The First Meeting
The trail was dry and dusty. A lone rider walked his horse slowly on, leaning slightly side to side in a drowsy manner. He missed the company of his partner. His presence would make the time pass faster as he always had something to talk about.
He’d thought about a lot of different topics to pass the time: women, food, drink, cards, food, women, food and food. He’d run out of stuff to muse about. It was dull. He lowered his Stetson to shield his face from the sun.
His partner would have something interesting to say, well maybe not so interesting, but something at least, and if he didn’t like what his partner was talking about, his being irritated would pass the time.
Partner. Partner for six years. Partner in good times and bad. Partner in crime. How’d they meet? Oh yeah, Big Jim had brung him into Devil’s Hole, and there was the other fella playing cards with that cat grin across his face. It was like he’d known him for years, ‘cause they seemed to think just alike. The brown haired fella had laughed, ‘that’s ‘cause they we’re cousins, ya know,’ he had said. Knowed each other for years, and fished together and been at the Home together.
No that wasn’t it; the brown haired fella had been in some other gang before they met. Heck whose gang was that? Plummer, that’s right. Not the real Plummer mind you, the fella who not only robbed but murdered too, but a sort of downsized Plummer who tried to scare widows out of their saloons.
The rider frowned. What about those years at Valparaiso? You know the home for waywards where they had first met after their folks had died. Let’s see, their folks had died, when? Oh yeah, during the war between the North and South, and that wasn’t too long after they had met, because he, or was it the other fella had just moved to a farm nearby in Kansas where he or the other fella had lived.
Kansas was where they were from, and where they had been born, or would have been where they were born if people had been allowed to settle there when they were born. ‘Cept people weren’t allowed into Kansas Territory until later after they were born which meant they both hadda been born elsewheres and moved to Kansas, and then met, and then had their folks killed and then ended up in Valparaiso, which was all well and good ‘cept Valparaiso didn’t really exist.
The rider was getting a headache. If they were cousins and born in Missouri, then they woulda had Southern sympathies, unless they were from Ohio and had Northern sympathies, none of which mattered anyway to a couple of ten year olds, or ten and twelve year olds, who had just met, and fished together.
Unless that is, they were cousins, one born in Missouri, and one born in Ohio, and they moved to Kansas, and then their folks died and then they met on the wagon on their way to Valparaiso. Poor orphans, huddled together in the cold, finding out they were cousins, or weren’t cousins, and being sent to the home, all abandoned by the whole world, except by the state authorities, the home, the teachers, and the local community. He liked the picture he was painting. It would get a lot of sympathy especially from the female folk, and that was a good thing, he figured.
‘Course they could have been mismatched twins separated at birth, and only found that out when one of ‘em recognized the birthmark shaped like the state of Kansas on the arm of the other. Or maybe one was stolen by gypsies, and that’s why they didn’t meet until Big Jim brought ‘em together, or they met in Wichita, at a poker game of course, or maybe they met during a bank robbery, and then had a fight, and then split up for six years, and then met again in Wyoming, and then been successful outlaws and then rode into Porterville, Wyoming, which didn’t exist either, and asked Lom to ask the governor for amnesty. Was it worth it? Waiting for that amnesty for nigh on thirty years? In the west? Being stuck somewheres in the 1880s for thirty years and in the west yet? Most places in the west didn’t even have indoor plumbing in the 1880s.
No it wasn’t worth it, and he didn’t like this headache he got from thinking all this through either. Which was why he was on his way to shoot that Roy Huggins fella.
