Chapter 4-5
872 Words
He knew he was beaten even before he felt the weight of his gun butt in his hand. His gun flashed up, but Chris' gun was already staring him in the face.
Chris had just beaten his mentor to the draw!
“Holy Bejesus!” the old man muttered in awed tones, unable to hide his shock and admiration.
***
“You’re dead, Uncle Chad,” the boy said, his anger gone, his huge face filled with a stunned look of pride and happiness and sheer bliss.
“Yes, I am, laddie,” he whispered. “Yes, I sure am, you little heap of cow dung!”
Slowly a rumbling laugh of happiness blasted out of the boy’s throat, and Uncle Chad joined in, and then they shook hands.
“You done fine, laddie, and I sure am proud of you.”
And from that day, their contests ceased to be that one-sided.
The mentor still continued to win most, but ever so slowly the tide began to turn, and as the months wore on Chris Bawa soon began to draw faster on Uncle Chad… until he was almost unbeatable.
***
The killers rode into Little Rock on a cold Thursday afternoon, during the celebration of Little Rock Day.
They were about ten in number.
They were hard, lean men, their dusty clothing and hard-ridden horses evidence that they had come a long way.
Like deadly apparitions, they moved down the main street slowly.
Five men were at the head of the group.
Three of them bore a close resemblance to each other even at a distance. They were tall and broad across the shoulders. The one slightly ahead of the rest had a much more aged face, lined with rough ridges, but brutally handsome in a menacing sort of way.
The two behind him could have been twins, and they were younger versions of the man in the lead.
There was no doubt that the three of them were brothers.
The few people who were not at the Rock Park for the celebrations gathered on the boardwalks to gawk at the strange men in town.
They all knew that trouble had come to Little Rock in a big way.
The gunslingers stopped briefly at The Bliss, a huge saloon owned and operated by Matt Slade, the one-legged war veteran.
Slade was a mean man, and the shotgun he kept under his bar had become quite legendary. However, as the killers trooped into his bar that day, he quailed inside.
He knew for a certainty that his shotgun would not be making an appearance that day. He believed himself to be a good reader of men; indeed, he was well-known by the phrase ‘men are like books, and it takes an avid reader like me to sort them out.’
That day he read his new visitors well, oh yes!
He could tell at a glance that these were not the usual riffraff that had taken one look at his shotgun and sobered up. These were cold men, dead people. These were men who lived violently, and died violently; savage men who stared death in the face and spat disdainfully.
One of them was the biggest and ugliest man Slade had ever seen.
He stood close to seven-foot and had shoulders as wide as the side of an elephant. He was wearing dirty corduroy trousers, and his boots spotted the cruellest-looking spurs Slade had ever seen.
His black shirt was opened at the neck, and Slade could see a hirsute chest, bulging out with sheer strength. His beard was thick and matted. The most hideous part of him was his face. It was huge and covered with a web of deep scars. It looked as if somebody walked on his face with knife-soled shoes.
The giant took off his hat and slapped it down on the bar. A puff of fine dust rose from the hat. Men who had been drinking at the bar quickly left the saloon. Indeed, Slade’s popular bar was emptying pretty fast as the strangers came in.
Slade took all these in hurriedly as he looked at the scarred face of the giant in front of him.
“The name’s Tiny,” the giant said in a deep drawl. “Get us drinks, pardner. The very best in your stinking cellars. And make it quick, goat, before I turn your ugly face to a pulp.”
Normally anybody who dared to speak to the war veteran in that fashion would have stared down the twin barrels of Slade’s shotgun.
Nothing of that sort happened that day.
Slade got the drinks…and they were the best he had, and he was quick getting it.
Most of the killers came into the bar, but a couple more stayed on the street, sauntering almost lazily to take up vantage points.
The five men who had led the killers into town rapidly downed their drinks, and then they mounted their horses again and continued up the street, their horses slowed to a walk.
They looked neither right nor left.
It was evident that they were going to kill.
***
- Writer
