Pax Dakota Decree
👨🏻💻🔫 A one-shot doddle: pulp literature to down with your choicest poison.🍷🍸🧃
—— Dᴏᴅᴅʟᴇ Aɴᴛʜᴇᴍ: Original Theatrical Soundtrack suggestion:
They were standing — speaking only with the discerning sweep of an eye or the ponderous oscillation of a neck — around the interrupted apparatus of a campfire, two nights old. Their moon-carved forms described a coven-circle at this grade of the witching hour, on a territory of ash as soft as heather. Theirs was a covert collective of heads bowed in a reverence that can only be attributed to the serious pleasure of the hunt. Not one man moved, not one man traded a whisper. Soil made supple and softened by smoke wheezed beneath their feet. Firewood collected at the centre of their conspiracy, like daring deeds in darker corners: finally, it was the brooding blond tracker, equipped with the marled grey gaze of a crow beset by cataracts, who finally broke the song of their silent vigil. He shucked his tan cattleman derby with the priestly adroit roll of a wrist, and clutched it at his groin, staking the snakeskin brim snugly on his bison-cameo belt buckle.
‘He went west,’ intoned the blond. He struck a match on the toecap of his boot, and watched the flame imperil itself with proud, tigerish leaps down the length of the matchstick. It reached the blond’s fingertips and winked once, like the hilt of a blade, before being consumed by the vigour of the night. He buried the fuming match beneath a filigree heel. The air was thick with a sudden, haunting scent. Sweet, but also, perhaps, too immediate, too unapologetic. A taint like rook-flocked orange acreages. A clangourous unguent on it like a fuck at a funeral. The men hunkered on sunken haunches, their nostrils flared, strident as an autumn-posted symposium of snorting racoons.
‘Now. If he were a clever man, we could but hope to never hear spit of his footfalls in Shiloh, again. But something tells me he ain’t a clever man.’ The blond braced the sole of his boot against the cinder-spackled pyre of wood at the centre of the men’s serious, violent ring. Unthinking, he clove apart a log with the sickle-shaped teeth of a spur. ‘Something tells me he’s a sporting sort of man. Saddle up, boys. Tonight we ride west. And we mean to ruckus.’
Hoots ascended the treeline like a parliament of nocturnal moths. Dogs were released from their tethers, blue bayou catahoulas baying and convulsing at the pin-drop constellations canted in their quadrants overhead.
Hunkering low on his gut, and in the higher canopy of a savannah sequoia not twelve metres distant, Ringo “Six-and-Six” Drinkwater — gunfighter and the world’s notorious and best train-highwayman — lowered his rifle-sight. Nested angelic akimbo in redwood gremlin branches. Retinas spoiled wet like watercolour violets. And tallying by breath, from within a brimming mouth of children’s Christmas caramels, one final time, the amount of bullets he’d need.