Andromeda Gun

by John Boyd

  He glanced at the book she had laid on the counter and said, “All right, Miss Stewart. I’ll take fried chicken and potatoes.”

  He could decipher the word “Bacon” on the front of the book. Assuming it was a cookbook, he said politely, “I’d like to compliment you on your choice of reading matter, ma’am. Ain’t many young ladies who’d be reading up on their work while they’re working.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, putting a place setting in front of him, “but I have to sharpen my mind for my children.”

  She wore no wedding band, so her remark interested him.

  “How many young ones you got, ma’am?”

  “Fourteen, but I’d have more if I could get help from the Mormons in this valley.”

  His soaring expectations suddenly fell as he realized she was a schoolteacher. That accounted for the children, the book and the “Miss” everybody put in front of her name.

  “Ma’am, I’d think every man in this valley would be glad to do anything you wanted.”

  “The lower half of the valley is all Mormons,” she said. “They won’t put their children in a Gentile school. Mr. Bryce Peyton, the stake superintendent, says he doesn’t want to get his angels mixed up with our angels.”

  “Still, you must be busy with fourteen, teaching them and running a restaurant.”

  “My mother helps during schooltime. Pa used to run the restaurant, but he was killed this spring in a fall from a horse.”

  Her cooking range, set back in an alcove, was within talking distance of his stool. He watched as she bent to put in more firewood and turned to slice his potatoes. All schoolteachers had high ideals, he knew, but this girl had something more—lean flanks, well-turned shanks, and the prettiest haunch he had seen north of Sonora.

  Schoolteachers went to respectable places, he reflected, like church, and a church hitching rack would be a good place from which to steal a fast horse. Ranchers would be riding their best animals to church, and the preacher would keep them occupied for at least an hour while the beasts went unguarded. Schoolteachers were seen only with respectable men, but, temporarily, Ian McCloud was a respectable man.

  “Are you open Sundays, ma’am?”

  “No, I’m not, Mr. McCloud, but I could fix you a box of chicken good for three meals, tomorrow, for the amount you’ll have left on Brother Trotter’s meal ticket.”

  “I might take you up on that. Is there a Methodist church hereabouts?”

  “Why, yes, Mr. McCloud.” Her face within the alcove flashed him a smile. “It’s just south of town. Brother Winchester preaches a fine sermon. Tomorrow, he’s going to tell us about heaven. If you care to join us, I’d be pleased to sit next to you and introduce you to our congregation.”

  “If you’re willing to be so kind, Miss Stewart, I’d be happy to hire a rig and carry you to church.”

  “I’d be honored to let you, Mr. McCloud, but I’m spoke for, coming and going. It’s only after I get there that I’m alone.”

  “Reckon I should have figured that, Miss Stewart. A girl as pretty as you would be sure to have a courter for going and one for coming.”

  “No, Mr. McCloud. Billy Peyton’s my only suitor. But he’s a Mormon and won’t go in. He just waits outside.”

  Her remark dismayed him. It would be harder to steal a horse with Billy Peyton waiting outside the church. “If Peyton’s willing to court you, seems to me he’d be willing to take your faith, unless you took his.”

  “No,” she said, above the crackle of frying potatoes, “and I’m not marrying into his church. Mormons can take more than one wife, and I’m not rushing home from my honeymoon so my husband can hurry away on another one.”

  “Why don’t you refuse him?”

  “Wouldn’t do any good. No other boy in the valley dares to come around, knowing how Billy feels about me. Besides, Billy’s Mr. Bryce Peyton’s first son by his third wife, as I recall, and Billy’s trying to persuade his father to send the Mormon children to my school. I’d certainly like to bring those children to the light, at two dollars, apiece, head tax, payable to the teacher.”

  “Still, the young men in this valley must be lily-livered. Billy ought to have claim jumpers all over the place.”

  “Billy’s a little ornery,” she explained. “Most of the boys know I despise violence, and Billy can get violent when he thinks somebody’s taking on over me.”

  She brought his plate and a cup of coffee and set them before him. “Now, when you’re through with this chicken, Mr. McCloud, I want your honest opinion if it’s the best chicken you ever tasted. If it’s not, you needn’t say a thing.”

  “All right, Miss Stewart, but why don’t you just call me Ian?”

  “I’d be pleased to, Ian, and you may call me Gabriella until Billy gets here. After that, we’d best go back to Mister and Miss because Billy might think we’re getting too familiar.”

  “Is Billy coming here?”

  “He will if you have a second cup of coffee. He watches from the saloon across the street.”

  “I didn’t think Mormons drank,” Ian said, biting into a chicken leg. It was good chicken, and a sip of the coffee told him he was bound to have a second cup.

  “Billy’s sort of a backslider, a jackleg as the other Mormons call him.” Suddenly her voice grew excited. “Here he comes, already. He must have seen you smile at me, and he’s getting worried.”

  “Well, if I’m not going to have the pleasure of your talk, Gabriella, maybe I could look at your book while I’m eating.

  “Why, I’d be pleased, Ian,” she said, handing him the book. “I’m always glad to see somebody read an enlightening book. But, remember, call me Miss Stewart, and I hate violence.”

  “I’ll remember, Miss Stewart, and I hate violence, too.”

  Ian raised his eyes to look at the man who emerged from the swinging doors across the street and disliked instantly what he saw, a tall and handsome young man with a ten-gallon white hat tilted back over his waving and lustrous black hair. There was deviltry in the smile that flashed teeth in the afternoon sun, an animal litheness in the swing of the broad shoulders. The only aspect of the approaching man Ian approved of was the way in which he wore his pearl-handled revolver, strapped low on his thigh with a double thong in the conventional manner of the gunfighter.

  The hand had a long way to travel before it reached the pistol’s butt. Billy Peyton would be dead before his gun cleared its holster.

  Ian glanced down at the book, opened it, and immediately became so engrossed he barely noticed Peyton enter and order a cup of coffee. He failed to notice, entirely, the hostile glance Peyton threw down the counter at him.

  Ian was reading. Although unable to decipher the name of the book, Novum Organum, he made out most of the words inside. When he discovered that long words were small words put together, he had found a key to a language he recognized as English but which was written in a manner no trailhand ever used and, for that matter, no newspaper. After three pages, he was picking up speed. Almost unconsciously he asked for a second cup of coffee because, after the fifth page, he was breaking out of the chaparral. By the seventh page, he was reading at a full gallop. On page twenty, and his third cup of coffee, he was brought back to his surroundings by the loud voice of Billy Peyton.

  “Looks like you got a scholar in here, Gabe, and a real coffee drinker.”

  Ian looked up the counter toward the man. With intuitive clarity, he realized that his virtuous behavior had availed him nothing; Billy Peyton, grown jealous of a reading ability which would raise a man’s standing in the eyes of a schoolteacher, was trying to pick a fight.

  Shamefacedly, Ian closed the offending book and shoved it down the counter, as Gabriella tried to wedge polite formality between the two men. “Mr. Peyton, this is Mr. McCloud. He brought in Brother Trotter.”

  Peyton was not interested in friendly formalities.

  “Well, coffee drinker,” he said with loud contempt, “you must be a Samaritan.”


  “No, sir,” Ian said politely, “I hail originally from Alabama.”

  “My, isn’t he the witty one.” Peyton addressed the girl with mincing tones. “Or maybe your scholar doesn’t know that a Samaritan is somebody who does good deeds, like bringing in a dead body before the other buzzards get to it.”

  Billy Peyton was using grammar, yet he was making out that Ian was a sissy.

  “I just did my Christian duty, sir,” Ian interposed humbly.

  Billy Peyton slapped his exposed thigh and guffawed, still directing his conversation to Miss Stewart. “A Christian as well as a scholar! I bet he’s a chicken lover, too.”

  Billy Peyton was spoiling for a fight. Coming out from under the influence of Francis Bacon, Ian’s thoughts swung back into their old channels. If Peyton didn’t appreciate virtue and wanted to fight, he was giving Ian a chance to get rid of the horse guard at church tomorrow. But, he cautioned himself, Peyton might be a coward who wore a fancy gun to shore up his courage and . he might back away from a showdown. Ian wanted to forestall any backdown. He wanted to kill Peyton fair and square, and it would hurt his currently high standing in the community if he shot a man in the back who was running away.

  Ian affected an apologetic look and spoke with a voice that reeked with humility. “I truly do love chicken, Mr. Peyton. I ain’t never wrapped my lips around a better breast than Miss Stewart’s and her thighs are about as good as any I ever sunk my teeth into.”

  “What are you talking about, boy?”

  “Miss Stewart’s chicken, sir.”

  “Sounded for a minute, there, like you were giving your last will and testament, and maybe you were.”

  “If I done you any offense, Mr. Peyton, I surely want to apologize. Next to Miss Stewart’s chicken, there’s nothing I’d like better than a little peace…”

  “Watch it, boy!”

  In desperation, Ian turned to the girl.

  “I do want to thank you for the loan of your book. As Sir Francis Bacon says, ‘Some books are to be chewed and digested.’ His own is one of them books, and so’s your chicken. Now, you got my meal ticket, Ma’am, and you can punch it any way you see fit, but I want to leave this silver dollar with you in appreciation for the most delightful breast, legs, and thighs I ever met with on life’s journey.”

  The silver dollar he laid on the counter was the largest gratuity he had ever left a waitress, but it was a small price to pay for a fast horse. Gabriella plucked it from the counter with delight and excitement, saying, “Why I do appreciate both of them, Mr. McCloud, the speech and the dollar.”

  Tipping his hat to her deferentially, he walked toward the door, giving Peyton a wide and respectful berth, but politeness availed him little.

  “Boy, that was your last will and testament.”

  As Ian eased out of the door, with a shy, scurrying movement, he heard Gabriella exclaim, “Now you leave him be, Billy. Mr. McCloud is a good Methodist.”

  “A good Methodist! Well, that does it.”

  Ian walked rapidly down the boardwalk toward the hotel. Behind him he heard the door open and close, and he stepped up his pace. Behind him, the clomp of boots on the boardwalk sounded faster.

  “Hey, boy!”

  Ian did not like the term “boy.” Peyton was using it because he was a few inches taller than Ian and not because he was older. But Ian stopped and turned, forcing a smile that wobbled on his face as Billy Peyton halted twenty paces behind him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That girl back there. She’s my girl.”

  There was a temporizing, lecturing note in the Mormon’s voice. Apparently he was not intending to gun down the respected stranger, only to give a bullying lecture.

  “I don’t doubt that, Mr. Peyton, but, as I told you, I’m a peace lover…”

  “Watch it, boy.”

  “What I mean, Mr. Peyton, is that I’m no gunfighter like you, partly because I’m peaceful but mostly because I’m so slow. I’m kindly disposed toward everybody, Mr. Peyton. Even Mormons. Maybe mostly Mormons. It’s hard enough for a man to make his way in this world when he don’t know who his pa is. It’s a lot harder for a son like you, whose pa’s got fifteen or sixteen wives, because a poor old Mormon boy, like you, don’t even know who his ma is.”

  “You wouldn’t be calling me a son of a bitch?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Peyton. I couldn’t rightly call you one. Only your pa could do that, since he’s the only man who knows which bitch is which.”

  “Draw, Gentile,” Billy Peyton snarled.

  The men had forced the moment to a crisis. G-7 caught with its tendrils out, diffused along the neutral channels of McCloud, and it knew with the knowledge of its host what devastation might be wrought by a lead slug ripping through brain tissues. Vulnerable, now, it was faced with the instant dissolution of its photons. With it would go all hope for this species, and it was either it or the Mormon.

  Reluctantly but instantaneously, G-7 fissioned an ion and slowed the currents of time around Billy Peyton.

  With lightning speed the Mormon’s hand swooped toward the gun, but the hand had a long way to go to the low-slung pistol, and Ian knew, already, the gunfighter he faced was a rank amateur. Not only had Peyton telegraphed his move by tensing his knees, the fool had yelled at Ian to draw.

  This boy, Ian remembered, was the son of Bryce Peyton, the Mormon stake superintendent. Through Billy Peyton, Gabriella was trying to bring the Mormon children to the light. Ian hungered to send a bullet into the groins of Peyton, killing him slowly and letting him know that death was on the way, but his hand slowed at the thought of Gabriella’s students.

  In its haste, G-7 erred in attempting to superimpose its own unselfish aims onto the purposes of the gunfighter.

  With Peyton grabbing iron, this was one hell of a time to be thinking about schoolchildren he cared not a whit about. Far more important to Ian was the opportunity to get rid of the horse guard at the church tomorrow. Besides, with Peyton out of the way, he could drive Gabriella to church, in a springed buggy with a wide, cushioned front seat. He couldn’t think of a more pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning than with a girl who liked his speeches and grew ecstatic over silver dollars, schoolteacher or no.

  Ian’s last musing, drawn out over several microseconds, gave G-7 a clue to more powerful motivational areas in the human psyche. It reacted with whorls of energy around the mating nodules in the man’s brain.

  McCloud had never heard of Lilith or Helen of Troy. For him, Semiramis had never been, and Deirdre was a lie told by an Irishman. Yet, at this moment with Peyton’s hand finally touching the pistol’s handle, he felt all the storied charm of earth’s immortal beauties, all the nuances of love held by romantic legend, focused in an after-image on his brain of a golden-haired waitress. For approximately three one-hundredths of a second, McCloud was in love with Gabriella Stewart.

  He had to take the girl to church tomorrow, but a proper schoolteacher would never permit herself to be escorted by the man who had gunned down her recognized suitor the day before. The problem occurred to Ian simultaneously with its solution. He could make Billy Peyton the laughing stock of Shoshone Flats. He could spare the man but kill his pride.

  It was Ian McCloud’s solution, not G-7’s, but since levity is an attribute of luminosities, the humor in the plan aroused G-7’s admiration.

  Peyton’s revolver had cleared its holster before Ian moved. He flipped out his gun and took careful aim, firing at the index finger protruding from the trigger guard of Peyton’s pistol, leading the upward moving target by a quarter-inch. Ian fired. Watching the slug from his .44 move along its trajectory, Ian knew before it had gone six feet that the bullet was on target. No follow-up shot would be necessary.

  G-7 did not figure the firing angle for its host. With his nerves, viscera, muscles, and keen eyesight, McCloud had done it all himself, and G-7 was proud of the man.

  Ian saw his bullet stride the trigger casing of the Mormon’s
gun, sever the first two joints of Peyton’s trigger finger, and ricochet, tumbling to strike sideways against Peyton’s belt buckle. The slow, driving force of the bullet jackknifed Peyton backward along the boardwalk, lifting his boot heels into the air.

  Technically Peyton had never fired the bullet which oozed from the muzzle of his revolver and crawled slowly toward a clump of bushes ten paces between the gunfighters; Ian’s bullet had fired Peyton’s pistol. As Ian watched the .38 slug plummet toward the ground, he made, for him, a strange resolution: He would never tell anyone that his bullet had fired Peyton’s pistol. Without doubt, this was Billy Peyton’s first and only gunfight, and it was fitting that, along with the stub of his trigger finger, the Mormon be left some tattered remnant of his pride.

  As time regained its tempo in the roar of pistols, Ian saw Peyton’s gun swirling away into the dust and Billy sitting on the sidewalk holding a bleeding stub of what had once been his trigger finger in front of him, looking at it in disbelief. He saw Gabriella rushing from the restaurant. Across the road, the swinging doors of Bain’s saloon swung outward, propelling Mr. Bain and four spavined dance hall girls dressed in ball gowns toward the scene. Sheriff Faust was emerging from his office, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Down the street, the door of Near-Sighted Charlie’s Funeral Parlor opened and a sawed-off man groped his way out. All the images impinged but briefly on Ian’s sight as he moved toward his fallen foe, whipping the bandanna from around his neck and twisting it as he advanced.

  “Give me your wrist, lead knuckles,” he said as he knelt beside the seated man who stared dazedly at the stub of his missing finger which was spurting blood. “I’ll tourniquet your arm.”

  As Ian tightened the handkerchief and the blood flow lessened and stopped, Peyton recovered his senses.

  “It’d been better for me if you’d killed me, mister, because I’d like to return your favor, but I won’t be able to. I can’t pay back a dead man. Gentiles don’t gun down saints in this country without retribution, but I will say a little prayer for you while I watch you hang.”