Haypenny Western

The man had to have been at least 500 yards out.  The horse he was on was going at a slow, easy pace, but it was hard to tell if it was actually an easy pace, or one that meant the horse was almost spent.  Randle Suthers wondered about it for a short while and then squeezed the trigger of the Springfield and watched as the horse stalled and the rider slacked and his posture failed, and he slid off the horse like a thing untethered.

Suthers checked the scope.  The horse moved about in a small circle, it’s head lowered from time to time and nudged the crumpled figure on the hard ground and then it walked a short distance and started to graze on the tough grass of that country. 

It had been four days since he had gotten severed from the group of eight other men all intent on taking the bank.  A bad plan fueled by whiskey courage and rough talk over gold dust being held and waiting for safe transport to a nearby rail, and then an armed escort back east.  “It’s ‘bout easy as liftin’ an ol’ lady’s skirt,” Dylan Grange had said.  His face wrinkled and leathery--eyes crushed in a constant squint.

“You ever do that?” Eli Wagner said.

“What?”

“Lift an ol’ lady’s skirt?  You ever?”

Dylan smiled.  “No.”

Eli winked and nudged Dylan with a boney elbow.  “Ain’t all that easy when she’s got a Colt pointed at your balls.”

The men laughed and drank, some lit cigarillos and the smoke trailed from their thin lips, and their smiles were yellow and foul.

Suthers took a drink and then said, “How many’re in the bank?” 

Dylan looked up at the sky and tapped his fingers on his knee and nodded with each tap.  “‘Bout five, I think.  Maybe seven.”

“You don’t know for sure?"

“No.”

“And the gold dust?  What about that?”

“That I do know. I’ve seen that.  Piles of it.  Bags all over.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure, Suthers.  If you ain’t, you don’t need to go.”

Suthers looked around at the other men.  “Just would be good to have a count on the people.”

Eli spat, and then said, “We all got guns enough for twenty or more.”

Suthers nodded, his face tight.  “They armed?”

Dylan was drinking from the bottle of whiskey he was sharing with Eli and another man, a Mexican who was lying down on the ground, his head propped against a rock, his breathing steady and calm.  “Don’t know, Suthers.  All I know is that there’s gold in that bank and I aim to get it all.”

Each member packed bags of gold dust while Suthers stood watch and kept a gun on the four clerks that just happened to be working at that particular time of the day, on that particular day the week, Tuesday, a day that no one suspects anything.  Dylan packed up the largest load.  “Let’s go,” he said to the others and they headed out of the bank to their horses while Suthers stood empty of gold, and ready to spit hot lead.

“Hol’ up there, Dylan.  What about my share?” Suthers stepped out of the bank, away from the clerks.

Dylan looked at the other men, and they all looked at him.  And Suthers looked at each one of them, especially Eli, who was grinning stupidly and had his hand on his Colt, ready to draw it out.  “Well Suthers, it’s a hard thing to say.”  He nodded over to Eli and Eli drew the Colt and leveled it at Suthers, but Suthers was quick, and he ducked into the doorway just as the shot splintered the wood of the door frame.

“Goddamn you, Dylan!”  Suthers shouted and poked his Colt out and fired off a round, then cocked it, and fired another.

Shots rang out from behind him, and wood and glass flew in pieces all around.  The clerks had guns drawn and they were shooting at Dylan, and Eli, and the rest of the men outside, and they hadn’t seen Suthers yet.

Suthers hoped his horse was still tied up across the way, separate from the others.  Maybe he should have fallen in good with them and then they would be leaving alive with gold enough to live on for a at least two years.  But that didn’t matter now.  What mattered was getting away without a bullet in his guts.

He poked his head out the door and saw Eli down and bleeding, crawling through the dust of the streets.  Dylan was already gone, and the other men were dispersing, guns firing at the bank.  A clerk was struck in the head and his brains spilled out like the insides of a watermelon tossed against a brick wall.

Suthers saw his horse and made for it.  He climbed up and ribbed the animal hard and it took off in a direction uncertain, and he rode and rode, out of the town and into the rocky canyons where he found water and quiet, and time to think.

He had gone north, that was what he had figured, as he had not seen the rocky canyons as they had approached the town from the south. He made a quick camp--one easy to set up and take down, and he scoped the land around him and made sure his place was a good one to defend, and he found that it was.  The town was still visible in the distance, but hard to see, and when he scoped it, he saw a horse making its way out and toward him.  It was loaded down by the way it moved, and he thought that it might be Eli’s horse, but there was no way to be certain.  He looked through his supplies and found that he had at least two days worth of food, some jerky he’d picked up from some Ute, a little coffee, some dried up things he wasn’t at all certain of.  He would need whatever that horse was carrying, and if it was indeed Eli’s horse, then there would be whiskey and lard, some sugar, maybe a little flour left in the pack, and gold dust he could use to buy feed for the horses, and move on to a little ranch of his own, or just keep moving.

He watched the horse for a long time, and when it seemed close enough and the land around was dead of any movement, he rode out to meet it, and he found that it was indeed Eli’s horse.  He looked through the satchels filled with bags of gold dust, and then he opened the pack and where there should have been whiskey and food, there was more gold dust.  Eli had taken the all or nothing approach and it looked like he might have more than Dylan, which would make Dylan less then happy, but it didn’t matter now.  Eli was more than likely dead in the street, and Dylan was probably already heading back south with his gold, south to booze and whores for the next two years, and when the money ran out, he’d be back if someone didn’t kill him.

Suthers patted the horse down and talked to it, and he reached in his feed bag and held out a handful of oats and Eli’s horse ate them as though it hadn’t eaten in days. 

Suthers climbed back up on his horse and took the reins of Eli’s horse and led it slowly away toward the rocky canyons and the water, and as he did, he though he heard thunder, but it wasn’t thunder at all.  It was several horses riding towards him from the east. He stopped, rather then make a break for it and give away his position in the canyons, and it turned out that it was the Mexican, and some other man he didn’t know.  “Eli is dead, and one of the other gringos, too,” the Mexican said.

Suthers looked at the other man.  He had a wildness in his expression and his body was dark from the sun and the dirt of the trails he had ridden, and his eyes glowed hot blue in his head like some vicious, fabled animal and not like a man’s at all.  “Figured he’d be.”

“That’s his horse, no?” said the Mexican.

The wild man spat black tobacco juice out of his mouth like it was something his body made.

“It is.”

The Mexican said something in Spanish that Suthers didn’t understand and the wild man nodded.  “Is there gold?”

Suthers pulled out his Colt and pointed it at the Mexican.  The barrel glistened with menace and he cocked the hammer and smiled.  “I wouldn’t worry about it.  This was Eli’s horse.  Ain’t no more.”

The Mexican eyed the barrel of the Colt, but he was cool and calm because he had had many barrels of many guns pointed at him many times.  “Senor Grange would like his gold.”

Suthers laughed.  “Senor Grange can go fuck a nigger.”

The Mexican was still not shocked.  He had many a man tell him that his boss could go fuck something or another, but the wild man did not take to kindly to Suthers’ insolence and he reached for his gun, but before he could pull it out, a shot cracked the sky and the horse reared, and he fell out of the saddle and was dead on the ground, the right side of his head open and the brains sizzling in the hot sun.  The Mexican wiped blood off the left side of his face and he shook his head and sighed.  “Suthers, this will be a problem for you.”

Suthers turned the gun back on the Mexican.  “It will?  I’ll tell you what.  If Grange wants his gold, he can come and find it.  You tell him that.  Now get off your horse.”

The Mexican shrugged.  He had been told many times to get off his horse and he had walked many miles back to many bosses, some worse and some better than Grange, with the same news.  He slid off his horse and unhooked his gun belt and let it drop on the ground.  “It is always the same, Suthers.  Always,” the Mexican said and he started to walk east.

It was Dylan’s horse, and it was Dylan down on the hard ground, his chest ripped open and the blood all over around him.  Suthers talked to the horse and went over and searched it and there was nothing.  No gold.  No food.  Nothing.  He went back over to Dylan and found that there was no gun.  He scratched his head and looked around and nothing that he saw could help him make sense of it until he looked back toward his camp and saw Eli’s horse being led away by two figures, and then he felt as though someone had run into him and knocked him down.

He coughed and held his hand up to where it hurt and he felt the familiar wetness of blood.  The sounds of a horse came to him from nearby, and the sounds of someone walking along the hard ground and the tough grass, and the sun in the sky was eclipsed suddenly by the face of the Mexican.  “It’s always the same, Suthers.  Always.”

The Mexican pulled out Suthers’ Colt and aimed it at his head and pulled the trigger, and then he called out in Spanish something that Suthers could not understand, something he would never understand.