Lonerider

Tales

Deadeye JackThe Only Miss

Story by Lonerider.

They said Deadeye Jack never missed, and for most of his life they were right.
He was a quiet man in a long coat who stood with his back to walls and his eyes on doors. He did not drink when he worked and he did not talk when he could nod. Railroad men paid him well, because the trains ran on time in any county Jack was riding through.
The telegram found him in a town with one street and a water tower. Two hundred dollars from the line, it said, for a woman who had burned a homestead to the ground and gone missing with a metal box. There was a sketch with it. A wide hat. A shotgun on her shoulder. A face Jack had not seen in four years and had not forgotten for one day of them.
At a desert telegraph window, the operator hands Deadeye Jack a telegram
Jack studies a sketch of Betty with her shotgun on her shoulder
He knew where she would go. Betty always went east when she was done with a place, and the eastbound train took water at Cutter's Tank at sundown.
Cutter's Tank: a wooden water tower and empty platform beside the tracks at sundown
He got there first. He always did.
The platform was empty except for a ticket clerk who decided he had business inside. Jack stood against the wall of the water house, where the shade was long and the light was behind him, and took out a match.
Jack leans against the water house wall in his long coat, a match in his fingers
She came walking down the tracks with the sun at her back and her shotgun riding easy. She saw him a hundred yards out and did not slow down. That was Betty.
Betty walks down the railroad tracks toward the tank, shotgun on her shoulder, the sun behind her
She stopped at the edge of the platform. Neither of them said anything for a while. The wind moved the dust around their boots.
Jack and Betty face each other across the dusty platform, her wanted poster nailed to a post
"Two hundred dollars," she said at last. "I'm insulted."
"I told them you were worth more."
"You came to collect?"
Jack struck the match on the wall. The flame jumped and settled. He watched it the way other men watch a clock.
Close on Jack's shadowed face lit by the burning match
"Do you feel lucky?" he asked.
"I never needed luck around you, Jack. You never missed."
The match burned down toward his fingers. Far off, the train whistled.
He dropped the match, drew and fired in one motion. The bullet passed a foot from Betty's hat and took the wanted poster clean off the post behind her. It fluttered down onto the tracks.
The wanted poster tears off the post in pieces as Jack lowers his revolver and Betty stands unflinching
Betty did not flinch. She looked at the poster, then at him, and for one second the hard line of her mouth gave way to something else.
"You missed," she said.
"First time for everything."
The train came in hissing and took on its water. Betty stepped aboard without looking back, which was the only way either of them had ever known how to say goodbye. Jack watched until the last car was gone, then walked to the telegraph office and sent four words back down the line.
Jack stands alone on the platform watching the train pull away into the sunset
Too late. She's gone.
Folks still say Deadeye Jack never missed. Jack never corrected them.

Folks still say Deadeye Jack nevermissed. Jack never corrected them.

Deadeye Jack rides with the Legends. Meet the Legends

Moretales