1
Roy Bean was mixing a cocktail of his own
concoction—something he referred to as Mexican
Widow—and prognosticating the changing seasons.
“The wooly worms is black as a smashed thumb,
and the chickens are all molting, and the spiders’ webs
is thick as twine. Boys, it is going to be a bad winter
that befalls us, and I for one am heading back south be-
fore it does.”
This came as a major surprise to the men drinking
with Roy Bean in the Three Aces. Roy Bean had ar-
rived in town that previous spring and established
himself as somewhat Sweet Sorrow’s honorary mayor
and jurist. He had been instrumental in forming a
town committee made up of more than saloon owners
and whores to set the wheels to civilization in motion
once the old crowd had been swept out in a hail of
bullets, namely two lawmen of bad reputations.
One of the bullet deliverers was standing at the far
end of the oak sipping coffee—Jake Horn. Jake had
killed the previous city police, had shot them fore and
aft with the help of a half-breed Mandan Frenchman
named Toussaint Trueblood. The two police that Jake
and Toussaint had put under the sod were Bob Olive
and his deputy Teacup Smith, a pair of corrupt souls
who, when not riding roughshod over the locals, were
off in other counties performing as robbers of banks,
individuals, and almost anything that moved that
looked like it had a dollar attached to it.
Jake hadn’t shot them for no reason, as they had
done him when they first came upon him. Shot and
robbed him and left him for dead. But dead didn’t
work out as they’d planned it and Toussaint True-
blood had found the man and brought him into Sweet
Sorrow figuring the white people there would be de-
cent enough to bury one of their own at the very least.
But Jake survived his wounds and as things most
sometimes happen in such dire circumstances, came
round full circle and justice was served in its own pe-
culiar way—frontier justice.
What most didn’t know, but what Roy Bean and
Toussaint Trueblood suspected, was that Jake Horn
wasn’t exactly as he represented himself. And indeed,
he wasn’t. Other circumstances, or some might call it
fate, had arrived him in Sweet Sorrow. Fate being in
the form of a conniving woman named Celine Shaw,
whom Jake—or as he was known as then, Tristan
Shade, physician—was in love with. The problem was
that the lady in question was married—something
that caused Jake, ne Tristan Shade, to go against his
Hippocratic oath and violate even his personal ethics.
He fell fool for her, and in the end he paid the price of
most such fools. It was she who pulled the trigger on
her husband and blamed Jake for it. And it was he
who ended up running for his life, not her. The alias
was that of a now-late uncle whom Jake was bound to
hide out with way up in Canada. Bob Olive and
Teacup Smith put a change in his plans. And some
would say, he put a change in theirs also.
The irony of all this was that having rubbed out the
duo, Jake was induced to take over the dead men’s job.
He was reluctant to stick around and eager still to make
the border. But eventually he succumbed to the fast-
talking Roy Bean, who in spite of his bombast tended
to make sense half the time, like when he suggested that
Jake might be better hid in plain sight, as a lawman. “If,
indeed there are those looking for you for something
you may or may not have did in other climes,” as Roy
delicately put it.
Jake let his beard and hair grow and with a new
name and wearing a badge and residing in such a far-
flung frontier town as Sweet Sorrow, it seemed at
least possible he might avoid detection by either fed-
eral marshals or any private detectives the family of
the dead man might hire. Thus far it had worked out
pretty fair.
He listened with only mild interest as Roy Bean
now went on about what a bad winter was coming.
“Snow will come so deep one Indian standing on
the shoulders of another will be buried up to his hat.
Men’s limbs will bust off from the cold. You won’t be
able to take a piss without it freezing to the end of
your whistle. I’ve heard tales of horrors from cow-
boys who survived and made it to Texas. Most
claimed they’d never winter again in the Dakotas.”
Such predictions were hard to believe, for the cur-
rent weather was quite balmy after the previous
month of September being little more than cold rain
and several ice storms. Indian summer the locals
called it. Best enjoy it while you can.
