Chapter 10

I woke up with a serious fit of coughing that rattled my cage a lot more than I would like to speculate on considering my state of health.

My Kate was still missing and I knew I had to drag my weary ass around town trying run down her present location. In all honesty, it was more for my benefit than for her because in the final analysis I needed her to make certain I had all my medications and that I was not overdoing the booze when all I really needed a steady dose of rest and abstention from excitement like female companionship or playing cards with violent men ready to back their play with a six-gun.

The teenage Clementine was safely settled in my rooms and I set her to organizing my books and papers into some sort of order to make it easy for me to locate something without constantly going through the rubble to find the right stack. Kate never did like doing anything of that nature because she considered it a complete waste of her valuable time. I understood that was one side of her nature that would never change even though she was overly generous in almost every other area including the dispensing of physical pleasures.

I discovered that the rumor was making the rounds that I was already resting peaceably up in “Boot Hill” and my sudden appearance on the streets was a mite discouraging to a number of mean-spirited yahoos with a great dislike of me backing my law enforcement pals when the need arose. The unnecessary noise and shouting greatly reduced in my vicinity for fear that I might take exception to it as I had done in the past with deadly results. Some cowboys didn’t understand plain English when I requested some peace and quiet in my immediate surroundings. I was also surprised that my little darling Clementine had called me “Daddy” twice before I finally left on my quest for Kate and that worried me a bit because she was obviously in a close relationship with her parent at a young and tender age without going into complicated details and her outlook on the relationship between men and women tended to involve the heavy use of corrective discipline and a strict way of limiting the touching of her physical body to only her father or her future spouse whichever the case might be.

It seemed that she had replaced me in her mind with her already deceased parent and that I would now occupy his place in seeking solace in the sanctity of her feminine favors hidden between her slender and shapely legs. I didn’t find that a disturbing development because she had the tempting attraction of youth and almost virginal inexperience whilst my confidante Kate was the giver of life and love to my failing systems in a serious downhill slide into the unknown “other side”.

I hoped that I was being premature in my frank assessment of my future chances but the doctors had been quite expressive in their prognosis of my remaining life span. Sure, it was all a matter of geography and life-style but the bottom-line was staring me in the face and leaving me with no long-range plans at all.

I guess that is the reason why I took the risks that I did because the thought of going out in a blaze of gunfire and flying balls of lead was more enticing than slowly wasting away in some dirty hotel room with some pain easer by my bed and an open bible in my hand. I knew that my excesses with Kate and the fresh new faces of frontier womanhood were certainly not a cure for my deadly disease and in fact were hastening me down that lonely trail to perdition, but it sure did make my remaining days a bit more interesting as the spark of life faded deep inside me.

In all honesty, I would be the first to admit that I had no regrets except maybe for that mother and daughter combination up in Mormon territory when they had a competition to see which one wore me out first. Their elderly male master couldn’t take the rejection for a sickness ravaged outsider and volunteered for tunneling duty with the new-fangled railroad and he got acquainted too fast with a stick of dynamite that had gone all unpredictable in the desert heat below.

I didn’t blame him at all and there were no two ways about the end result what with him not having much left to scrape up for proper burial services in Mormon town. The folks around there looked at me with scorn in their eyes but considering my uncertain future, I decided I had too many problems of my own to be concerned with the sensitivities of a religion where women are treated no better than domestic animals to be traded off to old men with no love involved and where the young innocent girls were used like saloon females to satisfy the carnal desires of men much too old to know the joys of marriage.

The Mormon wagon train was halted on the south side of town with the screaming little ones and the plainly dressed women all resting up on the wooden walkways perched up on empty barrels or just sitting on the bags of feed for the farm folk outside town. I walked past them without really looking and I was hoping nobody would recognize me as the bastard that drove Pastor Henry to his final confrontation with the master of the human race.