random etchings

Gun

The stranger was trouble—hell-raising, barn-burning, bank-robbing trouble, from his pistol to his leathers to his eyes which were nothing but shadows in his trouble-making face. When he got to town, the sheriff took to polishing his badge and the poker game dried up for the first time in eight months and the papas locked their daughters away and put bars on their windows.

He didn’t answer questions, not from the sheriff nor from Mayor Wilcox nor from the undertaker, who was wondering how big a coffin to build. The stranger asked no questions either, just sat on a barstool in a dark corner of the tavern with a beer in his hand, watching the door and staring the curious down with his shadow driven eyes.

For all that, everything stayed quiet for a while. He took a room in Missie Lockwood’s boarding house. Missie’s girls said he was nigh respectable—paid up his room and didn’t take no liberties unless he paid in advance.

Maybe three weeks after the stranger came to town, the cowboys were drinking whiskey and breaking tables and spilling out of the tavern to sing off key songs about loose women. Jerry Carter was in town, swilling and fighting and singing louder than all the rest of them put together. He was a handsome man, with broad shoulders, money in the bank, and a new wife from the east who was a sweet thing and worth nearly a hundred of her care for naught husband, or so the neighbors said.

Around ‘bout midnight, Carolina was wondering where her husband was so she poked her sweet young face in the tavern door. By now, a lot of the townsfolk were used to the stranger’s trouble-making presence, so no one noticed when he sat up straight.

Carolina walked over to the bar and laid her dainty little hand on Jerry’s arm. “It’s a long drive home,” she said, and her voice was so clear it cut through the rowdy tavern like a bowie knife.

His friends were nudging and poking each other, sure if they had a bride like that to go home to, they’d already be there. But Jerry got mean when he drank, and he was certain that his friends were nudging and poking because they saw how hen-pecked he was, now that he was a married man.

And so he yelled an obscenity that made even his buddies flinch and want to cover the lady’s ears, and backhanded his little wife straight into a splintered table half way across the room.

The tavern was shocked, the piano man played a sour chord, and all the men in the tavern drew away from Jerry like he had contracted the pox. Carolina was sobbing. In the near silence, everyone heard the stranger’s stool skid back as he stood up.

Jerry looked at the stranger and turned paler than a wisp of smoke. “You!” Jerry went for his pistol with trembling hands, but as soon as it was in his hands, there were two clean holes right through Jerry’s heart.

The stranger walked over to Jerry and kicked away the gun from his dying fingers. “I warned you. Don’t hurt my sister.”

The next morning, everyone came out to watch as Carolina, pretty as ever in her widow’s black and her brother tall and handsome, with bright, unshadowed blue eyes, rode off into the dawn.