Engagement with Brie

Folks called them the Cheese gang—with someone named Cheddar and both the Brie brothers as members, it was almost inevitable. Not that the whimsical name meant this particular set of bank robbers were to be taken lightly. Any question of that was put to bed when they tore through Reno like a savage tornado, shooting the sheriff, three bank tellers and fourteen presumably innocent bystanders (no one had an opportunity to learn otherwise, since all of them were dead before the dust could settle) during the hold up. The lump of hardened jack one of the outlaws tossed down in the middle of the street as they rode off might have, under other circumstances, inspired stories by would-be Mark Twains. The citizens of Reno, shattered in spirit if not in sober cold fact, instead wrote lengthy telegrams to every settlement within a three days’ ride, warning of possible immanent disaster.

Sheriff Coffee, who’d had his share of bad jokes about a name that looked more natural on a menu than an office door, treated the telegram that arrived in Virginia City quite seriously. He assembled not just his entire staff of deputies but also as many other men that he could trust on a posse as he could find to discuss the situation. Since the Cattlemen’s Association had held its annual meeting (and the attendant annual dinner) in town the night before, several of the ranchers from the surrounding area were mingling with the anxious townsmen—chief among them, naturally, the four Cartwrights from the Ponderosa and their top hand, Hank Meyers, whose recent engagement was still the main subject of local gossip.

Even with such a plethora of reliable men, it didn’t seem likely that the sheriff could do much to protect the town. There were so many potential targets—not just the banks, but the ore trains, the stamping mills, even the local jewellers—that placing guards on them all wasn’t possible. In any case the potential guards showed a marked reluctance to take on such a duty, and, given how trigger-happy the Cheese gang had been in Reno, not even Sheriff Coffee could blame them. Add to that the fact that the gang might come the very next day, or stay away for weeks, and defense began to seem hopeless.

But eighteen deaths…even more than the potential financial suffering, that was an appalling prospect. One of the dead in Reno had been little more than a baby, and another a woman expecting her second child. No one wanted such things to happen in their own community, and so the discussion went round and round in circles, accomplishing nothing except making the participants steadily more frustrated.

As the argument reached its height (or depth), a messenger brought Sheriff Coffee a second telegram. He cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention and announced, “Seems we may get a little advance warning after all. It says here that piece of cheese they left behind was bought in Reno’s general store the day before. If we have people watching for that kind of thing here—”

“Watching where?” someone at the back interrupted. “Ain’t we got three general stores here, plus that new one just sells cold cuts and deli food?”

“All of ’em, o’ course,” Sheriff Coffee explained. “Just get a hold of anyone from out-of-town who buys a big lump of cheese, and bring him here so’s we can figure out what to do next.”

Unsurprisingly, it was Adam Cartwright who pointed out all the flaws in this scheme, starting with the fact that just because they’d left cheese behind on one hold up didn’t mean they’d bother again, and even if they did no one in Virginia City knew the entire gang by sight—although the Brie brothers were familiar enough faces. Not to mention that someone buying a hunk of cheese still didn’t help them guess when the gang’s attack was coming, let alone what it would target….

“Anyone got a better idea, then?” the sheriff countered, sounding more hopeful than annoyed.

No one did, of course—not even Adam Cartwright. Meekly he and the rest of his family signed up for their share of the stakeout.

XxXxXxX

For a few days the novelty of keeping watch for unfamiliar cheese-purchasers kept people interested in the sheriff’s plan, but it didn’t take long before most of them stopped bothering to remember their assigned times. The Cartwrights did, of course—they never neglected their civic duties, especially when those duties provided an excellent excuse to spend extra time in town with a glass of beer to hand—but with only four of them to keep watch over every supplier of cheese in town it had to be admitted the odds favored the Cheese gang making their purchase (assuming they made one at all) unobserved.

Only it wasn’t just the four of them. Hank Meyers was spending just as much time as his bosses in town, even if cheese (or the Cheese gang) had very little to do with why he was there. He had wedding bells on his mind, and his redoubtable fiancee was hard at work purchasing material for her trousseau. Joe Cartwright—the only member of his family at all comfortable in the lady’s presence—was providing moral support for his employee as the happy couple debated options for the nuptial gown one morning several days after the disturbances in Reno.

Why it was the elder Brie boy who showed up in Virginia City’s largest general store that same day is a mystery that may never be explained. It should have been obvious to his fellow gang members that someone not from the area was a better choice for making an unobtrusive purchase. The Bries had been Joe’s schoolmates, had attended church with their widowed mother, had become nine-days’-wonders in the town when they took up their life of crime. In fact, quite a few people suspected that if their mother hadn’t been so fond of overwrought romantic poetry, neither of the boys would ever have been driven from the straight-and-narrow. Chief among those was their former teacher, who still spoke of them, as she did all the rest of her ex-pupils, in tones of mildly condescending disapproval that they’d escaped the bounds of her authority.

All might have gone well if Hank Meyers hadn’t been shown so many kinds of lace and fabric during the short time he’d been in the store. However, his nerves were well frayed by the time he recognized the new customer coming through the door, and somehow in the ensuing fracas a gun was drawn, turning a spirited confrontation into a very tense, if slow-motion, showdown. Hank and Joe had reluctantly slid their guns along the floor towards their opponent and were raising their hands in surrender when the store-keeper’s daughter and Hank’s fiancee came in from the back room, arms laden with more fabric. Sally Cass dropped her burden with a stifled shriek, but Abigail Jones took in the situation at a glance and, in her most piercing chalk-on-slate tones, exclaimed, “Why, Hildegard Brie, you put that thing down this instant!”

For the briefest of moments a small boy’s fear flickered in the gunman’s eyes—just long enough for Hank Meyers to launch a devastating uppercut at his jaw and Joe Cartwright to leap for his gun hand.

The rest was anticlimax, to say the least. After three completely peaceful days, Sheriff Coffee was forced to release young Brie; there was, as everyone had to admit, no law against attempting to purchase cheese, and if everyone who ever drew a gun in Virginia City was put in jail for that there’d be precious few people left to do any work. Hank Meyers and Abigail Jones completed the plans for their wedding in peace. Nothing more was heard of the Cheese gang until, several weeks later, they blew up a bank in Placerville. It was noteworthy, however, that they never again returned to Nevada soil, as far as anyone ever discovered.