Twist Bone (experiment 2)

Tight-cudgels of leather-draped men  drew up set-jawed on their horses and fronted the house.   There was McCabe riding front, pressed on each side by Jim Winters and his brother Edgar.  Close behind followed a phalanx of locally drawed up men:  the Blacksmith Merlon and his Brother-in-law Stewarrt, , the three McCallister boys, and finally to the rear a group of itenirent cowboys who’d just happened to be in town that night looking for adventure.   Each man in the posse was a sinewey pocket of muscled consciousness:  each was a spitting and simmering block of flesh and dirt with violence in their hearts and a still inchoate plan to pummel the glow of life from a randomly pointed-out human being.   This was the 19^th century  apotheosis of the western edge of human expansion:  a ragtag collection of men  clever enough to anneal barrels of steel and projectiles of lead in the fires of their industry, but with still stone-age fingers simultaneously itching to pull-and-fire the annihilation of another man’s life—possessed of a  demon to split another man’s flesh and to obliterate his existence with the crack of a trigger-hammer.    In the galloped high energy  of their hoof-and-horse cabal they only knew they felt a hatred, a hatred that smelled like gin and soil, and that cored out their insides  with a relentless and ravening hunger for someone’s life.   

Inside the loose-tacked shack the mood was not as jaunty.  Tuck sat beneath timbers that drooped so low they touched his hat.  His close-torn nails tapped slowly on the open oak grain of the table, marking a random cadence.  His hat canted deeply forward, the shadow that filled his face was deep and  opaque, completely closing his expression to revelation.  Only the raspy sound of a light snorting  through nostrils emanated from the center of the shadow on that face, a sound that could barely be heard by the other man hunkered down at the other side of the same table.  Ernie was old—at least old for these parts—nothing more than a collapsed flesh-sack of knotted-joints and rutted hide:  small and almost inscrutable as a man beneath the folding cloak of his deep wrinkles.  He was bird-thin, and his old skin seemed to be in the process of swallowing him all the time, like a python on a chicken bone.     

A bullet  whistled through the six inch space between them, and the crack of a rifle seemed to arrive a half second later.   Splinters exploded in slow motion and hurled through the cabin, pattering like light rain on the floor and covering Tucks's hat.

“Listen Up!” came a surly voice unimpeded through the thin slat walls.  “You kin walk out on your own, with your hands in the air, or we kin rain the justice of hell down on you right through  these walls. “  There was a pause, “You got yourself exactly five seconds to re-cipro-cate.”    

  

Ernie peered towards Tuck, waiting for a move, but none came.  Tuck stared straight ahead, the only sound coming from the prairie wind susurring  around the corners of the cabin, and the intermittent  jangle or tinkle of a random metal piece on the fence or on a boot or stirrup in the group of men outside.