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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Von Dair’s Mirror
Warden Kriss
Wellington snorted as the boy entered the gray’s stall. The boy was small, fourteen, pale blue eyes with cottonish blond hair that curled a bit around his temples. He spoke to the ex-cavalry horse in gentle tones like Daddy had. Mommy should’ve never sold him to Mr. Pane. Daddy would have never wanted that big tombstone, anyway. Daddy never wanted anything besides Mommy and his liquor it couldn’t even be said that he had much cared for Von or the newborn baby either. Mommy had named the baby, Benton -after Daddy. Von thought it was to try to make Daddy like the baby. It hadn’t worked.
Von threw on a saddle. He was sorry to be stealing it from Mr. Pane. It never occurred to him that he was stealing the horse too. In Von’s mind, Wellington was his, just like Daddy’s pistol. Von untied the gunny sack and drew out the .36 caliber Kerr’s Patent revolver. He pulled the pistol’s cylinder pin, assuring himself that the converted pistol was loaded. It was. He dropped the cylinder back and replaced the pin. He shoved the gun into his waistband. It was too bad that he had to shoot Mr. Webb. The store clerk had always been nice to him. When Von was younger Mr. Webb had given him sticks of candy and half cent pieces. It was more than Daddy had ever done for him. Still.
Chauncey Pane awoke to the creak of stable doors and the whinnying of horses. He swung his feet to the floor and shoved them bare into his boots. He snatched his Sharpe’s .50 from the wall and stepped onto his porch. The February night struck him. One suspender strap flapped loosely against his bare chest, the other hung limp at his side. Goose pimples raised on his flesh. By the light of a diminished moon the horse trader saw the open stable doors swaying in the wind. A rising dust trail lead away from the stables towards town. At its head, silhouetted against the moon’s glow, a horse galloped. Perched atop it sat a slender rider, much too small for its mount.
Chauncey jerked the rifle to his shoulder, sighted through the rear posts at the back of the fleeing boy. The posts sat there momentarily, rising and falling with each hitching breath. After a moment of anguished deliberation, he lowered the weapon. “Hope you get to that Remington as quick this time, Hienrick. Better be quicker.” He thought the store clerk wouldn’t make it though. Colonel Benton Dair had been drunk, in a burning, jealous fury. The boy would be cold.
Chauncey ejected the cartridge from the rolling block and caught it in his hand. “God forgive,” he whispered; the words were whipped away by the wind.
Hienrick Webb stood at the counter of the general store, bent close over the figures scribbled on his accounts book. He peered at the untidy double row of scratchings. One was headed “Cash Sales”, the other, “Credit”. The “Cash Sales” column was pitifully shorter than the “Credit” column. Some entries had “Paid” scribbled beside them but they were few. He was about to mutter something about dead beats when he heard the clatter of hooves outside. A horse slid to a halt. The thud of boots approached the door. He looked up. The door crashed open; a slight figure filled it, stepped into the light. Hienrick dropped his pen; ink flowed a black river on the page.
“What are you doing here, Vonley?” Hienrick asked; he swallowed hard at the sight of Benton’s .36 caliber pistol stuck in the boy’s waist band. He thought he knew.
“We gotta settle up,” Von said.
Von took another step. His hand palmed the pistol. Hienrick felt his skin go a cool damp.
“Y-y-you got no right to come at me, boy,” Hienrick said; he picked up a rag, dabbed at the spilt ink with a trembling hand. “Now, son, son…your father, he, he tried to kill me-without justification.”
But there had been cause. Damned if there hadn’t. He’d asked no, almost begged- Roxanne to step out with him. Benton had been away, raising hell, back shooting yanks most likely- from that great, damned gray; serving the faltering southern cause. She’d refused Hienrick flatly. And told, he thought, by all appearances. But he’d fixed that, for better or worse. This boy though. Well, he’d shot one Dair, he could shoot another. Maybe.
“You know that ain’t so,” Von replied. “You thought to get Mommy. That’s why Daddy come for you.”
Only too true, Hienrick thought. Foolish, but Benton had been a worthless drunk even before the war, why shouldn’t he have had a chance at Roxanne? Had he been the only man in town to have impure thoughts about Dair’s woman? No, he thought. But I was the only one fool enough to try. And now he had this stripling to deal with. Hienrick looked at Von. One, two, three seconds ticked by on his fobbed watch hanging from his vest. He scrabbled his Remington from under the counter, swung its weight upward in line with Von’s chest. Von’s right hand swept down, the .36 firing before Hienrick’s mind could tell his trigger finger to squeeze. The bullets drove three of his shirt buttons through his back.
Von squinted against the glare of the noon sun; it caused a radiation of lines to appear around the corners of his eyes. They met the lines fanning out from the ends of his downturned lips and formed a fascinating crosshatch pattern across his stubbled, wind burned face. He ran his tongue over his lips. They were parched and cracked. Too long on the trail. Six months now since he’d gotten decent rest. Since he had slept in anything that resembled a real bed. He dismounted from Wellington, scree crunched under the broken heels of his boots, and skittered down the slanting rock shelf. A small series of splashes echoed back as some of the larger rocks plunked into the gorge’s rapids. He pulled his binoculars up, swept them across the land beneath him. The gorge leveled into a shallow valley to the east, the river spreading into a quiet stream. The town backed up against it; a straggle of misaligned, shed roofed buildings. He moved the binoculars to the head of the town’s main thoroughfare. A sand scorched sign read, Stademire Town. Hmmph, he thought. Not much of a town. But it would do, for now. He could find work in the hostelry or maybe on some rancher’s spread. Von shifted the binoculars past Stademire. Not much to see: the river swallowed by the desert, scrub fading to alkali, alkali to hard pan, then to sand. Hell of a place, he thought. Maybe it would be different here, though. But he knew it wouldn’t. He had killed eight, not counting Hienrick. Wounded five from a distance with the Winchester rifle he’d bought in Memphis, just before crossing the Mississippi on a ferry. But they still came. They always came.
Von sat at a table in the corner of Shanty’s Cantina, one of the three saloons in Stademire. His back was to the wall to take in the entire room at a glance. He stared absently at the shot glass and the bottle of “who-shot-john,” then swiftly sloshed some of the bottle’s contents into the glass. He downed the amber liquid. He winced and shuttered as it burned through him. Von poured and threw back a second.
Then a third and fourth.
Nothing ever went right. First his father left him to fight in the war, and just when he’d gotten him back, Daddy went and got himself killed. Well he’d set that right, blasting his way up Webb’s shirt front before the store keeper could get his Remington half raised. Then he’d lit out for parts unknown, knowing he would never see his home again. Never see your mother either…or your little brother, he thought bitterly. He remembered his jealousy when his mother told him she was naming the newly born baby after their departed father. “I should have his name! I’m the oldest!” he’d told her. “You both got his name,” she’d said. “Least the one that counts.” Von remembered that her voice had had a desperate flatness, like a dark judgment of God read from scripture.
Von poured and downed another shot.
But going back home wouldn’t change anything. Not now. His mother was gone, had packed the baby and a few broken pieces of furniture and went west sometime after he’d crossed over the Mississippi. Or so he’d heard. He’d considered trying to find them but somehow it had never gotten beyond that. Not that there had ever been the time to try anyway. Not being hunted like he had been. God, but he hadn’t had a moment’s rest since that first shooting. Who knew Hienrick’s brother was a rich, New York shipping magnate? Five thousand dollars he’d put up. The price for Von’s capture, dead or alive. Fifteen years now bounty killers had dogged his step. Every time he thought he’d found a place to light, to get a fresh start, there’d be one show up and his dreams would go up in the smoke of his revolver. His fingertips caressed the .36. The walnut grips were smooth under them, like the bottom of a well-used gavel. He looked out the window to Wellington. Instinct told him he should fork the big ex-cavalry horse; get out of this dust bowl of a town.
Problem was there was always some form of aggravation no matter what a fellow did or where he went. Just like now. There was that jasper down at the end of the bar; a young dandy with two tied down guns. The kid obviously fancied himself some kind of bad man. Let him fancy, Von thought. Idle fancies were none of his affair.
Even so, the nasal twang of the kid’s voice grated on Von almost as much as his braggadocio. Let it go, he thought. Just a dumb kid. Someone will set him straight or kill him before long.
“Yep,” the kid said, “you just let ‘em come at me.” His hands flashed down, produced two nickel plated and engraved Peacemakers. The movement was swift, a blur barely registering on the brain. “It’ll be the last thing they ever do.”
Von masked his disgust by raising his glass. The dandy slid his guns back into their hand-tooled, well-oiled twin holsters. He turned to Von. The kid imagined him a down-at-heels drifter that he could buffalo. He smiled. He was going to enjoy this. Von stared ahead.
“Don’t you think so, mister?” the kid said. “Reckon there’s a man in the country would have a chance against me?”
His accentuated his point with another swift drawing of the pistols and an artful-absurd, Von thought-twirl. He shoved them back in their holsters.
Von didn’t respond.
“Say, mister I asked you a question,” the kid said. “Now up and answer it! Ain’t a man got a chance against me, now do they?”
A strange flicker touched Von’s eyes. He laughed: a low puff of air through parted lips.
“You’d get your head blown clear off, boy,” Von said. The words were slow, each syllable like tallow dripped from a candle. “-were you to face a real gunman. Best you can do is go back to your rich daddy, have him send those toys back to wherever he got ‘em.”
The kid’s face blanched, then reddened at the implication of Von’s words.
“Who are you to say? Y’ain’t no shootist,” He looked down at Von’s absurdly small .36 caliber pistol. Its bluing was chipped, its grips worn and cracked. What kind of a plinker gun was that anyway? He looked into Von’s eyes and laughed. “Pull it,” he said.
Von threw down a piece of silver for the whiskey, pushed back his chair and stood. He’d been here long enough. The kid was getting too fidgety for the good of either of them. Should’ve never come in the damned place to start with, Von thought. The kid drew his guns. Oh hell, Von thought. The right hand Peacemaker boomed, splinters flew from the table, striking Von’s jaw, a red stream dribbled down his neck. Another bullet crashed through the window over his shoulder.
The kid fired another shot. It missed too. The pistols felt awkward in his hands, like they his hands, not the guns- had never been intended for this kind of performance. He cracked off another shot. It went into the floor between the drifter’s boots. Why couldn’t he hit the damned bum? And why… The plinker gun was in the drifter’s hand, held waist high. The kid wasn’t sure how it got there. The drifter fanned the revolver. Once, twice, then three and four times the hammer fell.
Men dove as the crashing reports of the little pistol echoed through the confines of the cantina. Four little holes appeared over the kid’s heart, red blossomed over the pressed, white neatness of his shirt. He crumpled and fell.
Von broke the Kerr’s Patent down and ejected the spent shells. Customers slowly got to their feet and gathered round to stare at the fallen man’s body. The bartender knelt down to check for signs of life.
“He’s dead!” he said. “And as fast as he was.”
“Fast is what got him killed,” Von said; his hands reloaded the cylinder with deliberation. “If he’d taken his time, I’d be the one in the sawdust.”
“You’d better light a shuck, stranger,” said a thin, grizzled old timer. “Y’know who you’ve jest shot? That’s Jason Stademire, son of old Sam Stademire. Town’s named after ‘im, which should tell you something of your situation. He’ll have you lynched before sun down for that.” He pointed to the corpse.
“Kid drew on me,” responded the gunman; he dropped the last cartridge in place.
“Makes no never mind, friend,” said the bartender. “He’ll hang you just the same.”
Von looked at the bartender, down at the dead body. “Damn.”
Von could hear the murmur of voices outside. All were excited; some had the sound of anger. He parted the saloon’s curtains. People were bustling in confusion on the street and boardwalk.
Von stepped from the saloon, gathered Wellington’s reins, and swung himself into the saddle. Taking the old stranger’s advice, he pushed the gray through the crowd before anyone could react. As he passed the last of the buildings on the west end of town, he heard the hollow report of hooves clomping across the bridge over the creek on the east end.
“Going to tell Daddy,” he muttered. Von dug his heels into the gray’s flanks, urging more speed.
Roxanne Dair Stademire was seated on the divan in the parlor, crocheting, when Sam’s foreman, Nelson, broke through the front door. The cattleman passed with never so much as a how-do-you-do. She sat down her work and went to the door. From the hall she could just see the back of the foreman. He stood in the door of her husband’s study. A shadow fell across the floor as her husband stood from his desk.
“Mr. Stademire,” Nelson started. “I-I have awful news….” The foreman’s voice dropped below hearing. A cry erupted from the study and a crash of glass. Roxanne ran to the study. On the floor the foreman squatted, hunched over her husband. Sam lay amongst a shower of glass, one arm was badly cut.
“He fainted away on me,” The foreman said “-into the liquor cabinet.” He stopped, looked at her, swallowed. “Jason’s dead, missus. Shot through by some passing drifter.”
Sam Stademire pushed the doctor aside, his gashed arm half-stitched. He made Nelson swear to take all the hands, run Jason’s killer to the ground, and string him from the ranch’s main gate post. Shortly after, the pounding of many horse hooves faded into the distance.
Von Dair slowed his horse to a walk after leaving Stademire Town a couple of miles behind. After four he reined in Wellington. He turned in his saddle. From this distance the town was a huddled pile of geometric shapes blackened by the falling sun. A line of black ants strung out from the pile. He pulled his binoculars from his saddle bag, grimaced. “Here they come.” He kicked Wellington in the flanks.
As Von rode, he alternated between watching his back trail and the margins on either side of the road. Three quarters of a mile further on, he found what he was looking for -a dim track which left off across a rock shelf. He dismounted amid the rocks and did what he could to conceal the point where he left the road. Probably won’t work, he thought. Nothing else to be done though. Mounting again, he headed into the desert.
Von made a cold camp that evening. If he’d lost his pursuers he didn’t need a campfire to alert them. He doubted he’d lost them though; the sky directly over his back trail was tinged with a pale, dirty orange. Dust. If they had a good tracker they would be on him tomorrow.
Wellington whinnied; Von’s eyes snapped open onto a cold, gray dawn. He saddled the horse and led him to the spring he had found last night. They drank as the occasional hoof strike or rattle of a stone registered faintly on the ear. Von filled his canteen. God only knew when, or if, they would have another chance at water.
Just as he swung into the saddle, a shot rang out. He raked the gray’s flanks with his spurs. The horse lunged forward. Von could see the posse strung out behind him for a time but gradually Wellington pulled away, till they were only a dust column in the distant air.
Three times that day the fugitive drew up on some high point and dusted a man from the saddle with his rifle. That night he slipped back to their camp and, by the light of the moon, levered the Winchester into the figures around the fire. Bodies thumped the ground, cries rose, Von disappeared into the shadows.
Next day, at dawn, he sighted four riders from a high ridge. He lowered his binoculars. “Persistent,” he said. He raised them again. One rider, a boy on a paint pony, couldn’t be more than fifteen years old. The kid’s son? he thought. No, the kid had been too young and the boy was too old. Brother then. Except he didn’t have the build of the dandy. Too narrow built, set of the hips all wrong, raw boned where the dandy had been fleshy. Strange, he thought. He shook his head and descended to Wellington below.
“I’ll kill them all if I have to,” he whispered. The horse snorted.
With the remainder of the posse still hanging on by three that evening, Von decided to end it. Finding a copse of stunted cedars lining a hollow to the left of the trail, he led the gray into concealment, and hunkered in the brush above to await his pursuers. Before long they heaved into sight, the first three all in a bunch, with the paint and his rider hanging a few paces back. Von stepped out, rifle in his left hand, his right resting over the Kerr’s Patent.
“You looking for me?” he shouted. Startled, the three riders reined in their mounts. They went for their guns. Von drew and fired, thumbing the hammer and pulling the trigger in a rapid, rolling motion. Bodies twitched to a waltz of destruction. The cylinder clicked empty. Three men lay bleeding out in the dust.
He holstered the revolver and tossed the Winchester to his shoulder. The barrel swung to deal with the youth. The paint pony pitched and bucked, his rider fought with the reigns. Von held fire. The pony reversed direction, gave one last leap into the air, and spilled the boy. The kid’s face smacked the dirt, jaw striking hard. A little geyser of blood stippled the dirt. Von winced.
The boy’s back was to Von. He scurried round to face the older man. Von saw he’d been right, the kid was fifteen at best. He was scared, but trying to hide it, staring defiantly as Von sighted over the barrel of the rifle.
“Well…go ahead! What are you waiting for?” the boy shouted. “You killed my stepbrother, all these men-“ He pointed, wiped blood from his jaw. “-and you’ve near killed my stepfather…what’s stopping you?”
Von put pressure on the trigger but held for a long moment without completing the pull. He withdrew his finger. The rifle hitched, dipped, lowered to his side.
“I’m not gonna shoot you, boy. Go home. I didn’t know your stepbrother -or your stepfather, but if they’re among any of them I’ve killed or wounded…” Von looked down to the ground; back up into the boy’s dirt smeared face. Blood trailed down from his jaw, a stream that disappeared beneath his collar. Kid was blond headed; he hadn’t noticed that before, little bit of a curl around his temples. Blue eyes. Strange.
Von continued, “They called, I answered, see?” Now he pointed to the dead men; it was without force.
A fevered light danced in the boy’s eyes. Von saw he was still afraid. But not of me, but of not doing what has to be done.
“Better not leave me alive, mister. I swear, you don’t kill me, I’ll kill you.”
Von shook his head, “Yep, I know.”
Von backed down the hill, mounted Wellington and rode out through a gap in the trees. He spurred the horse to a gallop and glanced back. The boy still sat in the trail staring after him.
Three days later, Von rode into the single street of Dick’s Gap. An hour after, he stepped from the town’s hotel and bath house, clean shaven and dressed in fresh clothes. He turned toward a building at the far end of town. The word, ‘EATS’ was scribbled on a shingle above its door. As he stepped onto the boardwalk and reached for the door handle a voice rang: “Hey mister! “ Von paused, hand on the handle.
“Hey you…killer. I’m talking to you!”
Without turning, Von replied: “You don’t know what you’re doing, boy. It’ll kill you, what you’re planning. No stopping once you start. Believe me, I know. Leave -just let it go.”
“Can’t do that, mister.”
Von faced the youth, shook his head. “I know you can’t.”
Before him stood a mirror image. Same pale blue eyes, same blonde curls, same Kerr’s Patent .36. Half his brain screamed at him, Shoot him while you can!
Another half answered, I will. I am.
“I know who you are,” he said.
By the entrance to the hotel, tied to the hitching post, Wellington snorted as shots fell.
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