Every time the woman took a breath, blood seeped out and widened the scarlet stain on the bandage wrapped around her midsection. She had taken a slug in her belly when an outlaw had raided her family’s farmstead. Her husband and her son had been struck down, so there was nothing keeping her attached to this mortal coil other than a pointed desire for retribution.
Tyler tried to listen to her description of their assailant, but the copious amount of blood combined with the copious amount of bourbon that he had recently consumed, caused him to pass out after getting no more than a name: Tom Kelly. The Sheriff, none-too-pleased to find his “Wanted” poster artist passed out as cold as the fresh corpse next to him, woke him up with a sharp kick to the ribs.
“What in tarnation do I pay you for? Git your carcass up and draw me a pitcher of the sumbitch what done this. If you don’t have it over to the newspaper office in two hours, I’ll hang you in his place!”
Tyler didn’t want to endure the whooping that he would suffer if he admitted that he hadn’t gotten a description, so he scraped up his paper and charcoal and went to his “studio,” a cramped room in the attic above the saloon. What could he do? At least he had a name. He would have to find someone else who knew what Tom Kelly looked like and get a description from them. He enlisted the help of Maude, the saloon-keeper’s wife and the “madame” in charge of the upstairs services.
“Now, it’s bad for business to talk about other folks’ business,” she said while Tyler struggled to keep from staring at her generously displayed decolletage, “but killing women and children is bad business. Go talk to Marla. Tom Kelly was one of hers.”
Marla was reluctant at first, but when she found out about the heinous deed her client had committed, she complied. “I cain’t believe Tom would do sumpin’ like that,” she said before giving a detailed description.
Tyler worked feverishly, sweating out the previous evening’s excesses, until he produced a likeness that Marla deemed accurate. He got it to the newspaper office where an engraving was produced, and by mid-afternoon copies were rolling off the hand-cranked printing press. The Sheriff distributed them to the members of the posse that he had assembled and they rode off in search of the culprit.
The next day, they returned with a man who was bound and gagged and had a gunny sack tied over his head. He was taken to the town square and led up onto the wooden planks of the gallows that stood as a symbol of justice in the town. The sack was removed and Marla identified the man as Tom Kelly.
Thomas B. Kelly stood in the crowd, bemused, as he watched his dirt farmer cousin, Thomas A. Kelly, fall through the trap door to his destiny.
Literature in Small Doses 