The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [452]
“Go home, Abe!” called out the sheriff. “Today’s not a good day for dyin’.”
“You killed my pappy,” said the youth, “and my pappy’s pappy. And his pappy’s pappy. And my brothers Jethro, Hank, Hoss, Red, Peregrine, Marsh, Junior, Dizzy, Luke, Peregrine, George an’ all the others. I’m callin’ you out, lawman.”
“You said Peregrine twice.”
“He wuz special.”
“Abel Baxter,” whispered the sheriff out of the corner of his mouth, “one of them Baxter boys. They turn up regular as clockwork, and I kill ’em same ways as regular.”
“How many have you killed?” I whispered back.
“Last count, ’bout sixty. Go home, Abe, I won’t tell yer again!”
The youth caught sight of Bradshaw and me and said, “New deputies, Sheriff? Yer gonna need ’em!”
And it was then we saw that Abel Baxter wasn’t alone. Stepping out from the stables opposite were four disreputable-looking characters. I frowned. They seemed somehow out of place in Death at Double-X Ranch. For a start, none of them wore black, nor did they have tooled leather double gun belts with nickel-plated revolvers. Their spurs didn’t clink as they walked, and their holsters were plain and worn high on the hip—the weapon these men had chosen was a Winchester rifle. I noticed with a shudder that one of the men had a button missing on his frayed vest and the sole on the toe of his boot had come adrift. Flies buzzed around the men’s unwashed and grimy faces, and sweat had stained their hats halfway to the crown. These weren’t C-2 generic gunfighters from pulp, but well described A-9s from a novel of high descriptive quality—and if they could shoot as well as they had been realized by the author, we were in trouble.
The sheriff sensed it, too.
“Where yo’ friends from, Abe?”
One of the men hooked his Winchester into the crook of his arm and answered in a low southern drawl, “Mr. Johnson sent us.”
And they opened fire. No waiting, no drama, no narrative pace. Bradshaw and I had already begun to move—squaring up in front of a gunman with a rifle might seem terribly macho, but for survival purposes it was a nonstarter. Sadly, the sheriff didn’t realize this until it was too late. If he had survived until page 164 as he was meant to, he would have taken a slug, rolled twice in the dust after a two-page buildup and lived long enough to say a pithy final good-bye to his sweetheart, who cradled him in his bloodless dying moments. Not to be. Realistic violent death was to make an unwelcome entry into Death at Double-X Ranch. The heavy lead shot entered the sheriff ’s chest and came out the other side, leaving an exit wound the size of a saucer. He collapsed inelegantly onto his face and lay perfectly still, one arm sprawled outwards in a manner unattainable in life and the other hooked beneath him. He didn’t collapse flat either. He ended up bent over on his knees with his backside in the air.
The gunmen stopped firing as soon as there was no target—but Bradshaw, his hunting instincts alerted, had already drawn a bead on the sherriff ’s killer and fired. There was an almighty detonation, a brief flash and a large cloud of smoke. The eraserhead hit home, and the gunman disintegrated midstride into a brief chysanthemum of text that scattered across the main street, the meaning of the words billowing out into a blue haze that hung near the ground for a moment or two before evaporating.
. . . the gunman disintegrated midstride into a brief chysanthemum of text that scattered across the main street. . . .
“What are you doing?” I asked, annoyed at his impetuosity.
“Him or us, Thursday,” replied Bradshaw grimly, pulling the lever down on his Martini-Henry to reload, “him or us.”
“Did you see how much text he was composed of?” I replied angrily. “He was almost a paragraph long. Only featured characters get that kind of description—somewhere there’s going to be a book one character short!”
“But,” replied Bradshaw