ACROSS THE BLACK PLAINS

   Harlan Poole was beating the sorcery out of one of the twins when trouble hammered at his front door.

     “Hieronymus Pike! I’m callin’ you out!”

     The old man’s breath was a rasp in his chest. His good hand trembled, inches from his screaming son’s backside, while red starbursts detonated behind his eyeballs.

     You’ll kill yourself yet, damned fool.

     He’d caught the twain playing out in the old henhouse. Caven, the rowdy one, had somehow achieved an invisibility spell and gone ghost-stalking quiet Hile, his brother. Poole had rushed out to the henhouse to find the twain fighting, seen and half-seen, both of them covered in blood and the dust of ancient chicken turds. Now here came a stranger, fouling the air with a name he’d hoped never to hear again.

     He let Caven squirm off his lap and stood up, and the starbursts in his head redoubled their assault. He caught hold to the back of his chair and held on until the dizziness passed.

     “I hate you,” the ten-year old screamed. “One day I’ll learn the right words and make her hurt you bad!”

     “Your mama’s dead, boy."

     “Liar!"

     “Pike!” the rough voice barked. “Come out or we’ll burn you out!”

     Poole went to the window and looked out. Then he turned to Simene, his oldest.

     “Take the boys out back. Keep ‘em quiet.”

     Simene nodded in her customary way. Even after all these years it was impossible for Poole to look at the girl without seeing the woman for whom he’d earned damnation staring back. Long ago his love had ripped away his daughter’s voice, and she had spoken no word since that night of bereaving.

     “Simmie...if somethin’ should happen to me..”

    Simene nodded. At only fifteen winters old she was a dead shot with pistol or rifle. She could knock a nested screech owl off its perch at midnight from thirty yards. She was brown-skinned, long-limbed and spare like him, but with the ink-black hair and cat-tilt eyes of her mother’s Crow people. And she was tough enough to take the piss out of any half-grown roughneck.

     As Simene wrangled the boys into the back room, Poole tried to think of the things he should say, but his tongue lay fallow in his mouth. Instead, he gripped his revolver and checked its chambers.

     Too old for gunfights.

    He holstered his pistol and grabbed Ol’ Gal from where she stood next to the front door. The semi-automatic Gatling mini-shotgun could fire sixteen rounds in an assfull’a ‘ticks: more than enough firepower to make a reasonable defense.

     Beneath the black leather glove he wore, the skin of his left hand writhed, mocking his presumptions.

     “Kiss my ass,” he growled.

     Then he opened the door to the setting sun.

     Two men sat mounted in front of his house. Each of them wore the drab brown or gray longcoats most common among western Plainsmen. The tall, skinny one wore a battered brown fedora with the brim pulled low over one eye. The stouter of the two wore a faded gray bowler, its rim tipped back to reveal a boyish face and the eyes of a Plains hyena. Neither of them looked older than twenty-five winters.

     “Hieronymous Pike?” Fedora asked.

     “Who wants to know?”

     Fedora’s eyes went all squinty and he puffed out his chest. Poole saw that he was going to have to hurt this one before all was said and done.