They came from him at a quarter to nine and led him past the gallows and into the courthouse. It was already packed. People who couldn’t get in were standing outside. Some women had signs. “Free Dr. Lumpkin” and “We want to be treated!” and “Our bodies are our own.” One woman held a sign that said, “My husband cannot do it for five minutes.” Men were shouting, “Hang him!” The local preacher was yelling something about blasphemy and the breaking of commandments. He called the vibrator “Satan’s tool straight from hell” and prayed for the souls of the women who were treated. Chauncey Lumpkin rubbed his throat. He was pretty sure he had just shaved for the last time.
He was settled in his chair at the defense table when the bailiff announced, “All rise!” and the judge walked in carrying a large pile of papers and a large thick book. He sat.
Everyone sat and watched as he organized the documents and opened the book to the page he had marked. He put on his glasses and looked at Chauncey. “Will the defendant please rise?”
Shaking, Chauncey stood up.
The judge addressed him. “Dr. Lumpkin, between law school, lawyering, and sitting on the bench, I’ve spent most of my life deciding on the fate of others. I thought I’d seen every kind of a case there was to see. But damn if you didn’t come up with a new one. Now, as much as I’d like to turn you over to this lynch mob and let them take you outside and hang you, I’ll be damned if I can’t find a single thing in the laws of this territory that gives me a reason to.
“So all I can say is this. Dr. Chauncey Lumpkin, on behalf of the Territory of Oklahoma, I find you not guilty by reason of no laws under which I can find you guilty of. Therefore, you are free to go. And since your credentials check out, you’re free to apply to the mayor of Bee Sting and the town council to open a medical practice, whatever practice that may be. But since there’s no other doctor in town, I’d suggest that you consider seeing other patients and not just crazy wimmenfolk.”
“Who are you calling crazy, Ernest Farquhar?” Madame Le Guin yelled. “Maybe there’s such a thing as Male Hysteria. Maybe that’s why you visit my girls once or twice a week so you can diddle them.”
“Oh no!” Clementine Askew said. “Really? Do tell.”
“Well, just who do you think complained because my girl Celeste bit him a few weeks ago?” she said, pointing her head at the judge.
“Oh dear,” Clementine said. “Where did she bite him?”
“In her bedroom, where else?” the madam replied.
The judge slid his hand off the desk and underneath his robe to adjust himself. It still hurt. That bitch. If anybody had Feminine Hysteria it was that damn whore. And maybe his wife. Some of those symptoms hit pretty close to home.
Two months later, Dr. Chauncey Lumpkin hung out his shingle on a building on Main Street. Waterstockle Apothecary opened next door. Dr. Lumpkin’s first patient was a boy with a broken arm who fell off one of those penny-farthing bicycles. He made house calls, delivered babies, treated men for diseases they didn’t want their wives to know about and many other things. He still treated many women for Feminine Hysteria, and by 1902, he was the proud owner of a brand new Hamilton Beach electric vibrator machine—only the sixth electric appliance made in America.
But in the back of his head, he still had the feeling that one day, the best place to get rich treating Feminine Hysteria was going to be in California.
Homeward Bound (A Tale of the Weird Wild West)
Mark Woods
Who says you can’t go home? The gunslinger thought to himself as he gazed down the hill towards the town lying there before him.
He had left his current travelling companion, a mysterious and enigmatic woman he’d picked up on his travels who called herself Candace, a few miles back in a neighbouring town, taking part in a high stakes poker game and having some fun while he took care of business.
For it was business that had brought him back here to Hope Springs, not pleasure, though he wished that it were not so.
She had offered to come here with him, but as the gunslinger had told her, there were some things a man just had to do by himself.
He wasn’t sure how long his little detour here would take, but what he did know was that it probably wasn’t going to end well for somebody.
He was a changed man since the day that he’d last left here, a mere shadow now of the person he’d been before.
He’d seen a lot of things, many of them inexplicable and difficult to explain, on his travels, had killed a lot of men – some of which had deserved it – and that sort of thing changed a man, altered his perspective of the world; made him harder, colder, even though that was not always necessarily a bad thing.
He’d left here a broken man, hunting vengeance for his dead wife, Molly, and their daughter, Kendra, who had been viciously murdered by a couple of psychopaths for hire who had killed them solely so they could pass on a message to the gunslinger that he was best to leave things alone that were of no concern of his. He had tracked the two men down, killed them, and taken his revenge, but had discovered somewhere along that dark path that in fact they had been sent by someone else, something else, and were part of a much larger chain of events. A man he had encountered once before, back in the Civil War, had sent them; a monster that walked in the shape of man and who called himself by a number of names that included Mr. Skinny Legs, The Tall Man, and many others besides.
He had been tracking him ever since, but just lately the trail after his quarry had started to grow cold.
The man had set a trap for him, it had failed, and now the gunslinger found himself headed back towards somewhere he had never thought he might return – home – and he did so with an itching deep inside him to spill blood.
***
He rode his horse into town, and tied her up outside the local bar and tavern. The gunslinger didn’t believe in naming horses and so his mount was simply called Horse. His past track record in keeping any steed he rode alive for more than a few weeks was bad, and besides, he didn’t hold much tack with anthropomorphising animals and attributing them any kind of personality.
At the end of the day, they were just dumb animals – there to do a job or provide you with something good to eat. You gave an animal a name, the next thing you found yourself talking to them like they were human and that could lead to all sorts of trouble.
He had known a guy, back in a town that he had passed through once, who had tried to marry his horse.
Needless to say, that encounter hadn’t ended very well.
Few encounters with the gunslinger did.
Candace had done well to stick by his side and still manage to stay alive so far, but she was the exception.
She was like him – with secrets of her own and a past, like him, that she didn’t like to share.
As he walked into the tavern, the gunslinger noted that since he’d last been here, very little had changed. The same faded photographs of legendary gunslingers from days gone by still adorned the wall behind the bar, and over in the corner, Little Tommy Twiddle still played the piano the same as he’d always done.
Except he wasn’t so little any more…and the years had started to catch up on him.
He had been only a few short years older than the gunslinger himself when he had left, now the formerly baby-faced lad he’d left behind looked like the intervening years had not been kind to him.
Absentmindedly, the gunslinger half-wondered what had happened to the man to age him so drastically in the time that he’d been away, but then he realised he simply didn’t care.
A lot of water had passed under the bridge.
Many of these people were like strangers to him now.
“What it’ll be?”
The barkeep looked him up and down as though wondering what brought him here, what possible reason this stranger might possibly have for idly wandering into his tavern so late in the afternoon, but sensing at the same time that it was probably best he not ask. He would have already spotte
d the trusty six gun sitting on the gunslinger’s hip, within easy reach, and taken note of the cold, hard, steely look in his eyes and known that here was someone who probably didn’t take kindly to answering too many questions other than those a barkeep should be asking like ‘what are you drinkin’, bud?’
“Give me a whiskey,” the gunslinger told him. “And none of that cheap shit you keep for tourists neither – give me the good stuff you keep on the bottom shelf for your best customers and regulars.”
“How’d you know abou…” the barkeep started, and then a glimmer of recognition suddenly appeared in the older man’s eyes.
“Jack?” he asked. “Good God, man, by the Lord’s own good graces, is that you?”
The gunslinger couldn’t help himself, he broke into a smile.
“As I live and breathe, Sonny, my good man. As I live and breathe. Long time, no see.”
“Long time indeed,” Sonny said. He shook his head. “I heard tell you were dead…”
“The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” Jack said, tipping his hat, before removing it and laying it on the bar. “Mark Twain said that…”
“Who?” Sonny looked puzzled.
Jack shook his head. “Don’t worry about it; I don’t think he’s even been born yet.”
There were whole days sometimes when the gunslinger felt like a man not of this time. He had spent some time travelling with a tribe of Indians not long after he had first abandoned Hope Springs as his home, and during that time, had taken part in some kind of Sun Dance ritual or Vision quest in which he had found himself thrust forward into the future, or at least one possible version of it.
He had seen things, experienced things, that had changed him, altered his outlook on the world and once that happened to you, there was rarely any way of coming back.
Sometimes he heard himself saying stuff, coming out with things, and had no idea where those thoughts might have come from.
There was another tribe of Indians Jack had met, out there on the trails, who believed that none of any of this was real – that all life was nothing but an illusion – and there were some days when Jack thought they might be onto something there.
“How long has it been?” Sonny asked, pouring out a shot of his best whiskey for them both as the gunslinger shook his head again.
“Too long,” Jack replied. “And a helluva lot of water has passed underneath the bridge. I’m a very different man now, from the one I was the day I left.”
“I can tell,” Sonny said. “You’ve gotten a couple of new scars, grown a few more grey hairs, I almost didn’t recognise you for a minute there. But that’s not the sort of change you mean, is it?”
Jack shook his head again.
“So what brings you back this way after so long?” Sonny asked.
“I was just passing,” Jack told him, and for a minute, very almost nearly believed what he was saying himself.
“Well, I can think of a few people who will be glad to see you back again,” Sonny said, and though they both knew who he was talking about, that was about as far as that conversation went.
“That was a terrible turn of events that happened that night, back then,” Sonny said, polishing glasses, and again, both men knew exactly what he was talking about. “Heard you caught up with the killers though. Hope you made them bastards suffer for what they did, made it slow. It’s all bastards like that deserve, the way it should be. There were some thought that you might end up coming back here…y’know, after you finished up with business, so to speak. Don’t think anyone ever thought it might take you this long though…”
“I guess you could say I took the long way round,” Jack said, downing his whiskey in one. He paused to raise two fingers to signal Sonny to pour him the same again, and then continued.
“Turns out Molly and Kendra’s killers weren’t working alone,” Jack said. “Someone put them up to it, sent them here to kill my family, and in the process, pass on a message not to stick my nose into things of no concern of mine. After I tracked down my wife and daughter’s killers, I decided to go off after the man who put them up to it, hoping to hunt him down and put him down like he was an animal.”
“And did you do it?” Sonny asked. He downed his own whiskey then poured them both another without waiting to be asked – the sign of a good barman. “Did you ever catch up to the man ultimately responsible and make him pay?”
“Not yet,” Jack reluctantly confessed, “but I have gotten close to tracking him down on more than one occasion and I know he’s running scared. He tried to set me up just recently, trap me in a corner and have me killed, but with a little bit of help, I managed to escape. All these are the actions of a desperate man. I’m getting close now, I can feel it, and I know he knows it too. It won’t be long now before I finally catch up with him, and when I do, there will be a day of reckoning.”
Jack wanted to say more, take the conversation further, but before he could, he heard the sound of his name being called from all the way across the bar. The gunslinger turned, just in time to see the town Sheriff confidently striding forwards across the room to meet him; a tall, good-looking girl – the Sheriff’s daughter, Ginny, and the certain person Sonny had been alluding to earlier when he had mentioned someone else being glad to see him again – following close behind him.
“Jack…oh my god, Jack, is that…is that really you?”
Ginny sprang forward, and before her dad could stop her, quickly threw her arms around the gunslinger and hugged him tight as though not quite believing he were real and expecting him to vanish at any second.
“Oh my god,” she said again. “It is you, it really is. My god you’ve changed, you got older; how did that ever happen? What happened to you – no-one ever expected they’d ever see you round here again after, well, you know…”
She broke off what she was saying, quite rightly sensing that the past was something he probably did not want being brought back up again and a topic of conversation that was probably best avoided altogether.
She always had been perceptive, Jack thought, and good at reading people.
Jack and Ginny had grown up together, spent most of their childhood playing together and keeping the other company until well into their teens, and there were many in town who had anticipated and expected they might end up spending the rest of their lives together, but the bond between them had never really been like that. They had both regarded each other more like brother and sister, and nothing romantic had ever developed between them even though Jack was sure that Ginny had much stronger feelings for him than he had ever had for her.
He had gone to fight in the Civil War against General Robert Lee’s armies in the South and when he had come back he was married, to a pretty nurse named Molly who had helped him recover from the injuries he had sustained in battle. Ginny too, had moved on with her life, and from that moment on, things had never been the same between them, though they had always remained close.
Right up until the moment he had left, without even stopping to say his goodbyes…
“You’ve changed too,” Jack said quietly, pulling slightly away. “But for the better, of course…what’s this?”
He lifted up her left hand and eyed the ring sitting on her finger. He raised a solitary eyebrow in question.
Ginny smiled.
“Well, I couldn’t wait around forever for you to come back to me eventually, now, could I?” She said, only half joking. “But seriously, after everything that happened right around the time you left, I got scared. A lot of us here in town did, because suddenly we realised nowhere was truly safe anymore, and what had happened to your wife and daughter could have just as easily have happened to any one of us. I felt alone, with no one to turn to you other than my dad, and Tommy - you remember Tommy Peterson, don’t you? Well, Tommy promised to look after me, keep me safe, and protect me on nights when dad was out on duty or off on one of his trips to some of the other local townships. At some point, I don’
t know when, it started to become something more. Now Tommy’s my husband these last five years and we have a little girl togeth…”
She broke off again, realising suddenly she was headed towards treacherous ground again as regards to his loss. It had been a long time, and there were whole days sometimes when Jack fancied he could barely remember either of their faces anymore, but the wounds were just as fresh and raw now as they had been that night that they’d both been taken from him.
Still, that was his issue to deal with, his cross to bear, not hers. Jack shook his head.
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m happy for you, truly I am. You just keep her safe, you hear me? Keep her away from harm and never let her out of your sight.”
“Tommy’s looking after her tonight while I share a couple of drinks with dad here,” Ginny said, as though feeling the need to explain why she wasn’t home with her daughter right now. “He’s been out of town a few days, haven’t you dad? Working on a case a few towns over.”
“Someone mutilated a load o’goats,” the Sheriff said, stepping forward to greet the gunslinger. “Probably kids, but you know – still gotta check these things out, right?
“It’s good to see you again, Jack. Been far too long.”
He took Jack by the hand and shook it in a warm and friendly manner, patting the gunslinger on the shoulder as he did so.
“Good to see you too, Brett,” Jack said, and meant it. He thought he detected something in the other man’s eyes, but before he could acknowledge it, whatever it had been was gone.
“Ginny, love, I see Becki and Mary-Sue over there,” the Sherriff said, turning back to face his daughter. “Why don’t you go and share a few drinks with them this evening instead of spending it here with your old dad. Give me and Jack here a chance to catch up on old times. We’ll catch lunch together tomorrow instead, just you and me, what do you say, Kiddo?”
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