How the West Was Weird, Vol. 2

by Barry Reese

  He had half-expected her to never come back to the ranch after their dispute earlier in the day, but he just had a hunch that she would be nearby. He knew that Rachel was mad, but he had no idea that she would place so many lives in danger just to get that sweet filly back.

  He was beginning to think that Rachel had sent the T-rex as a distraction, to keep everyone away from the stables while she swept in and grabbed the raptor behind their backs.

  That filly would fetch a more than fair price on the open market. So would the T-rex, for that matter, but there was absolutely no market for it in the Midwest, and it would be impossible to get the T-rex East.

  As he came up the low grade slope that fed into the stables, Hoffer heard noises coming from inside. As far as he knew, everyone on the ranch was busy with the T-rex. He wished he had his six gun on his hip, or even better, his shotgun, but as it stood he didn’t have time to get them. By the time he came back from his office with the hardware Timbers would be long gone.

  He patted Spitfire gently on the head, a silent command to slow down. He wanted to surprise Timbers, and maybe get the jump on her before she knew that she had been caught.

  Hoffer slid off of Spitfire’s saddle slowly, edging toward the entrance to the stables. Someone had lit the gas lamp inside and shadows were busily dancing on the ground, cast by the light. Hoffer moved with his back to the wall, sliding up to the doorway. He motioned for Spitfire to stay still, and the beast complied.

  He was uneasy about confronting her like this, as she was a wild woman that could easily just go crazy on him. But he hated having his property rustled out from under him even more.

  Hoffer stepped out from behind the wall cautiously, ready for anything.

  “Hendricks!” he exclaimed.

  The wrangler stopped dead in his tracks and stared at Hoffer. He had one hand on a set of reins coming from the prize filly’s head, and in the other hand he wielded Hoffer’s own whip.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hoffer demanded.

  Hendricks noticeably hesitated. “Now wait just a second there, Jimmy,” Hendricks replied. “You just wait one blasted second. I can explain this.”

  “Explain it?” Hoffer took a few steps into the stables and felt his anger boil up something fierce. “Go ahead and try to explain you stealing from me, Cal. I’m just itchin’ to hear this. I bet the sheriff will want to hear it, too.”

  “This ain’t what it looks like, boss. I know... I know it looks bad, but I’m telling you to just listen to me for a minute. Don’t go getting all rowdy on me just yet.”

  Hendricks suddenly raised back his arm and snapped his whip directly at Hoffer. If the ranch owner had been a second slower he might have been dealt a terrible lashing, but the truth was that Hoffer was ready for Hendricks to make a move. He threw himself to one side and yanked his own whip off his belt. He fell against a door stall just inside the stables, but he had avoided Hendricks’ strike.

  Hendricks tossed his legs up onto the raptor. The saddle that Mallory had slung onto the raptor still held tight, and Hendricks was ready to crack his whip once more, this time in a command to flee the stables.

  Hoffer thumbed the switch on his whip’s handle, pushing it all the way up, and snapped it directly in the face of the filly. The raptor screeched and bucked wildly, tossing Hendricks onto his backside on the floor of the stables.

  As Hoffer ran to calm the raptor, Hendricks sprung to his feet and made for the exit on the other side of the building. Dropping his whip and deciding to take his chances on his own two fast moving legs, Hendricks only got as far as one step outside the stables.

  The thick, flat top of Silvermane’s skull bashed into Hendricks’ side, sending him flying thirty feet away. The broad Megalosaurus hollered at the downed wrangler, but was quickly brought under control by the woman riding on his haunches. Hendricks rolled nearly a dozen times in the dirt before coming to a stop face up. His face was bloodied, and he was knocked out cold, but he was still alive.

  Rachel Timbers smirked at the unconscious wrangler and then patted her dino in appreciation. She pulled gently on the reins, guiding Silvermane into the stables beside Hoffer.

  “Heard you had a little commotion on the ranch tonight,” she said casually.

  “You came back,” Hoffer responded. “I thought you were done working for me.”

  “Jimmy, even though you’re a lowball cheat, you’re still the best dino rancher in the country. I won’t get nearly as good a selection of lizards to work on if I leave Suffrage.” She tossed a glance over her shoulder toward Hendricks. She smiled. “Besides, you need me.”

  “You won’t hear me argue. Where did you run off to when you left earlier? Were you skulking around the ranch or did you get half way to California?”

  “I made it as far as the saloon,” Timbers answered. “I struck up a conversation with a few of the wranglers that work for your uncle’s ranch, seeing if I might find some work there. That’s when they told me about Cal.”

  “Hendricks? He’s working for my uncle?” Hoffer was baffled, and his anger was boiling back up again. “How is he wound up in this mess?”

  “They said they were sending a T-rex your way to wreck the ranch, and that Cal was supposed to make off with your latest catch as payment on a debt. I think your boy there has some gambling problems.”

  It made perfect sense. The only crew that had a chance of wrangling a T-rex, outside of Hoffer’s, worked for his uncle. With the resonator on that lizard they wouldn’t even have to worry about losing the beast, and they could round it back up easily after Hoffer’s ranch had been thoroughly trashed.

  Hoffer couldn’t help but grind his teeth together. His uncle had never gotten over all the business that he had taken when they parted ways. Hands down, James Henry Hoffer was the better rancher and his uncle knew it. So did everyone else, which was why his uncle’s business had been hurting the last few years.

  Still, he never thought his uncle would try and kill him. That’s what sending a mad Tyrannosaurus amounted to. It was like rolling a lit powder keg into a church.

  Most of all, he was disappointed in Hendricks. He had never once suspected that one of his wranglers would turn on him that way. He looked up at Rachel, a woman he had scorned that very same day, and wondered how things might have turned out if she hadn’t decided to come back and give him this information.

  Hendricks might have gotten away, and Hoffer would never have known about his uncle’s involvement. It might have come down to the blame resting solely on Hendricks’ shoulders, and the sheriff would hang him for sure. Even though Cal had done him wrong, he didn’t deserve to die.

  Hoffer rubbed his hand soothingly on the startled rap-tor’s neck, trying to calm her. He looked her over once to make sure that she hadn’t been harmed, and then looked back up at Timbers.

  “Mind stepping into my office for a spell, Rachel?” he finally asked.

  She gave him a quizzical look. “Why’s that?”

  Hoffer smirked, took in a deep breath, and sighed.

  “I think I owe you some money.”

  WEST OF FORT SMITH

  by Tommy Hancock

  The six gun's dragon-like mouth belched fire, its lead tooth slicing through his gut like whore's silk. He screamed his entire life into the knotted, manure tasting burlap sack filling his mouth. The blast broiled the fair skin of his belly and blood bubbled up and boiled over, spilling out of this new wound. He danced and thrashed, his hands chafing against the hemp rope that bound him to the scaffolding. His legs kicked up puffs of dust as he weaved back and forth, suspended just high enough that only his knees and the tips of his boots found ground. He opened his eyes to the darkness that had plagued them since someone had slipped something over his face three hours before. Black swirled in front of him, black filled with agony, confusion, anger, but most of all betrayal. Noises around him provided accomp-animent to the dervish of emotions and agonies he was swept in. The dry drone
of crickets somewhere behind him. The sound of his own blood splashing against the ground like thick slop thrown to wasteful pigs. And voices, not the voices of angels calling him to his mother’s side like the hymns always told about, but voices of men, evil men he’d once called friends, partners. And one that he had trusted enough to ride into the closest thing to Hell this world had. The voice of a man he would have died for. In the most heinous of ways, Sam Hane was doing exactly that.

  “Remove his hood,” came the resonant authoritative thunder that had decided life and decreed death in the District of Western Arkansas and the Indian Territory for the last eighteen years. “Samuel should at least glimpse the last moments. He should know of the contribution he makes.”

  A flock of fingers tangled themselves up in whatever was over Sam Hane’s head, probably just another cowboy’s burlap, and yanked it off. It was still night, he could tell that through his squinted, reddened eyes. Flurries of motion haunted the corners of his vision, blurry figures that he knew to be Borton and Maker. Borton moved in and out of Sam’s range of vision, the fencepost of a man carrying some sort of flame, holding it sideways. A candle. A candle with red wax dripping from it as it burned, dripping as Sam’s blood spilled from his stomach. Borton walked around him, dollops of wax in his trail, forming a crude circle around him. Maker stood almost out of view, only his pudgy hands a constant. Slinging, throwing something toward Sam, at him, covering him. A dust, a gray cloud of powder. Not fine, like lady’s face powder, but coarse and sharp, slivers of something amongst the grains.

  More fire flickered around him, the incessant sizzle of the gas lamp he knew to be out in front of and to the right of the gallows adding itself to the cacophony. All of that was hazy, blurry, even though Sam knew it all to be true. The man in front of him, however, the gaunt, dignified figure before him, masked everything else from Sam Hane’s view, from his mind. Judge Isaac Parker, his salt and pepper hair wet with perspiration and blood, the greasy mix caught in his trimmed mustache, fully commanded the final few seconds of Sam Hane’s attention and life.

  “I abhor waste, Samuel,” Parker intoned, unfolding his arms from across his chest. One hand held the hogleg that had delivered the bullet into Sam’s gut, the other the Judge’s trademark wooden gavel, scarred from dealing death to many a worthy badman. “In time, resources, and words as well. But it is important, I believe, that you know you have not failed.” Parker loomed in front of Sam, his arms outstretched, each hand holding an instrument of judgment, Fort Smith’s very own fully realized spirit of vengeance. “You came to me, Samuel,” Parker orated, “two years ago and stated eloquently your desire to wear my star.” Parker’s lipless mouth turned up into a maniacal grin. “To be one of my marshals, one of my agents in my thankless war on violators and outlaws. And I gave you that right, Samuel, for you reminded me of myself when I first arrived,” Parker said wistfully, “before I knew the truth.

  “I was convinced,” Parker continued, “that the law and my own aggressiveness in pursuing it would be sufficient to be the judge of this District, Samuel. Until I actually arrived here and surveyed that I had not been sent to a backwater Arkansas settlement, but I had been placed as guard and keeper at the figurative mouth of Hades. I learned, woefully too late,” Sam swore he saw tears brimming in the Judge’s eyes as his insane prattering stampeded on, “that the men of this land were of such true debauchery and evil that the only recourse I had to battle them, to stop their infectious spread, was to align myself with the forces they served. To take certain measures,” shadows filled his drawn cheeks, dancing like gray imps along his face, “to insure justice prevailed. Even at the cost of lives and souls.”

  Sam Hane shut his eyes and thrust his head down, the only way he could show that he had no interest in what the man he’d once respected more than any man of the cloth ever was saying. Parker continued, smatterings of speech and sight tying enough of what Sam’s pain-addled mind had pieced together. Maker moaning about someone finding Sam’s body and blood come sunup. Baker explaining in frustrated snippets that no one had found the other sixteen, that nothing would be left but clean ground beneath the gallows. Parker telling them both to ‘quell your fears and make right the task at hand.’ Maker throwing even more powder, reaching into an odd colored leathery sack held in his left hand. Borton lighting another candle, this time walking so the wax dripped in a different shape, up to a point, then back down and over and repeating. And words from all three men in the midst of their conversation, words in a language Sam Hane had never heard in his life, not from Indian, Negro, or white man, but words that frightened him. Tapping some deep, primal horror that welled up within Sam, forcing his mind to want to flee, to somehow retreat. But it could not run very far, only back to where this nightmare had started.

  Earlier in the evening, Borton and Maker had cajoled Sam to go out with them, to hit the dram houses up at the far end of Garrison Street. They and others had plied at him since the first day he’d put on the badge for Parker, but the Judge had been right. Sam Hane’s only drive was to serve the law and Judge Parker and to see justice done. This had been a desire storming in his heart and spirit his entire life, since his first memories of the Masonic Home for Orphans in Batesville. No family ever existed for Sam Hane, no semblance of a childhood. Only the urge to see wrong made right.

  He’d resisted the juvenile pleadings and teasings of other marshals for the last two years, but for some reason tonight, saw little harm and even felt compelled to at least trail along behind Borton and Maker on their jaunt through town. They hadn’t crossed a batwing door of a saloon, though, before Hane knew he’d made a mistake. In an alley between Moore’s Dry Goods and the Hewitt Hotel, Baker spotted a woman. Sam knew her. Molly Ferguson, daughter of one of the handful of doctors in town. Molly saw the three men as well and, blushing, said she was expecting someone, but would be on her way.

  What came next sounded the beginning of the end of Sam Hane.

  Borton grabbed Molly about the neck from behind, his snakelike arm tightening like dried leather, and forced her back into the alley. Maker followed, his fat hands making fast work of the girl’s coat, ripping into her bodice like a child at Christmas. Hane, overcome with shock but for a second, drew his six-gun and shouted, demanding to know what was going on, telling them to leave her alone. Deep in the alley, Maker laughed, hawing like a donkey, and Molly only gurgled, her breath escaping in gasps from the alley. Hane ordered once more, threatening to shoot. Borton’s whiny scrape of a voice rose from the alley in response. A response that chilled Sam Hane’s bones.

  “Come on, Sam,” Borton invited, sadistic glee hanging on every word. “Take a taste with us. We’re the law, after all. The good people owe us something now and then. No one’ll know, boy. They never do.”

  Only one word made its way out of Sam Hane’s throat.

  “No.”

  “Then,” came a voice from behind him, one that Sam had heard sentence a murderer to hang mere hours ago, “you were correct, Borton. He is just the man to pay our yearly price for peace and prosperity.”

  And Sam Hane’s world ended, only to be savagely reborn with a gunshot to his stomach minutes ago.

  “You are a good man, Samuel,” Parker’s words intruded on Sam’s recollections, “and only good men, pure of heart and clean of vice, can help me bring justice to the badlands. But even with those such as you, I could not do my job, my destined duty without becoming what I despised. So,” Parker sounded almost regretful, yet justified, “I did just that. I sought out the true source of the corruption and decadence of not only what lies beyond Fort Smith to the west, but the very wellspring of wantonness and wicked-ness that has plagued humanity forever. I sacrificed myself, Samuel, and the men who would carry out my will so that this town, this country would become the glowing bastion, the beacon it should be!”

  The cold steel of a gun barrel caressed the underside of Sam’s chin, forcing him to look up. Parker was there, his eyes vacant of any l
ight. He whispered only so Sam could hear. “But even with such self-sacrifice,” Parker said in a singsong voice, a demented child reciting a lunatic’s nursery rhyme, “one must give good to the bad to make it all better. Simply put, one good soul, Samuel, one man of right mind and spirit every year. It is a pity, though,” Parker added, sincere sorrow in his voice, “that men like you are only good as fodder for the Great Beast I serve.”

  The barrel of the gun teased Sam’s parched skin, trying to tickle, but only taunting. “So, here you are, Samuel. Offered at the very gallows where law is made final. A lamb on the altar, as it were. And through you,” Parker stood up straight once more, again his arms in the air, “because of this offering, the godlessness that permeates throughout the land west of here shall never cross beyond Fort Smith and shall soon be smitten from the Earth.”

  Sam Hane felt the searing cold heat of the bullet shatter his skull and enter his brain before he ever heard the crack of the shot. And then nothing. Nothing but indescribable, blinding light.

  Splinters dug into his knees, pricks of sensation riding hard and loose up and down his body. His eyes opened slowly like thirsty cactus flower blossoms, desperate to live, but afraid of what might await them. His arms were no longer suspended above him, his wrists no longer tied to the gallows’ scaffolding. His head bowed, fingers of his right hand traveled across his stomach while his left ran its digits through his desert blonde hair. He pulled them both away, looking at them, expecting blood on his skin, gore between his fingers. Yet they were dry and clean, spotless of any dirt or stain. His eyes saw beyond his hands. No dirt beneath him. Only wood. Weathered planks of wood nailed together as a platform. The last place the convicted stood before earning their just rewards in Fort Smith.