In a nutshell:
Sam Gibson used to be a lawman, until the day he made a terrible mistake that could never be taken back. Since then, he has alternated between wishing there were a way he could redeem himself and believing he deserved punishment.
He’s about to get both…
It is 18k in length, about 61 pages, so one or two sittings worth of reading.
And here is an extract:
Chapter 1
There were some days when Sam
Gibson didn’t feel any guilt at all.
But those days were few and
far between. Most days he felt chewed up inside and so full of self-loathing
that he couldn’t bear to catch sight of himself in a mirror or see his
reflection in a window. Yet he still had enough pride to keep himself clean,
and not let his beard stubble grow too far. On shaving days he had learned the
trick of imagining himself to be two people. He was both barber and customer,
and if he, the barber, didn’t cotton to the customer, well, he’d just nick his
face a little. That was why he generally added a cut or two to the other small
healing scabs on any shave day.
“Are you coming inside for a
beer, or something, mister?”
He stopped walking along the
boardwalk and looked down at the young red-haired kid with a freckly face and a
wide grin who was sitting on the chair beside the batwing doors of the Gold
Nugget Saloon.
“No, son. I have no taste for
beer or anything else that a saloon has to offer.”
“There are a lot of friendly
folk in here. It’s the friendliest saloon in town, you betcha. Friendliest
bartenders and the friendliest and prettiest girls in the whole of –”
“I guess you must be on
commission. But the answer is still no. I’m just passing through town and
minding my own business.”
“Can you shoot that gun?”
Sam’s hand unconsciously
twitched. He swallowed as that familiar lump came to his throat. “Yeah, I can
shoot. But like I said, I’m just minding my own business. It’s something that I
practice a lot, just so that I can stay out of trouble. You might think about
that, son.”
“Oh, don’t mind me. I like to
talk, mister, that’s all. And I like to watch folks.”
Sam reached into his vest
pocket and tossed a coin at the youngster. “That’s for your trouble. Just point
me in the direction of a good eating-house. Not a saloon, just somewhere I can
get food and coffee. And then a store where I can get tobacco and stuff.”
The boy had caught the coin
and secreted it away in a pocket as quickly as any cardsharp could stow an
extra card up his sleeve. “You want Ma Brady’s place, just past the bank. Then
come back this way and go down Second Street and you’ll find Kincaid’s Emporium
on the corner with Carson Street. That’s the best general store in town”
Sam tipped his hat and walked
on along the boardwalk. He was starting to feel cross with himself again and
that lump in his throat made him all too aware that the kid had touched several
raw nerves and brought those memories that were never far from the surface back
to haunt him.
He had thought of stopping
wearing a gun, just as he had stopped drinking. That had been hard enough,
owing to the fact that whiskey numbed his mind some. At least until he sobered
up, when the self-disgust would kick in along with the nausea and the
thundering headache that he always used to get.
But the worst thing was the
kid himself. He had looked a lot like the youngster he had shot dead.
