by David Boop
“Jimmy Kettle, leader of the Claw Rock Gang, wanted for the rape and murder of Sarah Ragsdale, wife of William Ragsdale, and the murder of Trina Ragsdale, daughter of William Ragsdale. I am a vengeful spirit. I failed to kill you once.
“Now I claim my due.”
The Kid picked up the chamber pot from the floor and threw it with all the strength he had available. It flew across the distance and hit Kettle square in the head. The outlaw stumbled backward and through the window. The Kid heard his recognizable cry, the same cry as when he’d gone into the creek twenty years ago, cut short.
When the Kid peered out the shattered remains of the window, he saw the broken body of James Kettle lying prone over a hitching post. Kettle twitched for a moment or two, then died.
The spiritual pull felt like a tornado as the Kid descended the stairs and exited the saloon. He wanted to look on Kettle’s body closely, to make sure he’d done his work right this time, but the crowd had grown even thicker since Nate’s death.
The sound of horses at full gallop brought everyone’s attention around. The men who had ridden off to William’s cabin had returned with his body slung over the back of his horse. It wasn’t making any sense to anyone.
“The body was cold and stiff,” said the town doctor. “He’s been dead awhile, maybe late last night or early this morning.”
“But then that woulda been before the smithy,” said Clint.
Gasps and prayers echoed, as realization struck them.
“If not the Rag Doll Kid, then who?”
An older man called out, “That’s Jimmy Kettle, the guy that Sheriff Rags—I mean, the Rag Doll Kid swore he’d killed. Maybe, it was actually Kettle cleaning up some loose ends. Maybe all this was some sorta payback?”
There were murmurs of agreement, and everyone seemed satisfied. They’d write off Kettle’s death as an accident, a cosmic justice to an evil soul. Nobody wanted to think too hard on it.
“The Rag Doll Kid is dead, and Jimmy Kettle now is officially dead. The people of Drowned Horse can breathe easy again,” pronounced the preacher, who’d come up to give last rites to both.
Hearing his name spoken aloud, the Kid looked to a spot on his belt for the first time since his death.
It wasn’t there.
He made his way around to the horse carrying his own dead body, and saw the small stuffed toy on his hip. It’d been his good luck charm since the day he pried it from Trina’s cold hands. He’d worn it as he hunted down the gang of outlaws that had kidnapped and killed her and his wife, Sarah. And after the Kid had dispatched them, he continued to wear it as he hunted down and showed no mercy to the dozen men and women who had stood aside that fateful night and let Jimmy Kettle do his devil’s work on his family.
The Kid gingerly spirited the doll away from the corpse without anyone’s notice and held it to his chest.
The pull was inescapable now.
He let it lift him up.
He passed the rooftops in an instant.
Clouds surrounded him, and he left his burdens there. The release was welcome after so many years of torment, of guilt, of feeling like a failure. He should’ve stopped Kettle right away before he could murder the ones he loved. The Kid had wanted to kill himself after he’d finished his vigilante crusade, but, for some reason, he’d held on. As the stars guided him, he understood he’d been kept on Earth to dispense one last piece of justice.
Now, the scales were balanced.
As William Ragsdale crossed over eternity, he saw delicate, tiny hands reaching out toward him. He handed them the rag doll and accepted a hug from his wife in exchange.
Hell-Bent
TEX THOMPSON
In travel, as in life, the first virtue was self-control.
Presently, Holly could not control the blood spattered on his collar, nor the mud slopped over his trousers, nor the crack in his spectacles.
But he could very well fold his sack coat crisply over one arm, keeping a jaunty grip on his carpetbag with the other, and smile as he approached the rustic fellow leading a mule along the rain-swollen road.
“Pleasant morning, sir,” Holly said, and would have tipped his hat, had he retained its possession.
The rustic touched his battered straw brim in reply, and stared in open-mouthed amazement at the view beyond Holly’s shoulder.
Holly turned to stare with him. The mud-mired wreck was a good quarter mile behind him now, the stagecoach’s skyward-facing wheels having long since ceased to spin. “Oh, don’t be alarmed,” Holly said. “The reinsman and the shotgunner were both thrown clear, and my fellow passengers have enjoyed the grace of God and steel-ribbed corsetry. You see how they’ve set to drying their skirts on firmer ground, there. We’re all just cuts and bruises, nothing worse.”
A gunshot split the humid morning air.
“Well, perhaps not the horses.” Holly turned back to the rustic, whose expression had deepened its resemblance to a shriveled apple. “It’s not far to town, is it?”
Holly could not recall the name—something picturesque like Hobnail or Boot-Hump or Stye—and perhaps the rustic had the same difficulty, as it was a considerable time before he replied.
“…no, not hardly; Hockit ain’t but two miles up the road.” He crafted a helpful compass of his thumb.
“Splendid,” Holly said, as the sun was already making a white-linen swamp of his back and underarms. “Do you know whether they might have a doctor in residence?”
“Oh, sure,” the rustic said to the drying blood in Holly’s hair. “Doc Fitch’s place is cat-a-cornered from the hotel, can’t miss it. Just watch out for his boy Lan-Yap. He’s one of them hellbenders from the bayou, and you know what-like they are.”
Holly didn’t actually, but that was fine: This was surely rural racialism at its finest, a delicacy as authentic as any that had ever been plated and sold to a world-hungry expeditioner.
He smiled. “Fantastic,” he said. “I certainly will. And while we’re exchanging confidence, you’ll do very well by Miss Hinchcliff back there if your mule can spare his blanket. We pulled her out by the window, and I’m afraid her crinoline is a lost cause.”
His debt thus repaid, Holly took his leave and went on, boots squelching, carpetbag’s contents clinking merrily. Here was the true art of the traveler: One had only to retain mastery of one’s own person—and hand luggage, where possible—in order to enjoy all the education and entertainment that Nature reserved for the portable man.
And that was before profit even figured into it.
* * *
Holly introduced himself to the town’s main thoroughfare according to the rustic’s instructions: past a livery and the butcher’s, deftly avoiding horse piles, mud puddles, and the pious shadow of the church, until the gay green-and-white front of the Hockit Hotel directed him across the intersection. There, on the promenade, waited a shop advertised only by a pair of stoppered glass bottles in the window.
Holly folded and pocketed his cracked spectacles, tugged down the tips of his wine-colored waistcoat, and applied his knuckles with utmost gentility to the door.
“Come in, please!”
Holly was greeted first by the uncommonly pleasant voice, and then, upon admitting himself to the office’s dim interior, by a strikingly disagreeable smell.
As his eyes adjusted, Holly had little difficulty in spotting his target: The good doctor and his apprentice were bent over opposite sides of a table near the window, their mutual concern blocked from view by an apothecary’s counter.
The apprentice—a small, dark, native fellow—remained fixed on his object, but the doctor straightened. He had a pleasant young face, a gangly frame, and a white surgical smock absolutely saturated with blood.
Holly blanched. “Ah, Dr.…Fitch, is it? I’m terribly sorry; I see I’ve interrupted you. Is there a better time when I might—”
A snort from the apprentice cut him off. “It’s no trouble; she’s not going to get any deader.”
/> Stricken with horror and a surge of postmortem chivalry, Holly took two further steps into the room…
…and discovered that the “patient” on the table was a weanling pig, tied down and divested of its innards.
How vulgar.
“That’s tremendously gracious of you,” Holly said, his voice frosting over, “but I was rather more concerned about the doctor’s time. Please, sir,” he said, “let me make an appointment, and no further inconvenience.”
Dr. Fitch seemed momentarily taken aback, either by the sharpness of Holly’s tone or the deplorable state of his trousers. After a moment’s silence, the apprentice glanced up from his grim project. “Well, Doctor?”
That seemed to shake the tall blond master surgeon out of his daze: He blinked, and then beamed. “Not at all, not at all,” he said to Holly, waving away a particularly enterprising fly. “Please, have a seat at my desk; I’ll wash up and be right with you. I could do with a fresh face—God knows I’ve been looking at this one long enough!”
Holly couldn’t have said whether the good doctor was speaking of the apprentice or the pig. Nor could he afford to waste an invitation, no matter what its odor. “Thank you kindly,” he said. “I’d be much obliged.” He ducked to avoid the hanging nets of dried herbs, his boots stifling their imposition on the dusty floorboards until he had seated himself in the lesser of the desk’s two straight-backed satellites.
He shouldn’t have let that crude fellow lance his temper like that. Rudeness never profited anyone, and worthy gentlemen did not go about taking a coarse tone with other men’s menials.
Even if said menial was a “hellbender”…whatever that was.
Well, Holly would make amends for it presently. In the meantime, he pulled out his abused spectacles to study the framed diploma on the wall. It was difficult to read all the flourishes of penmanship in this light, but the essentials—
Board of Medical Examination and Registration, Province Lebeque—This Certifies—A Graduate in Surgery and Medical Jurisprudence—
—were unambiguously concluded with the name T. B. FITCH, the signature of three presiding scholars, and a date not even two years past.
Perfect.
“A little self-important, isn’t it?”
Holly glanced over at the doctor, who was already busying himself at the washbasin.
“Not at all! The University of Eau Doux has a sterling reputation even by northern standards,” Holly replied. Though it did explain where he’d picked up his swamp-dwelling apprentice. “I’m a Dutton man, myself.”
Because one could legitimately claim to be a “Dutton man” even if he’d only studied there a week, and Holly had persisted all of ten.
Dr. Fitch was duly impressed. “Dutton? Ah, now I have to ask: What terrible business brought you here, Doctor…?”
“Holly,” he said, drinking in this magnificent misconception like a tonic for his distressed sensibilities. “Frank Holly. And I’m no doctor—I leave that to my partner, Wilberforce Digby. Do you know his work?”
A rural sawbones like Fitch almost certainly wouldn’t, but Holly was happy to imply otherwise. Courtesy always spent.
“Digby…Digby…is he that clever optician with the iris spatula? No?” Receiving nothing but an insouciant shrug from his apprentice, the doctor apologized to Holly with a shake of his head. “May, you’ll have to acquaint me—just as soon as we patch you up.”
“Oh, not at all,” Holly demurred. “There’s no need; it’s only a—”
“My foot!” the doctor said, drying his hands on the inside of his gore-spattered smock and then reaching for the appropriate liniments. “Can’t have all that Dutton education leaking out of your skull; goodness knows you spent enough stuffing it all in there. Sit and be agreeable, Mr. Holly; we’ll just clean the cuts and see what’s what.”
Holly would have felt considerably more agreeable if the doctor would consent to take off that dire apron first…but if there were an inoffensive way to word that particular proposition, the coach wreck had rattled it out of him. “I’d…of course, thank you…and…that is…”
“Now then!” The shadow that fell over Holly’s seated frame announced itself with a collegial clap on the shoulder. “Tell me what kind of mess this was.”
“Oh, nothing very spectacular,” Holly said, his tone endeavoring to soothe his own stomach. “Those storms last night turned the roads to rivers of mud, of course, and everything’s pleasantries and polite conversation until someone spots a half-drowned tree fallen across the path, and someone else veers a little too sharply to avoid it, and before you can work out what pleasant impropriety has brought your face to union with Mrs. Mayweather’s lap, there’s an unholy amount of screaming and sideways-going, and a sharp suspicion that your skull has gotten off to quite a bad start with the corner of the window frame.”
From behind him, the doctor snorted. “Go to bed! And you don’t consider that spectacular? I hate to think what—”
At that moment, he leaned forward to dip his cloth in the washbowl at the corner of the desk, and the smell of offal enveloped Holly so completely that he spoke in immediate preference to vomiting. “Oh, you see a hundred times worse every day, I’m sure! Mud-caked tourists aside, what tends to ail the good people of Hockit?”
“Complaints?” Undeterred by the interruption, the lanky blond gentleman daubed with professional care at the gash on Holly’s scalp. “Oh, nothing special—whooping cough in the winter, malaria in the summer, and worms regardless.”
For his part, Holly kept his gaze fixed on the clean, still water in the bowl, and breathed through his mouth only. The sooner he closed the deal, the sooner he could quit this cheerful butchery. “Of course,” he said. “Is it very difficult to get bog yams here? I hear they’re quite good for sinkworms.”
The rhythmic twinges in his scalp paused as Dr. Fitch leaned forward again to refresh the cloth. “Oh, for the larvae, yes—a little purple paste on the foot sores and you can tweeze them right out. But that’s no help once they’ve rented a room in your innards, is it? The potato will kill you before the worm ever gets wind of it. Nasty things. They’ll clog up your bowels faster than you can—”
“I’d heard just the same,” Holly quickly agreed, struggling to stifle his nausea with a tried-and-true sales pitch, “and that’s why I was so surprised when Dr. Digby said he’d found a way around all that. You see, he spent a considerable time among the mereaux down south, and—”
“Oh, the fishmen!” Fitch interrupted, and in a tone of the most childlike glee. “Fascinating folks, aren’t they? We got to treat one just this spring…what was his name? Boudin? Bonbon?”
“Bouillon,” the apprentice said.
“That’s the one! Oh, I wish you’d met him, Mr. Holly. Even your worldly Dr. Digby would have stunned to see him. We talked for better than twenty minutes, as close as the two of us here, and as I live, it wasn’t until he opened his mouth for the tooth extraction that I figured him for anything but a perfectly human being. May, this could do with a few stitches.”
Adrift in a blizzard of irrelevance, Holly all but tripped over that last sentence.
Certainly not. He’d sew it himself before he let this unfathomable taxidermist pick up a needle in his presence. “Oh—I don’t know about that; I’m very quick to heal.”
“Are you sure? It’s very quick, and I can numb it with—”
“I wouldn’t be so much in your debt!” Holly sputtered, starting up to his feet.
Fitch’s hand on his shoulder was firm. “Then let’s at least have some iodine.” Was that disappointment in his voice?
“Thank you kindly,” Holly said. He yielded his posterior back to the chair, and struggled to right the conversation. “Anyway, I imagine you must have seen them with fair regularity during your time at school. As I was saying, the mereaux—”
“Oh, now don’t take on like that,” Fitch admonished him. His paintbrush announced itself like a feather drawn across an o
pen sore. “Nobody on this side of the border will understand you. Call them fishmen if you like, but they’ve got a far more familiar name around here. Now then, Mr. Holly, to business: Do you have any headache?”
“No,” Holly lied. If he hadn’t had one when he walked in, he certainly did now.
“Are you sure? No pain at all?” He pressed his cupped hands with relentless inquisition over and around Holly’s skull.
Unable to suppress a flinch, Holly struggled to excuse it. “Oh—only a bit, just there.”
Far from disapproving, the doctor’s voice was positively gleeful. “That’s what I thought! Dizziness, disorientation, nausea?” he asked hopefully.
“No!” Holly said, this time with the conviction of an inmate before the parole board. “Nothing of the sort.”
“Hmmm.” There was a longer pause, time enough for Holly to engender some wild hope of being allowed up from the chair. He desperately needed fresh air.
Fitch stepped around to the front. Holly held his breath. Without his glasses, he could nearly pretend that that was red paint. “Well, let’s just try your eyes. Watch, please.”
The doctor held up the brush he’d used to paint the cuts. Holly tracked it as the doctor moved it up and down, to the left and right.
From the edge of Holly’s periphery, the apprentice pulled something out of the carcass. Holly stared, transfixed, as the apprentice held up a length of intestine, and used his forceps to draw out something long and wet and heavy, like noodles, like shoestrings, like—
“Mr. Holly?”
Holly lunged forward, shoving the doctor violently aside, and had just time to plant his hands on the desk before he was retching into the bowl.
Fitch said something, but Holly heard nothing but the sound of his own disgrace until he’d relieved himself of his stomach contents…and his dignity. It didn’t take long.
When he finally straightened, the doctor regarded him with his arms folded, one hand cupped sideways under his chin, and an expression somewhere between vindication and disappointment. “You know, Mr. Holly, I’m beginning to think you haven’t been honest with me.”