As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
His name was John Alfred Coates. He was from the Iowa Coates, not that it mattered, because his Pa died of the muskrat fever when he was three, and his big sis got married off to a salesman to get off the farm, and his big brother Bill just pitched horse shit at the livery.
That left Missy, who was Johnny Cakes junior of three years, as she was birthed ten months after Pa died.
Johnny Cakes was the handle the store owner's daughter pinned on John Alfred with her snooty pretty dress friends, and allot of things got pinned on him from age 4 onward without a Pa and a too unfriendly visiting politician visiting Ma, by the name of Sniver. He seemed to get beat at Sunday school, beat at country school and beat at home too.
He was good though at knocking muskrats over the head and caching away the pelt price. He figured the way to keep his money was to convince his Ma that guns were a way of bringing in income for her, along with a horse and a bed roll.
John Alfred was fast as his shadow with a pistol, but that was slower than most other shadows. He was good with a Winchester though out to 200 yards and when by chance a wolf happened to drift through, that 30 dollar bounty got squirreled away, and come snore time at the Coates place, John Alfred was clearing the rise headed into Kansas.
Kansas in them years was not much, no more than it is today. Just allot of city folk acting like they were not fed off the short grass. Most towns were tents from St. Louis and boards found floating down the river. You made your way teaming or armying, and for a fifteen year old, that was close pickings gnawing on famine.
John Alfred decided in Abilene to wet his whistle. He never had whiskey before, but whiskey is what men drank, and in one of the tent saloons he ambled in and paid his two bits.
He looked green and was. His store bought Levi's could stand in the corner in being so stiff and were rolled up for they were built for much longer legs than John Alfred had. He had his red shirt, kerchief, knee boots and those blued pistols with hunting knife on his belt.
A stranger at the bar began laughing him down as he coughed on the whiskey and the man would not let up, as he meant to ride the boy hard. The others looked on in silence over their cards and shot glasses.
John Alfred was starting to set down his glass for his gun to draw, but something froze his hand.
The stranger taunted him with, "What's the matter boy? You yellow? Can't find them guns on your hips there boy?"
John Alfred just stared ahead, but never let go of his shot glass.
The stranger let a round loose at John Alfred's feet as he walked out the door.
At the livery, the straw boss let the boy know that it was Border Bob who was taunting him, and if John Alfred had drawn, it would have been his last, as Bob was faster than most, and made a sport out of bullying folks.
It was not that his name was Bob, as his real name was Ben Stiller out of Texas way. He made his way at cards and not much else. He liked to fancy himself as Doc Stiller, as something akin to Doc Holiday out of Georgia and Dodge City, but it never took as he was neither doctor nor dentist, and folks just preferred to call him Border Bob, as he spent more time boarding a lewd woman named Heels to the Sky Liz than drinking almost.
Bob had a local badman renown about as far as yelling distance on a clear night.
It was a fracas at that same tent saloon, the Sitting Pretty, in which Bob was playing cards with a set of dandies out of Indiana, and got the best of them as the whiskey flowed. Things got said and Bob put one through the shoulder of the one Hoosier and through the breast of the other.
It was not so much anything out of the ordinary, but the dead one was some dude relative of the law east of the Mississippi, and it was soon made known by the survivor that justice would one day be hauling Bob back east for a proper hanging, whether the killing was killing or murder.
About 1 o'clock that night, Bob lit out of Abilene bound north for what laid in Wyoming.
John Alfred had taken up being paid two bits a day pitching horse shit and sleeping in the loft, with a ration of beans and bacon, for breakfast, dinner and supper. It was not that he liked horse shit or beans, but he knew that watching Border Bob was staying too close to the cat to get clawed. It was watch Bob's horse and where that horse went, Bob would be along for the ride.
Bob was in a sour as owl shit mood. It was easy for John Alfred to follow as Bob was loping along, cussing, drinking and shooting to his bad heart's soothing contentment. The muzzle flashes made things like a lamp to the boy's feet, and by dawn, the bad man had made 75 miles to the Republican River looking for Nebraska.
Bob just threw down his saddle and propped himself up, to begin drinking some more, taking long swigs from the second quart bottle he had in tow.
John Alfred took care of his horse in a cut a half mile away, gnawed on a biscuit and worked his way over to where he could now hear Bob muttering. The boy could see the horse was done in legs splayed and Bob was not much better propped up the way he was.
He went back to his camp as he saw Bob's head slump to a drunken slumber.
By afternoon, the boy was rested and had snuck back to where Bob was snoring. The horse had improved, but only by pulling leaves off the cottonwood it was tied to. The kid was about to leave around dark when Bob stirred and started cussing as he built a fire and began chewing on some cookies from his saddlebags.
Darkness set in as the fire illuminated the bar bully. Bob was still grousing about showing them eastern folk when he had a mind to and that is when the gun went off.
John Alfred had snuck up to thirty yards of Bob and put a 44 40 through his right lower lung. The muzzle flash made blind spots in the kid's vision, but he saw well enough to see the muzzle flash of Bob's pistol.
The boy called out, "You shot me you bastard!" and to that Bob snarled out, "You bastard yourself, you shot me first, you bushwacker."
"I ain't no bushwacker, Bob, I just picked a gun fight with a rifle I would win at as pistols only would get me killed."
"You're that filthy Hoosier!', Bob spat out.
"No Bob," John Alfred replied,"I'm that kid you called yellow."
"I don't know no damn fool kid, you little shit!", Bob yelled, as he coughed up a hack of blood clot from his lung.
John Alfred could see the bully was drowning in his own blood. There was not much sense in making more conversation, but Bob bellowed out one final gasp of, "Well at least I killed you, you little brat."
John Alfred simply said to himself, "No you bastard, you only killed a tree."
The boy circled slowly around as Bob slumped by the fire. He knew he had planned to shoot the bully, but did not know how it all had happened. It was like someone else had done it and he was just watching.
There was not allot to it. The straw boss had said Bob had killed 9 men, 4 Mexicans, 14 Indians and 2 Chinamen, but the numbers of it all was no different than knocking muskrats over the head in dead was dead to John Alfred.
He threw a loop on Border Bob and fished him out into the river as it was moonlight. Didn't have a shovel to dig with and that would be more work than John Alfred intended on. He didn't know if God approved, but he figured the score was settled as Border Bob meant to murder him legal in the Sitting Pretty and John Alfred simply renewed the terms on his own long gun settlement.
There was no sense in getting the bulge on about the cat out of the bag.
John Alfred found 538 dollars in poker winnings from those Hoosiers in Border Bob's saddle bags, along with a tin of cookies and two boxes of shells. He dumped the traps in the water as the cookies carried him and Bob's horse in tow up to Wyoming.
He got a job teaming for the military up in Boseman, but the winter found him roofed up in a warmer clime in Colorado.
John Alfred was a good boy, who worked, saved his money, never bullied folk, and married a two scrapping gals as gristled as a three year old sage hen. The first was a Mormon escapee who died of the trots after 8 months honeymoon and the second was a 15 year old teamster's daughter still in the blush. They set up housekeeping running Hereford crosses just this side of the divide and had seven children, two never made it past weening in the fever, but the other five were Church goers and never made it into pulp print, except for good things and not bad.
John Alfred would tell his children about picking fights to advantage and ponder with his grandchildren just how many unfortunate miscreants he saved by shooting Border Bob. It got to be a past time on roundup and hunting campfires up to the time he was 86 year old and passed on in that mule deer hunt for winter stores.
They buried them there at cracked rock, as John always said having two wives in the grave, he could not be laid out in two places at once trying to please them, so that is where the killer of Border Bob rests as some damn recreationist sleeps on that grave not knowing it is a grave nor how it all came to be.
agtG
