Western Short Story : A Puny Little Thing

Being the local undertaker has its benefits. For one thing, people tend to avoid pestering such a man over his morning coffee when they know he might be sizing them up for a casket. It was therefore not difficult to keep the residents of Chinrock, Montana Territory, from finding out much about my past.

Being a Harvard graduate was embarrassment enough in and of itself.

They knew I talked "all high toned like", as one gossip put it, but their guesses as to why that might be fell uniformly wide of the mark. I had once admitted to growing up in Missouri farm country, but my speech no longer reflected that and  nobody believed it for a minute. Neither did they believe my reason for becoming a mortician.

"Death has never bothered me," I'd said, "As long as it's not my own."

What was simple truth, they took to be graveyard humor. Go figure.

Now, to get to the crux of this particular story, you need to understand that for every rule, there's an exception. In Chinrock that year, the exception was a gambler by the name of Slim Jim McKane. Jim was that rarity of rarities, an honest cardsharp, and for that reason he didn't get run out of nearly as many towns as most of those following his trade. Jim did have two major failings, though.

He seemed to like me for some odd reason, and he loved to bet on gunfights.

"Taker," he greeted me that morning--he always called me Taker, short for Undertaker, no matter how many times I mentioned having an actual name--"They's a ringtailed doozy goin' down today at high noon, right out yonder in the street."

I didn't have to say anything, just raised an eyebrow.

"Yep," the gambler grinned, revealing one gold tooth in an otherwise perfect set of choppers, "Dang fool sodbuster kid, that Samuels boy from out by Willow Crick, he jist called out none other'n ol' Lightning Johnson hisself. I got me some serious coin down on this'n, I'll tell ya. They don't call Johnson the undertaker's best friend in these parts for nuthin', and that kid ain't got a danged thing fer a shootin' iron other'n a little single shot .22 girly gun."

"That's--"

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Taker, you always wanna see the underdog win. I git that. That's a plumb sorry situation, no two ways about it. Here's a dirt poor fella, cain't be more'n eighteen, nineteen years of age, goin' up against the fastest pair of Russian .44's west of the Mississip with nuthin' but a rabbit gun, a lousy single shot Remington No. 6 Rolling Block. I admit it ain't right, but what's a gambler gonna do? You go with the odds, old son; you go with the odds."

"Heck, Taker, you know how it musta happened. Ol' Johnson purely loves killin' farmers, or at least running off the ones that won't fight. Ain't Samuels the one raising hogs? Bet you a dollar to a doughnut hole, he rode over there when the kid was out plowing and shot up a pig or two. Now, I like my ham and bacon as well as the next man, but you cain't blame a cattleman like Lightning fer wantin' to clear the pig stink outa the county, can you?"

"That's all--" I began.

"Well and good. You bet, that's all well and good. Now, 'scuse me old son, but I gotta go stir up a few more bets. Right now I'm only havin' to give ten to one odds, but that cain't last."

With that he was gone, heading out to hustle his little bit of blood money on the side while a young pig farmer with a mother and three younger sisters to support was marching to his own grave. I decided there wasn't much point to heading back to the office just yet. After all, I needed a shave and a haircut, the gossip would be running wild at the barber shop--and besides, Billy Stark didn't just cut hair, he also made caskets.

By midmorning, there was talk of little else to be heard anywhere in Chinrock. A few high minded citizens evinced a touch of sympathy for the Samuels lad, but mostly the chatter ran in three channels. Channel number one: The kid should just take his blasted pigs and head back to wherever in Hades he came from. Channel number two: Good for Lightning Johnson, the established rancher and sometime gunfighter, for cleaning up the county. Channel number three:

No, come to think of it, there really was no channel number three.

The good citizens of Chinrock were not, as a whole, my favorite group of people on God's green Earth.

Time passes, of course, regardless of the small minded designs of mortal man. It was close enough to high noon when I joined my gambler friend at one of the windows in the saloon, watching as the shooting prepared to commence. Lightning Johnson, six feet tall and an axe handle wide across the shoulders, had ridden in, tied his horse off at the hitchrail, and stepped out to the center of the street to do battle--if it could be called battle. His well worn revolvers rode low on his thighs in cutaway holsters that were tied hard and fast, a clear shootist's getup.

Facing the burly, middle aged rancher, just now walking up the street--he owned no horse, only one aging plow mule he'd likely not cared to expose to stray bullets--the pig farmer looked pretty pitiful. He wasn't really a small man for the times, somewhere around five-eight and maybe a hundred fifty pounds, but compared to Johnson he was a mere splinter.

That's it, I suddenly remembered. They called him Splinter Samuels.

"It'll be over right soon," Slim Jim chuckled at my side. "Taker, look at that tiny little thing he calls a rifle, wouldja? They say he cain't afford nuthin' else, y' know."

"That's all that he--"

"--All he kin afford, yeah. That's what I said."

Well, you're probably wondering why I'm taking this long to tell such a simple little story, so I'll wrap this up. The kid had his rifle just hanging in one hand, pointing at the dirt, when he hollered at Johnson. Johnson didn't yell, just quietly told Samuels to turn around, get on out of town and head back East before he got himself hurt. Whereupon the youngster quit yelling, but he didn't turn around. No, he told the man with two tied-down guns that he, Johnson, could either draw, or if he was the sort of yellow bellied coward who went around shooting pigs, he could unbuckle his gunbelt and surrender for transport to the jail at Sledge.

Now, that was enough for Lightning. He'd killed a number of men, all in fair fights so far as I ever heard, and cowardice was a charge he didn't much appreciate--especially coming from a dirty faced, pig-stinking farmer. He fired first, too, but he missed. Samuels hadn't just stood there; he'd dropped flat to the ground, and his enemy just wasn't used to shooting that low except up really close at rattlesnakes.

The little -crack!- from that Remington didn't sound like much. A lot of people in Chinrock had never even heard a .22 before that day, and they most likely would have started laughing at the very sound of it. They didn't laugh, though, because the third richest and first deadliest man in the area dropped like a stone, dead before he hit the dirt with that little bullet smack through his left eye and rumbling around inside his skull somewhere. I found it later, but told no one. It was simply my curious nature to learn how such things worked whenever I could.

Young Splinter Samuels was upset. Said he'd been aiming to hit his target between the eyes, hadn't missed that far in a coon's age.

Anyway, nobody was in greater shock that day than Slim Jim McKane. He was able to cover his bets; he always made sure of that. In fact, a more honest gambler I've never seen to this day. But he didn't understand. Knowing he was broke, I took him by the elbow, steered him to a table, ordered a couple of shots of rye and told the barkeep to leave the bottle.

"How...how...."

"How did that happen?" I looked at my somewhat impulsive friend with a degree of empathy, having been known to leap before I looked a time or two in my own misspent youth. "It's pretty simple, really. I knew his family when I was growing up. You know, on that Missouri farm everybody in town thinks I'm lying about? Last time I saw young Splinter Samuels, he was maybe eight years old. His Daddy had been dead a year, but the boy had even at that age become the man of the family. Word was, he'd take fifty rounds for that little Remington and bring home fifty rabbits for the table."

"Then..." the ruined gambler paused to throw down another shot, "When I told you he had nuthin' to fight with but a puny little thing, a lousy little single shot .22, you were trying to tell me--"

"Exactly," I nodded, patting his shoulder, "Exactly. I was trying to tell you that's all he needs. Not that you slowed down long enough to listen."

It was my turn to slow down long enough to throw down a shot and relight my pipe before adding, "You never do."