confidence. To close the distance, the hunter soaked himself in blending tonic, the sort meant to dull a man’s smell and let him walk nearer than nature usually allows. Whether bewitched by the animal’s size or mistrustful of a long shot, he crept closer than sense would advise.
The gamble failed him. As he raised his rifle, the tonic lost its hold, and the moose caught his scent in a sudden snort of alarm. The charge came fast and brutal. The hunter says he took the antlers square in the chest and was flung aside like a broken branch, spared only by luck and the beast’s haste. The moose thundered off into the trees, leaving the man gasping in the snow. With what strength he had left, he clawed his way to his horse and rode hard for shelter, carrying with him a hard-earned reminder that in Ambarino, even the quietest giants answer closeness with violence.
Wagon mishap rattles bounty hunter outside Blackwater station
By Odell Clifton
A routine handoff at the Blackwater Police Station turned rough this week when a bounty hunter was struck moments after stepping back onto the street. Witnesses say that as the cowpoke cleared the doors, a wagon rolling through town veered just enough to clip both hunter and horse, sending them hard to the ground. The animal scrambled up quick, the rider soon after, and onlookers were relieved to find that neither suffered more than bruises and shaken pride. Officers inside the station, under the watch of Oswald Dunbar, confirmed no serious injuries were reported.
The wagon’s driver reined in at once and, by all accounts, acted the gentleman, offering to cover the bounty hunter’s next ride by private stage coach as recompense for the scare. With tempers cool and damage light, no complaint was filed, and the matter was settled there in the street. In a town like Blackwater, where gunfire and gallows often write the day’s headlines, some remarked it was a rare sort of ending: dust brushed off, hats tipped, and both parties riding on their separate ways.
Quiet contest of herbs yields an unexpected bond
By Emery Cosberry
A small posse of cowpokes gathered this week in the open country of New Hanover, preparing to take part in a tradition as old as the trails themselves: an herb-picking contest. The rules were simple and well known: set a span of time, spread out, and see who could gather the most useful plants before the moment ran out. “It may seem silly,” one of the men remarked, fingers already stained green, “but truth is we need herbs for our day-to-day life, so why not make it a competition.” Such contests, though lighthearted, sharpen the eye and steady the hand, virtues no frontiersman can afford to lose.
Just as the challenge was about to begin, a stranger rode up and dismounted without introduction. The posse shared a brief, wordless glance, then turned back to the ground and began picking in earnest, the newcomer joining in as if he had always been there. When the time expired and the herbs were counted, the stranger did not ride on. He lingered, helped sort the bundles, and shared the quiet company of the group. By the time they parted ways, no names had been spoken, yet a friendship had taken root all the same, proof that in New Hanover, even silence can be a common language.
Strange claims of sudden revelry unsettle Saint Denis
By Emeline Vickroy
Several cowpokes have come forward in Saint Denis this week with accounts so peculiar they have stirred equal parts laughter and unease along the boulevards and back alleys. Four men, unknown to one another by prior acquaintance, insist they arrived in the city without traveling to it at all. Each claims to have no memory of their life before the moment they “woke up,” as they put it, already atop a stage somewhere in the city, feet moving to music they could not name, bodies dancing as if commanded by an unseen hand. They recall noise, lights, and onlookers, but nothing of how they came to be there, nor of any past worth recalling.
A fifth cowpoke offered a different, if no less troubling, account. He stated that he had been observing a hunter in the wilds when, upon blinking, the world rearranged itself and he found himself standing in Saint Denis, watching the others dance in visible confusion. Unlike the rest, he claims he felt no compulsion to join them, only an overwhelming sense of dislocation. Many residents dismiss the stories outright, attributing them to drunkenness, illicit substances, or a coordinated attempt at attention. Still, the similarity of the accounts, especially among men with no evident ties, has left some wondering whether the city’s bright lights now pull more than just commerce and ambition from the dark roads beyond it.
Man captured in Rhodes is allegedly the target of a private bounty
By Mathilde Orry
Rhodes was hushed this week by a quiet taking inside the Parlor House, where a man of means was relieved of his liberty without incident. Witnesses say he went meekly, hands raised, while his two hired guns were cut down outside the saloon. Those same witnesses, peering through lace and smoke, swore the man who did the taking was Tom Lockburn, long coat, steady hands, and that habit of leaving a room emptier than he found it.
Trouble followed him out of town. As Lockburn rode east with the captive tied and silent, local deputies took up the chase, having been told the warrant was no warrant at all, but a private paper bearing the seal of Leviticus Cornwall. The deputies pressed hard for a mile or two before reining up, the lawmen conceding that Lockburn had slipped the tether of their jurisdiction. The dust settled, the bells of Rhodes rang on, and the matter was left to the wider, harsher arithmetic of the frontier.
The man was not seen again until a day later, when he was delivered to the Tumbleweed Sheriff in a state that answered any lingering questions about the road he had taken. His clothes were torn, his skin bristled with cactus needles, and his manner suggested a long acquaintance with rope and sand, as though he had been dragged through the desert to teach him the cost of being owned by other men’s debts. Representatives for Mr. Cornwall did not respond to requests for comment, and so the story ends where it began: with a door closing quietly, and a bounty hunter riding on, leaving the rest of us to argue whether justice, like the desert, belongs to anyone at all.
The Five States Herald 