I Came For You - An Adulterers Tale

[Light Ice]

It was Jeb that woke him, plain-faced and gap-toothed, kicking the bottom of his booted foot the way he'd been told. The honesty of it was disarming despite its suddenness. It touched memories that the rot-gut hadn't killed and served as the lone balm to a survivor's nerves. Augustus McCall woke and opened his eyes, blinked them clear of sleep and took stock of Jeb Thompson as he had the three nights prior. The boy wore the same clothes but had bathed and washed them both. It was to the boy’s credit that he could do as he’d been told. His hair was combed back with hasty and unskilled hands. The cowlick that spun the red curls into a mess on the side of his head was unabated by the half-assed attempt to calm it and raged like a furious tornado of ginger atop the boy. He was not, nor would he ever be, handsome.

But he was kind.

In truth, all the boys of Flynn Ranch were kind. All of them, even Ike Howzer, counted themselves fortunate. The five boys had enjoyed a charity otherwise abandoned in the West. It was a kind of good and Christian spirit that so many towns had cited only when it suited best and forgotten otherwise. When it came to charity, however, Augustus did not spite his neighbors. The land was harsh and most could not survive on it. The Flynn's had proven themselves an exception, one made so emphatically that they indulged in their own form of charity in the private of the ranch.

They adopted the five boys after their parents had met untimely ends or abandoned them in Deadwood to the north. The town existed on the very border between Lakota Land and the Dakota territories and was technically illegal in the eyes of the Government. The Gold had been enough to draw great volumes of scoundrels in and provoke great waves of desertions amongst the armies. That, alone, had kept the small territory safe for now. Safe, of course, being a relative term.

Augustus rose and moved to account himself for the night’s routine, drawing on the heavy duster that draped itself along his body and kept the dust and grit of the trail clear his clothes. The coat had seen better days and showed it, weathered in a way made charming only by its owner’s meticulous care. He reached up and smoothed his hands over his face, wiping the sleep from the corners of his eyes and reminding himself of how badly he was in need of a shave. The coarse stubble clung tight to his jawline, not yet shaggy enough to resemble the beginnings of a true beard.

But he’d work to do. Grooming would wait. Instead of a razor he reached for the belts doubled and looped beneath his burlap pillow. The worn leather was oiled and soft, cracked from the sun and lined with brass cartridges that heliographed the light from the rising moon. Augustus ignored the way the boy’s eyes followed the guns as he strapped them into place on his hips, hanging down against the corded stretch of his thighs. They’d been quiet since his arrival on Flynn Ranch over a year ago.

He’d have had it none-other way.

“Mrs. Collins is going to bring you your supper ‘gain.” Jeb said, grinning lopsidedly at him.

Augustus didn’t reply, keeping the grimace from finding its way to the surface as the boy watched him. Mrs. Ava Collins had made it her business to learn of him, inquiring and speaking heedless of his disinterested or the pained looks she provoked. Her husband, John, had become Grant Flynn’s most likely successor. As bold and curious as Ava had proven herself, John Collins had been much the opposite.

He was an average man in height and look, plain brown hair and puppy-brown eyes softening any proud angles that could be found in his face. A hard worker, he suffered to toil with diligence and focus. He was well-liked and polite, respectful and caring. A good man.

But he was also mistrusting of Augustus McCall and insulted that he’d be hired on without so much as a word said to him. There was little that could hide his suspicion, particularly after Augustus had volunteered himself for the night patrols and taken residence in a tent a couple hundred yards from the Ranch itself. This had all been a year ago, but lingered, as real grudges tended to. The days did nothing to heal things. Time could not salve all wounds. In the end, between men, distrust and dislike was a poison that worked perilously slow. A year had been a great long while, long enough for the hatred to simmer until it lingered just beneath a boil.

A good spark would bring things to a head.

John Collins knew of many things. He knew of horses, fields, and cattle. He knew of Church, family, and the Man Jesus. But he was a good man and as a good man he was absent in the two skills to which Augustus McCall had spent a lifetime honing. He couldn’t pleasure his woman or know well-enough what she wanted to see to it. And he wasn’t a killer.

And so John, early on, had tried to get close to Augustus and learn of him. He’d made an attempt to overcome his own nature and be friends. It was a good man’s mistake, the kind that could prove tragic. But Augustus knew better, even then, and had made a point to stay far from the house and the others. He’d worked the nights alone, often laboring in the dark with fences and fields. It was a boon to the Ranch, an endlessly productive edge that allowed it in a year to outpace the other three Ranches that had tried to make their start.

Three times he had been offered more in Deadwood to leave the Flynn Residence. The first two he’d turned down with curt words. The last with a gun. Nobody had called since.

“Mind if I walk with you some, Mister McCall?” Jeb spoke, suddenly bold. It was the first time in a year the boy had let his curiosity and desires find representation in his speech.

“Yes, I mind.” He answered, exhaling some as he slipped from the tent. “Run along home.”

For a moment, Augustus saw defiance in the boy’s eyes. It flickered for a moment before cooling, tamed when Augustus cocked his head. Jeb turned and left, wandering down the side of the hill towards the ranch below.

A good man would have given the kid an encouraging word, thrown him a smile. Something to soften the sting of disappointment. He’d let that man be John Collins, let the softness come from Ava and the good folks down below. It wasn’t the way he’d been raised. Infact, when it came to it, the Ranch wasn’t the kind of place he’d ever known. The world under his eyes was more like the town beyond, dirty and dangerous. A place of thieves and killers and desperation.



The patrol was quiet. They often were. For a short while he’d the company of a few Coyotes, lean and swift cutting through the high grass at the top of the rise. He watched them lope along thirty yards out, flanking his horse with typical, slack-jawed ease. Tongues lolled from their lean mouths, narrow muzzles painted splotches of white and gray, drooling long lines of silvery saliva in the light of the stars above. Most men took to shooting them, putting bullets into the ground nearby to chase them off. They were a nuisance, at times a costly one. Now and again they managed to find a calf in Spring and pull it down from its mother. But those dangers were past the Ranch for summer and the cows were away. Augustus let them well enough alone, keeping the big Winchester sprawled lazily in his lap as he flanked the properties exterior.

He’d found peace here. It was a lazy, satisfying thing to wander the boundaries of the property at night and be left to himself. Below, nestled between the hills that dominated the Flynn Claim, the ranch house was a bustle of laughter and conversation. It was still early yet, the Hands were still inside. He could imagine Grant Flynn in his bedroom, alone, finding sleep after the last drags of his cigar while his daughter and her husband entertained the souls that they’d inherit when age finally and completely took their toll and the Old Man was unable to tend matters himself. That would mark the day that Augustus McCall rode out, abandoned the kinder souls of Flynn Ranch the world outside. It was only the girl’s father, tough and learned in the wickedness of men, that kept this place running straight.

John Collins wasn’t a bad man. He was just a kind one. And in the end kindness had a way of ruining people.

Augustus shook the thoughts away, took water from the canteen hanging off his saddle. The moon light reflected off its dull, tin surface, and he looked aside. The Coyotes had left, slipped away when he’d been daydreaming. For a moment he was concerned, and let his eyes search the high-grass and the treeline for their lanky bodies. He didn’t look long. There was little to warrant concern, however, and he looked back to the fields ahead.

“Drop the rifle, fella.” Ignorant words, a slurred tongue. It came to his right, where the Coyotes had once been. A lumpy shape in the darkness stood, joined by two others.

The one that spoke stepped closer and Augustus saw him in the light. He wore a tattered pair of overalls and had rotted teeth, mossy and disgusting. A prospector, perhaps, or a failed one. His eyes were sallow and yellowed with an addict’s want. The kind of wild sickness that opium fiends took on when they’d gone on too long without a ball of dope. He held a battered, beat-up six-gun in his hand. It may have been a Remington. In the dark it was hard to say.

Of the three, though, he was the only one that looked well-fed. The other two were ghosts of men, long tied to opium and suffering as a result. One had pissed himself. The other looked vacant, his stringy hair unkept and falling out. He was also the only one of the three with a hat, cocked askew and its brim sagging pitifully.

The man in overalls shook his beat-up pistol again, a conversion Remington. It was in terrible condition. “The rifle, you cunt!” The man spat.

That was fine with Augustus, just fine. He took the Winchester by the barrel, pinched in his thick fingers, and let the butt slide from his lap. It’s walnut stock glinted in the light before he let it slide further, lowering it until it touched the ground and letting it go. It clattered some amidst the grass, the sound muffled and unoffensive.

“Now, them pistols. Nice and slow.” The man in overalls said again, bobbing his gun at Augustus.

The others heehawed, literally. The laugh was so ignorant it made Augustus wince, tightened his face. He felt his heart grow cold and looked sidelong to them, reaching to take his pistols and ease them from the holsters at his hips.

“Uh-uh, real slow. Hold them to me butt-first.” The man said, extending his open hand.

The other two were armed with mining gear. He saw it now that they strayed close. The first had a long-handled knife from a cooking set, meant for chopping meat. And the other held a pick-axe that looked too heavy for it to lift, struggling with it on his shoulder. He spun it by the handle now and again, knocking his hat askew worse without word or acknowledgement.

This was good. Easy.

The weight of the guns was familiar. He felt the cold metal in his hands, that heavy feeling of darkness sweeping in to take him. All at once his thoughts fled, his heart quieted. The great absence of thought, the fuzziness of his head clearing, all like a woman slipping to his side. He embraced it, knew it. Like your first fuck, you never forgot. A man at eighty, old and broken, would sooner forget to feed himself then he would forget how to fuck. Some things, like fucking, were born into men. It was written in the natural order somewhere, buried deep, always where they could find it when they need it.

The man in the overalls leaned forward, reaching with his empty hand while the scarecrow with the hat dropped his axe and did the same.

Augustus McCall was not a nice man. He was a bad man. He was certain that if he was wrong and the man Jesus was real and his father, like him, would exercise judgement of his soul, that he would find himself swiftly in the fires of Dante’s hell. And like most bad men, Augustus McCall could not forget how to fuck. The sheer savage fury of it, the primal expression of things to which he would never find the words to speak, were as ingrained in him as they could be. And Augustus McCall, despite a year of peace, could not forget how to kill.

His hands did the work of his cold-heart, flipping the massive pistols around in his fingers until their barrels were leveled on the pitiful trio and his fingers fit neat on the triggers. Augustus McCall spoke of his evil with his guns, letting them belch fire into the Dakota night, lighting the darkness with orange gouts of flame spit from the long barrels and the booming crack of shots that echoed through the hills and valley.

They silenced the trio of rabble, snuffed them out, left them with gaping holes that spurted opium-tainted blood into the air and across the grass. And they silenced the laughter from the household below, ruining the perfect happiness of their delusion.







This Thread is Closed.

 

[MadMissJ]

Ava Collins was a good woman. Young and fair and hardworking. The life that had been handed to her had not been an easy one by any stretch of the imagination, it was the sort that could harden you, hollow you out with so much hard work and thankless toil.

But where it lacked ease, she’d been handed tools. And a wise woman had once told her, long before she’d left her father, that a woman must use what was at hand, she was to mold it and make a life out of the often barren soil, carve out a life that at the end of the day she could take solace in.

Ava Collins had found a way to find meaning here. It was on the faces of the men she cared for. The boys, brought up here to The Flynn Ranch, so young and needing a woman’s touch. Some of them were almost men, standing on the cusp of some great adventure, they worked hard for each morsel of food that passed their lips, and her Father would have it no other way.

But it was with the dark haired beauty that they’d found a mother’s warmth and had learned by example that if tended correctly, the flower of womanhood could bloom so lovingly.

She cared for their clothing, taking it upon herself to make sure that her little family didn’t work in rags. She cooked for them, had learned their favorite meals and always remembered birthdays. Ava could sing like a diamond mine canary, she hummed and warbled out tunes she’d learned in Sunday school as she puttered around her small garden or baked bread in the mornings before the sun rose unbearably high in the sky.

Her father’s needs were tended to by his loving daughter. Each morning his room was cleaned and bed made, and when the times came that his arthritic hands couldn’t hold the shaving knife steady she helped with that, and when his ulcerous stomach gave him pains, Ava too saw that she found something that could ease it.

One day John had come calling, and he too had seemed to slip right into the running of the household. He’d taken over some of the jobs Grant Flynn hadn’t been up to doing, and had seamlessly too taken over the education of the boys. He was a good man, one that Ava had felt privilege to call her husband. He was kind and considerate, handsome and capable.

The life that those words painted was beautiful.

It could have been a Dakota morning, the sun rising over the flat land where their cattle grazed, greens and golds and blues. Boys running out to do chores, and strong men at her side.

It seemed that the only two who didn’t fit into that lovely picture were herself…and dangerous Augustus McCall.

Ava looked like one of those statues in the museums of the East. She was as pale as marble, breasts high and proud, waist thin and tight. Her arms were toned from work, shoulders slender and neck long. Her hair was curled, long to her waist when she let it down, black as a sinner’s heart and thick as molasses in winter. Her eyes were a bright blue, in direct contrast with her thick, long lashes and arched black brows.

When she’d been in the market for a husband, many had come to her door. Convinced that she was an angel sent from heaven…with money and land to boot. But none of them had said the words she’d longed to hear, and John had told her that he’d take care of her, take care of her father and take the boys under his wing. And in this dangerous land, that was worth more than silly words or a girl's imaginings.

At least she’d thought so until a year ago.

Her Father had started to make several changes to the Ranch after she’d married John Collins. The last of which was the hiring of one Mr. McCall.

He’d been so dangerous looking, shoulders hunched over with several days’ growth on his face. She couldn’t see even a thread of the softness that she knew her husband possessed, but for the life of her didn’t fear Augustus, no matter what warnings John gave her otherwise. Ava knew that she’d nothing to fear from him, confident that her father had, had his reasons to hire the man. And Ava trusted her father, and by extension, Augustus.

Just as Mr. McCall had taken to working nights, so too had Ava taken to night time rides, most often to bring him supper or even something for the next morning. It was then that she felt most confident in herself around him, when the boys weren’t crowding around them, and John wasn’t giving McCall warning glances from the corner of his eye.

Tonight would have been like any other night. Ava was packing the small satchel with goods. Wrapping pieces of grilled beef and vegetables inside parchment pockets, a small loaf of bread tied in a bandana and a canteen filled with lemonade. She’d just been slinging it over the back of her mare, John running a hand over her shoulder, wishing her a safe ride when the gunshot had echoed in the dying light.

And she’d felt the grip of John’s fingertips rip at her shoulder when she’d hoisted herself upward onto the back of her horse, and kicked her sides. Her ears had rung with his shouts and the shouts to the boys as she left them behind, holding onto the mane of her beloved Star.

Whatever she’d prepared herself for on the race to him hadn’t been enough. She was off the back of Star in a flurry of skirts and long black hair, a hand so white it glowed like moonlight against the raise and fall of her cleavage as she inched forward passed her mare’s long, worried face.

“Augustus?” Her voice was strong, but cautious. Pale eyes looking over the felled men, and not immediately seeing their Ranch hand.

“Mr. McCall?” There was that edge now, it was fear. Fear that one of those men could be…might be…

She stopped, looking from one to the other, their features either gone completely or splattered in blood. It bubbled up her stomach, thrusting it into her throat. It made her sick to see them there, on her land, their life gushing out onto the hungry grass as it drank away their moisture.

It was then as she stood so still that she was caught unaware by a noise. A foot fall.

Her chin snapped up from her staring, eyes drawn to where he stood, her full lips pressed into a line.

“Thank goodness.” She whispered, walking toward him. Aware that he didn’t like her to get too close, like a frightened dog beaten too many times that snaps even at a friendly hand.

“I thought….” Ava cut herself off and expelled the breath she’d been holding, dragging in the sent of the dead men as she did breathed back in.

“It doesn’t matter what I thought. I’m…I’m glad you’re safe.” It was on the tip of her tongue to ask…ask him what had happened. But even now she felt the surge that had ripped her away from John, had her ride like the very devil to find him begin to abandon her…it left her weak and shaken.

Her eyes melted away from his face and back toward the three bodies. Unconsciously she wrapped her arms around herself, the night was cool and her limbs felt bloodless as her present company.

“You are alright…aren’t you, Mr. McCall?”